Author: Charlaine Harris
Publisher: Recorded Books
Rating: WARTY!
So I'm trying an audio book for the first time, and it means I get to review three novels simultaneously - audio, ebook, and paperback, each one for reading under different circumstances (and all different titles, of course, in case you wondered exactly how crazy I am! I wonder if I can get the semaphore version of Wuthering Heights so I can get four going all at once? No? Okay....
Anyway, Johanna Parker narrates this - with the southern voices, yet! - which is quite listenable, although at times she sounds a bit too much like Ash Ketchum from the Pokémon cartoons when she;s doing her Sookie, and some of the characters come off sounding downright demented when they really oughtn't to do so. Unfortunately, there comes a massively huge, perhaps insurmountable problem in chapter one - Harris kills off Lafayette!!! Damn straight it’s a three exclamation problem. I do de-clare that I am inclined to rebel right here and now, and to melt down this CD and never read another novel by Charlaine Harris! How can she kill off one of my all-time favorite characters - and especially in chapter one, and especially in book two when we hardly even came to know him in book 1? Lafayette is kick-ass. I adore him on the TV show, yet here he is: gone! I don’t know if I’ll ever recover from this unwarranted assault on my peccadilloes!
Poor Lafayette is found in Andy Bellefleur's car. The latter was forced to leave his vehicle because he was drunk after having to deal with an awful case in his policing work. His sister Portia had to pick him up and when Sookie came in to work the next morning, she discovered the body, poor Sookie. She really needs to kick out the discovery of dead bodies habit with velocitous extramuralization. Unfortunately, the mystery of Lafayette's demise comes to a screeching halt right there, and isn't mentioned again until the end of this novel. There goes another issue running wild.
So Sookie gets to leave work early because she's traveling With Bill down to Eric's place, and therein lies another problem. Bill's idea of freeing Sookie from Eric's clutches is to join Eric's organization and become subservient to him! lol! Bill is, I'm sorry to say, a complete loser in this novel. He's cardboard and pathetic. The only character who does come out of this smelling spring fresh is Eric himself.
On the way to visit Eric, Bill and Sookie get into an argument and the car breaks down. Like a child, Sookie runs off into the woods and like he is, Bill leaves her behind despite there being a killer on the loose! Naturally, Sookie runs into Callisto, who is a maenad. She declares that she's not going to eat Sookie: she just wants her to take a message to Eric. The message is one of severe pain, as Sookie is poisoned by Callisto and left for Bill to find. Bill hurries her to Shreveport where the vampires suck the poison out of Sookie's system and save her life.
As this audio book continued to be rather annoying, I had to ponder how much of that was from Johanna Parker's narration and how much was Sookie Stackhouse's vapid obsession with hair and clothes. The novel is also rather disjointed. We're introduced to Lafayette's murder, but that immediately takes a back seat to the appearance of the maenad; right after that, all the time is hogged by Eric's summons for Sookie where she's told that she's being loaned to the Dallas chapter of Hell's Vampires. It's dissatisfying to say the least.
Sookie takes her first flight while Bill travels cargo in a coffin. As Sookie awaits Bill's unloading, a guy dressed as a priest tries to lure her away from the plane, but fails. They arrive at Hotel Vampire - that's not its real name, but it is its real purpose ("...you can check out any time you want but you can never leave..." maybe?!), a truly gone vampire, Isobel, acts as their host, pointing out the Texas school book depository as she drives them to her meeting with Stan the king vamp of the neighborhood. I have no idea what’s going on there. Why would vampires even care? That part just struck me as bizarre.
So Sookie's task is supposed to be that of extracting information from a barmaid as to where Farrell, a missing vampire has gone. Frankly, this seems a bit sad to me! I have no idea why they think this barmaid knows something, but aren’t vampires supposed to be awesomely powerful? So why can’t they locate one of their own who's gone astray? Worse, why can't they glamor the barmaid and have her tell them what she knows?! What’s up with that? Other than having some flimsy reason to get Sookie out of Bon Temps, there seems to be no point to this plot at all.
But anyway, she hypnotizes Bethany, the barmaid, and gets some useful information, but none of the other people she "interviews" can provide anything of value. They do track down the vampire who lured Farrell into the men's room, which was apparently the last place he was seen! The link leads them to the church of the Sun Shines Out of Their Ass (some names may have been changed to protect the in no sense). This is one more in a never-ending line of psychotic religious groups this world has seen. Fortunately this one is fictional. Sookie goes with a human friend of the vampire Isobel, and of course he's the very traitor they're looking for and Sookie is far too Mary Sue to grasp it.
