Author: Charlaine Harris
Publisher: Recorded Books
Rating: WARTY!
The Suckfest continues, and yes, I did mean that in a bad way. Dead to the World pretty much sums up Sookie Stackho, the dumbest dumbass in Dumbville, Dumbiana, United Dumb-clucks of America, but at least this was book four and I could ditch this whole sorry series after I heard it. I could have simply used the same review I wrote for Club Dead (and that could have been the same review I wrote for Living Dead in Dallas). Nothing changes in this series, so why should the reviews?!
Charlaine Harris is a professionally godawful writer. How about this: "The car was obviously a threat until they learned likewise." Honestly? Or how about this bizarre paragraph: "Bill looked good in his Khakis. He was wearing a Calvin Klein dress shirt I'd picked out for him, a muted plaid in shades of brown and gold. Not that I noticed." I mean how utterly clueless do you have to be to write that?
This novel appears to have precisely the same formula as the previous two: some guy disappears and only Suck-ee can rescue him. In this case it's not a vampire, but her brother, Jackass, who you may know as Jason. Jackass is evidently abducted right outside his lakeside home, and they find a spatter of blood and a paw print on the dock behind the house. Now Suck-ee has a shifter friend who would do quite literally anything for her (her boss, Sam), and she has a werewolf friend, Rancid, who would pretty much do likewise. Both of these guys have an extraordinary sense of smell, and yet Suck-ee never once even thinks for a split second of asking one or other of them to scent where Jackass was taken. Instead she constantly bemoans how devastated she is by his disappearance, whilst making out (or fantasizing about making out) with any hot supernatural guy who happens to cross her path. She does not even remotely behave like she's grieving for Jackass.
Once again Bill is AWOL, and Eric steps in. Eric (who shall hereinafter be referred to as Eriction) has been bewitched and lost his memory of who he really is, so Suck-ee is tasked with mothering him, although her brand of "mothering" is more accurately described as incest. Why is it that these supposedly powerful and fearful vampires are always, without exception, completely dependent upon humans? It's pathetic.
Not only is there the usual intensely boring repetitive bullshit about the minutiae of Suck-ee's tedious life, her boring clothes, her uninteresting household activities, the repetitive layout of her house, and the lives, clothes, activities and layouts of every person, natural or supernatural whom she meets, there's also endless re-hashing of themes already established monotonously in the first three books.
There's more racism in this novel, so I guess that's kinda new, along with a liberal dollop of bullshit American jingoism, and the usual casting of aspersions upon all religions not Christian (in contrast, I cast aspersions on all religions, period). No one who gets any real air time in these southern mysteries is black, and those with whom Suck-ee is more than merely acquainted are all uniformly olive-skinned if they're not whiter than white. The vampires, of course, are also pretty much entirely Hollywood white. In her blindness to be grammatically correct, Harris slices and dices her Suck-ee character by having this poorly educated southern barmaid speak grammatically correct sentences, too. Oh, and did I mention that Harris loves to have "long seconds" and "long minutes" and "long moments"...?
I don't get Suck-ee. She cannot stop herself from lusting after Eriction and Rancid even when, in the earlier books, she was supposedly head-over-heels in love with Bill and had no eyes or time for anyone else. She will pretty much lust after any supernatural guy she gets to know, but the one she will give no time to is Sam, the owner of Merlotte's, where Suck-ee works. She rather have some hot muscular, tall studly manly man who doesn't give a shit about her than a guy who loves her and proves it repeatedly. That's the kind of dismal sorry-assed bonehead Suck-ee is. She deserves everything she gets. Contrast this Suck-ee with the real Sookie: the one in the TV show, and it's disgusting how absolutely awful Harris's version is in comparison.
