Review: Dead to the World by Charlaine Harris

Posted on July 20, 2011 by Phoebe 6761 Commenthttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.phoebenorth.com%2F2011%2F07%2F20%2Freview-dead-to-the-world-by-charlain-harris%2FReview%3A+Dead+to+the+World+by+Charlaine+Harris2011-07-20+21%3A36%3A19Phoebehttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.phoebenorth.com%2F%3Fp%3D676

Dead to the World by Charlaine Harris

I’ll come right out and say it: I’ve been a bit jelly-brained recently. Between revisions of my novel, moving, and a stack of review books several feet tall, I’ve resorted to doing anything mindless to lighten the pressure on myself. Playing video games, watching Degrassi reruns on TeenNick . . . reading Charlaine Harris’s Dead to the World.

If the reviews of my goodreads friends are any indication, it’s typical to begin reviews of Harris’s works with these sorts of apologies. That’s because we all know these books are essentially fluffy wish fulfillment—and Dead to the World seems particularly, self-evidently so. It’s the plot thread under current rotation on True Blood, the tightened-up, television adaptation of Harris’s work, where sexy Viking Eric Northman is cursed by witches to lose his memory, holes up in psychic waitress Sookie Stackhouse’s ancestral abode, and schtups her.

But I don’t really feel like making any apologies for reading this, even if I can’t deny the bubblegum nature of the book, either. Why, wish fulfillment novels aimed at men—dirty little screeds like JP Donleavy’s The Ginger Man are seen as real literature, no matter how many inappropriately-exposed phalluses they contain. So I think that there’s no reason why Dead to the World shouldn’t be evaluated on its own merits, either.

And Harris really nails women’s wish fulfillment. Sookie’s plight—chronically and fundamentally alone, despite her many romantic prospects—renders her a truly sympathetic character. While her actions are sometimes a bit ridiculous when we see them played out on TV, Harris’s strong, first-person narration renders her, instead, empathetic. She’s really a lower-class everywoman; bright, but not brilliant. Her anxieties over money, over the gossipy nature of her small town, over her irascible brother are really needed to understand her sometimes inscrutable romantic behavior. Though Sookie’s been treated as a pariah because of her psychic abilities in her town of Bon Temps, she’s really just looking for the prince charming she was promised as a girl—someone who will step in and take care of her. And, in light of her rather deep and unrelenting solitude, well-reflected in her colloquial, vividly-voiced narration, it’s difficult to fault her in this.

As you might suspect in a book that, just beneath the surface, under a slightly jumbled plot filled with supernatural creatures, is really about solitude, it’s in the scenes were Sookie connects with Eric that the story has the most resonance. Sure, it’s lightly porny wish-fulfillment (Sookie refers to her own anatomy as a “nub”), but it’s also very affecting, as Eric and Sookie find one another despite the significant losses they’ve faced. The rather human scenes at the novel’s conclusion, featuring Sookie and brother Jason, are also fairly strong—the emotional connection between Sookie and these male characters is certainly deep.

Less effective are Sookie’s romantic flirtations with Alcide and bartender Sam, and her hollow reunion with ex-boyfriend vamp Bill Compton. The way the menfolk of Bon Temps are all drawn to Sookie was a little eye roll-worthy even by romance novel standards, and the treatment of romantic rival Debbie Van Pelt felt shrill and ill-justified even in light of attempts on Sookie’s life.

And the larger plot surrounding Sookie’s story with Eric was just a touch too epic for my tastes, featuring weres and witches and panthers and a cast of characters which would easily rival any high fantasy in sheer numbers. There’s a two-pronged mystery at the heart of Harris’s plot—Eric’s memory loss, and the disappearance of Jason Stackhouse—but I didn’t find either prong particularly compelling.

I suspect this is because Harris was really stretching her storytelling abilities here. She’s nowhere more successful than when her story is small—intimate. In scenes were the conversation (or the, ahem, action) is limited to two participants, it was an enormously successful book—believable, despite the fact that one of the characters in question is an ancient Viking vampire.

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