She ends up as a prisoner in the basement, but a young thousand year old vampire called Godfrey rescues her. Unlike in the TV series, this Godfrey isn't the maker of Eric, he's just a child-killer, who is a child himself in appearance, and who has a remorseful death wish, which is why he voluntarily went to the church. This bad conscience makes no sense because we've been told that vampires have no conscience, so which is it? It's really annoying, as well as sad, when a writer sets up their world and then immediately proceeds to break every rule they've established! There is never an explanation given as to why he needed to take Farrel with him, much less kidnap him, either.
Sookie sends a request to Bill via a fellow mind-reader who is back at the hotel, to come rescue her. Why she can't send one directly to Bill given that they have both taken each other's blood is a bit of a mystery, especially since she's called out to him mentally for help before. Oughtn't there to be a bond between them?! She doesn't even consider mentally calling Bill as an option here. Note: at this point, I am soooo sick-to-death of hearing Sookie endlessly, tediously, wearyingly, boringly, numbingly, painstakingly, tiresomely, and monotonously describe hair and clothes even, on one occasion, as she's being attacked by someone who seeks to rape her.
Sookie escapes with the aid of a shape-shifter, the religious cult is taken down, but a few escaped members of the group take some shotguns to a vampire party. Sookie is, of course, the only one who notices something is wrong; the vaunted vampires are senseless to it! Despite the fact that these guys who are attacking have not one silver bullet between them, none of the vamps go after them until the shooting is done. Bill takes off along with a few others. Eric literally covered Sookie and took a bullet for her; then he makes Sookie suck it out of him. When Bill returns, Sookie, who is absurdly worried about him (why?! At what risk, exactly, is he?), gets pissed with him for leaving her, and she stalks off alone heading back to Bon Temps. This is truly pathetic.
At this point I was ready to ditch this novel. Some of it was passable, but I think the combination of a first person narrative and Johanna Parker's Ash Ketchum delivery of Sookie's voice is a disaster. It really turns off my interest, especially when the story is not engaging in itself. Johanna Parker's narration alone isn't the problem. She has an impressive array of voice intonations which she can call up at will. Luna Garza's voice in particular was highly amusing; it's just that her Sookie impersonation combined with the vapid writing of the Sookie character in this volume is a massive turn off. Her 'Eric' isn't endearing either in his voice, but in that case, the writing is far more entertaining, so it offsets the poor voice.
If this had been written in a third person narrative, it might be a bit better, and there is some nice humor here and there, but it was just not enough until we reached chapters nine and ten, when it came roaring back as Sookie talked Eric into accompanying her to an orgy and he showed up dressed like he was a flaming gay. There was nowhere near enough humor before that point, but here, I was laughing out loud. I think the problem was that I made the mistake of watching the first few eps of the TV show and it's absolutely hilarious. I watched the most recent ep last night and Pam was entrancing. I think she, Tera, and Lafayette are without doubt my favorite characters. But coming back to the audio novel after all that really made it suffer in comparison.
I haven't anywhere near enough interest in "What Sookie Did Next" either. I am so tired of hearing every little detail of Sookie's life. I am. I couldn't care any less about what she's wearing, or where her latest bruise is, or where she's going, or what she thinks of character X, and I honestly really and truly do not, in any way shape or form, care even remotely how dirty her hair is and how much it bothers her, or whether it's hanging down her back or up in a pony tail. I absolutely do not. Nor do I care what every single person in her vicinity is currently dressed in. I don't. I never will.
I decided to finish this novel, but that was based solely on the humor in chapters nine and ten, but I vowed that it had better not get any worse or I'd definitely have to rate it 'warty' as opposed to 'worthy'. Unfortunately, Charlaine Harris has to be the only writer on the planet who can make an orgy sound boring, and a shotgun showdown sound painfully tedious. I am not kidding, The closing couple of chapters were so painfully laborious and totally dull and uninteresting that I would have tossed the CD out the window right there if it had not been an appalling way to litter the countryside and if I'd not been so close to the end. This book, despite chapters 9 & 10, is without question warty beyond redemption.
