Truly, Madly, Deadly_ The Unofficial True Blood Companion - Becca Wilcott [14]
Fairies: Fairies are beautiful, exotic, and extremely strong creatures appealing to humans and vampires alike. Vampires are particularly drawn to fairies, which are near impossible to catch, Sookie describing the attraction as like “watching cats that’d suddenly spotted something skittering along a baseboard.” They live in a magical world, but cross over to the human world via portals. While they are age-old, it’s undetermined if they are immortal. Those who have fairy blood in them are immune to the adverse effects of iron and lemon — known to kill fairies — but are not full-fledged fairies.
Witches and Wiccans: Witches in Harris’s series practice magic rituals, whereas Wiccans follow a pagan religion.
Charlaine Harris was born November 25, 1951, and raised in Tunica, Mississippi. A former weightlifter, she currently lives in Magnolia, Arkansas, with her husband and their three children where she’s also a senior warden of St. James Episcopal Church.
In my interview with Harris, she told me that she credited her parents’ reverence for books for her lifelong love of reading (she reads about 10 books a month) that also introduced her to the possibility of writing as something more than just a pasttime. “I thought that was the greatest occupation on earth; I still think so,” Harris says. “I knew in my heart I was a writer, even when I was working a minimum wage job. It was my secret identity.”
In 1973, Harris graduated with a BA in English and communication arts from Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, where she took a creative writing course under a former editor with Houghton Mifflin, which ultimately became Harris’s first publisher. She published two mysteries. Then in 1990, she released the first of what would become an eight novel series centered on a librarian-detective named Aurora Teagarden. During this time, Harris also wrote and published five novels in the Lily Bard (Shakespeare) series, set in rural Arkansas.
Harris made a conscious decision to end both series, wanting to try her hand at something new. Dead Until Dark was the first of the Southern Vampire Mysteries. It won the 2001 Anthony Award for Best Paperback Mystery. (In 2005, Harris also began another series, the Harper Connelly Mysteries, about a young woman who after being struck by lightning is suddenly able to locate dead bodies, seeing their last moments as they would have seen them.)
Interestingly, for as far as the imagination has taken Harris, she’s surprised to learn there are people who actually want to know how to be romantically involved with vampires. “People really want to know that? Geez Louise.” She continues, “I think it would be pretty awful. For one thing, there’s that whole daytime ban. That would be inconvenient. Also, there’s the whole biting thing. Not a big fan of biting. So, I would have to say, in reality, this would be a pretty bad idea. And, at the risk of sounding like the worst characters in my books, I really wouldn’t want my daughter dating a vampire.”
How then did this Arkansas mother of three (whose works have been lovingly described as “cozies with teeth”) come to write about a love she couldn’t endorse? Harris confesses that aside from being bored with writing conventional mysteries she simply wanted to broaden her readership. Citing among her influences H. P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allen Poe, Jane Austen (“the mistress of the small things”), and Shirley Jackson, she made the conscious decision to write cross-genre fiction, blending chick-lit, paranormal romance, and mystery into one storyline. When it came time to construct her protagonist, all she knew was that Sookie dated a vampire. She had yet to determine Sookie’s motivations, or those of the vampire for that matter. She devised Sookie’s telepathy as a “disability,” something that would draw them to one another, united in being outsiders from mainstream society.
Interestingly, Harris doesn’t necessarily see