As I alluded earlier, Harris has sorely warped views on religion. Christianity is apparently the only true religion. The only other 'competitor' evidently, is the "Jews" - not Judaism, but "Jews". Evidently Harris doesn’t grasp that you can be Jewish without following Judaism, and you can follow Judaism without being Jewish. Islam doesn’t enter Harris World™ at all, and forget about all those other totally irrelevant foreign religions such as Buddhism, Hinduism, and a score of others across the globe. This is curious, because this novel is about witches, but Harris draws a bizarre distinction between Wicca (the supposedly innocent religion practiced by pagans) and witches - who are pretty much evil and have nothing to do with Wicca! Oooooh! That's like Ian Fleming's inane distinction between the Turks of the mountains, and the Turks of the plains!
On this topic, what’s with the religious trappings of vampires? Why is silver harmful to them? Harris never explores this, merely taking the trope and blindly rubber-stamping it, running with it like a kid with scissors. What really tickles me is this farcical business whereby a vampire has to be invited in and they can be repelled by rescinding the invitation - and they have to walk backwards out the door! Seriously? I can't think of anything more insane or hilarious than that. Harris, wisely I think, doesn’t even try to offer any intelligent explanation for these inane rules; it’s all just swallowed as a meaningless trope and we’re expected to go with it just as blindly as she does.
I noted that Suck-ee was much more in-your-face about her Christian religious views (or Harris was about hers), ranting about praying etc., yet never once in four books, has any god ever stepped in to help her. She had to do it all herself or have her friends do it. A god like that isn't worth worshiping.
Rancid (you may know him as Alcide, or even Pesticide) shows up in this novel, so of course we're quickly reminded of what a manly man of a man he ruggedly is), but both Bill and Eriction are AWOL. Bill I don't miss in the slightest because he's a complete loser and a waste of printing ink (or laser burns, or magnetized disk or whatever!). Eriction I do miss because he was the only character worth reading about in all of the Harris hemorrhaging hegemony. He isn't worth listening about in this volume however, because Parker completely louses his accent. Her Sookie accent is nauseating, too, and combining that with Harris's absolutely worthless trash prose is truly vomit-inducing. Other than that, Parker's a talented voice artist.
Nor do we get any intelligence (in whatever definition you want to use) on why there is a witch coven which seeks to drink vampire blood. In fact there's no intelligence in this novel at all. I'd write a list titled "Sookie Stackhouse is so stupid that..." if I could stand to do the research, but forget that! Let me just pass on one: Sookie Stackhouse is so stupid that she thinks that the reason she's never encountered a fairy before is because she's been so often in the company of the undead. She conveniently forgets that for 26 years, Suck-ee had never even met an undead. That's how abysmally mindless Harris's writing is - or how stupid Suck-ee is.
But back to the witches: is their magic so weak that they need to indulge in this supposedly dangerous practice? And why are they trying to take over the vampires' financial concerns? They're friggin' witches! They can't magic-up all the money and power they want? The finale has the weres and the vamps joining forces to take down the coven. Sookie is required to put herself in harm's way so she can find out how many witches are in this house, and whether there are any 'civilians' who the vamps and weres should leave alone.
The problem with this is that later we're told that the handful of good witches working with the vamps and weres, have been able to single out and put a shine on the three innocent people so everyone knows to leave them and go only for the bad witches. But if the good witches can determine who is in there in order to put the shine on the right ones, then why the hell is Suck-ee needed to figure out who is in there? I'll tell you why: because Harris has trapped herself into the first person using Suck-ee as narrator, and now nothing can happen unless Suck-ee is there to witness it, or we have to learn of it second hand in megabytes of exposition. Yet another example of Harris's bad writing.
This plot sucks! The characters suck. Sookie sucks. Even Eriction sucks in this volume. Conclusion: WARTY IN THE EXTREME! Harris is arguably the world's worst writer and she wins this years Pedantry in Prose award from me. Rest assured I am done now and I will never read - much less review - another Charlatan Harris novel of any blood type. You have my pledge.
Oh, and please don't link to this review. I don't want anyone to know I was stupid enough to actually read four items pulled from Charlaine Harris's garbage!
