Dead Until Dark

In my short lifetime I've had dear friends and family die. I've also had classmates and acquaintances pass. When I look back I can even remember people that I had a strong disliking for lose their lives. A death from someone close to you, regardless of your personal feelings towards them, hits home so to speak, even if it only bothers you by showing a lack of your own invincibility. In the book Dead Until Dark, when there was a situation where someone lost their life, it seemed that there was such a down play that it really didn’t make a difference in the ending of the story. For instance, Sookie’s Grandmother dying. You can build a whole character off of how she responds to her death. Instead the death is passed over with barely any remorse. My point is reiterated when only a couple days after her “gran’s” death, Sookie tells Bill to take her into that room where she proceeds to lose her virginity on her late grandmother’s bed. I mean she put new sheets on the bed but her grandmother’s smell was still in the damn curtains for god’s sake. Maybe it was a feeble attempt by the author to portray Sookie’s accent into adult hood; moving her from a child’s bed to a grownup room, losing her virginity, not having to sleep on a pretty princess bed spread, but as I stated before, it was a feeble attempt at best.

The other two instances I didn’t find as troubling, were the Rats and Sookie’s Great Uncle. Obviously Sookie and the Rats weren’t the best of friends but I still found it troubling the way they were murdered and the murder scene made to look like a tornado hit. On another note the tornado made me wonder just how stupid the police in her small town really are. Back to the point, that killing, despite the circumstances, made Bill a murderer. There is no way to argue the contrary.

More than any of the murders committed in the novel, the murder of Sookie’s great Uncle tore me in two. On one hand this old man was a pedophilic pervert, which in my opinion is the worst form of scum on the earth; on the other hand he was an old man who on most accounts was, for lack of a better word, innocent. Sookie told a bad story to the wrong person and the next morning the man is sleeping with the fishes. It is exactly as Sookie put it; it’s like dating the Godfather.

Sookie seems to get over all of these deaths that are very close to her relatively fast; the death of her Grandmother blowing my mind the most. She even states in the book how much worse she felt after her cat died as compared to after her innocent fragile grandmother, who, if you remember, would wait up for her every night to make sure she got home safe. If you haven’t noticed I found that part somewhat depressing. Sookie probably used all her grandmothers clothing as toilet paper after she got done have premarital sex on her grandma’s bed.

Despite my nitpicking, I enjoyed most of the book, I just find that I have a gift for writing as long it’s bordering the morbid or I get to complain about it. Another complaint that I have with the book is, as I said earlier, Bill is a serial murderer. Regardless of the circumstances surrounding the murders, Bill is a cold blooded killer. All of his murders were premeditated and if he was human he would be on death row. In spite of Bills guilt he is allowed to roam the nights free and go about his business mainstreaming in this rural southern town in Louisiana to pursue his love interest. That to me is almost a tragedy in itself.