I'm on a supernatural kick right now, having read Twilight and Piers Anthony's Incarnations of Immortality series, not to mention watching Supernatural on TV (oh, Jensen Ackles, why must you be so far away?). So it comes as no surprise when I find myself traipsing down the preternatural thriller section of my local Barnes & Noble section looking for something to feed the flame.
I had heard that the Sookie Stackhouse series of vampire thrillers was just about the epitome of vampire lit from one of the online blogs that I frequent, so I thought I would give it a shot. I picked up Dead Until Dark, which is copyright 2001 ( an important fact to note for a comparison that I will make later on).
Sookie Stackhouse is a waitress in a little bar in a town in northern Louisiana. She has the (un)fortunate ability to read minds, which has prevented her from attending college, engaging in relationships, and has also given her quite the reputation around town as being a nutjob.
Along comes Vampire Bill (I know, I know, a vampire named Bill?). Bill's mind is the only one that Sookie can't read. Vampires in Sookie's world have come out of the coffin, as it were, and now live alongside humans. Vampires that "mainstream" are vampires that choose to live as much as they can like the humans around them. Bill is such a vampire. His house is across from Sookie's, and he sometimes frequents the bar that she works at (where her boss, Sam, keeps bottled blood stocked for him). Inevitably, our protagonist falls in love with him.
I'm not going to give away too much of the story, because I don't believe in spoiling a book for someone who hasn't read it yet. However, I am going to make some points about how incredibly similar a lot of this book was to Twilight.
Twilight was published in 2006, which definitely indicates whom might be plagiarizing from whom. There were a lot of little things that I picked up on as I was reading Dark that seemed like they were almost lifted from it piecemeal to make Twilight. For instance: Sookie's ability to read minds. In Twilight, Edward Cullen is the mind reader. He is attracted to Bella Swan because he can't read her mind (and because she smelled good, but we won't go there). Also, Bill claims that different vampires have different powers, just like the Cullen family all have different talents. I could chalk this up to the vampire mythos, where no two sources can ever really agree on what abilities vampires as a whole possess. However, it just kind of bothered me that that would be a part of the story.
One whole scene seemed to be lifted from Dark. Sookie had convinced Bill to take her to the vampire bar Fangtasia, where fang-bangers and tourists go to see real live vampires and to (sometimes) offer them their blood. At one point during this visit, Bill asks Sookie what everyone is thinking about, and Sookie answers, "Sex, sex, sex, and sex." To anyone who has read the Twilight series, that scene is incredibly similar to when Edward takes Bella out to eat at a restaurant in the city. Edward says virtually the same thing about everyone who is eating in the restaurant with them.
I'm usually willing to give people the benefit of a doubt when their writing seems to have pulled a little from some other writer. But this almost seemed like blatant plagiarism. I'm disappointed if that is indeed the case.
But now a little more on Dark. Sookie was an entirely relateable character, unlike Bella Swan, who whined and moped and whined some more. I also enjoyed Bill the vampire more, as he seemed more... well, vampiric than Edward Cullen. Bill made absolutely sure that Sookie knew he was not human. He couldn't go out in the sunlight, stayed away from garlic and silver, and actually buried himself underground during the day. He also drank Sookie's blood, which is something Edward refused to do to Bella.
I was impressed with the way that the society Sookie lived in seemed so true to form. Sookie mentioned more than once that blacks would not have been that welcome in the bar. She commented on the tension between the white police officer Kevin and the black officer Kenya (though I seemed to get a hint that there might be somethingmore intended in the future for those two). Also, her friends seemed almost more horrifed at the thought that Sookie might be seeing a black rather than a vampire. And the openly gay black cook Lafeyette was looked down on by the other servers in the bar (though Sookie liked him and interacted with him well enough).
This, I thought, was telling. A lot of authors won't touch a heavy-hitting issue like racism. They sweep it under the rug, pretend it doesn't exist, and paint a picture of a perfect society. This approach would have made Harris' book completely unbelievable (vampires and shapeshifters aside, of course). A Louisiana without at least a mention of racism would have been like a California without a mention of gays or Latinos. So, point for Harris.
She also made mention of the classism that exists. The sheriff thinks very little of Sookie because of her job and her lack of education. That kind of thing is touched on a little more in literature than racism, but it still isn't touched on nearly enough in a country where the gulf between rich and poor is widening, with very little middle class left to speak of.
All in all, I would give Dark four stars out of five. It was good entertainment- nothing enlightening, but a solid read with believable characters and setting. If you're like me and you need to get the taste of sparkly vampires out of your mouth, I would suggest picking this book up.
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