• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 433 0

Blood? It begins and ends with Alan Ball and everything he brings to Charlaine Harris’s novels. In the final moments of Six Feet Under, Alan Ball’s other little hbo masterpiece, I felt as if an anvil had been dropped on my chest. I distinctly recall sitting on my couch and muttering, “Oh my god, he’s going to make us watch.” I won’t call Alan Ball a god; I’ll leave that to the actors who repeatedly praise his approach to writing and directing. But as an audience member, I feel equipped to boast that he is unmatched in his ability to get things so right . . . and so wrong. He’s messy. His characters are human to a fault, even the non-humans. You yell at them. You coddle them. You want to jump into the television to show them how it’s done. And when Alan Ball jumps the shark, man, you just know that shark has issues. For as much as you might say — as I will in this book — that Jason’s season 1 addiction feels forced, that Maryann Forrester’s storyline goes on far too long, or that a certain vamp queen casting choice left many viewers agog, you cannot deny the ongoing quality of the production, and the legions of fans who will follow Alan Ball into a shallow grave. I’m amazed how many people have heard of True Blood — an international phenomenon — without knowing of Alan Ball’s participation, but, once they do, vow to catch up on the series because they loved his previous projects.

Are vampires really a dirty secret? There’s certainly enough criticism about the current vampire trend, but is it all that different from the offshoot of serial killer films that resulted from the immense popularity of Hannibal Lecter? If we killed that beast, we’d be without another of my favorite literary-adapted hero-slash-villains, Showtime’s Dexter. And what a crime that would be. We love these archetypes because they continue to surprise us, visited in so many new ways, revisited even in the faces of the unexpected. Remember the Tom Cruise Interview with the Vampire casting debacle? Because, perhaps the true appeal of vampires is that as surely as I’m sitting here, and you are sitting there, we could both be one. That’s the fantasy, isn’t it? Whether we want to stay up all night, read everything, see everything, be anything, feed, or, in some cases, fly, we’re told that on the other side of a remarkably simple procedure there’s not so much an afterlife as an endless life, as we are. It’s a truly mortal desire.

Which is precisely why you can expect to see a few unfamiliar faces in Truly, Madly, Deadly: the faces of the fans. I asked people just like me, just like you, why they love True Blood. What I got back was as surprising and multi-faceted as I should have expected. It’s not just that vampires are everywhere; it’s that everyone has a unique take on their appeal. There’s no one vamp for every person. And if the online communities surrounding the series prove anything, it’s that the fans make all the difference. During the process of writing this book, I was amazed by how many people said they would wait to watch the show if it meant they could watch it with their friends, some recording each episode then using Skype to connect with other fans around the world, just so they can experience it at the same time. And if you’re not a fan of spoilers, stay away from Twitter on broadcast night. It erupts in feedback, outcry, and tweets of joy, with “#TrueBlood” regularly trending in the days leading up to and after each episode.

In a slightly sad turn, when I asked participants of my site’s “Interview with a Sympathizer” questionnaire which rituals they had when watching True Blood, over 25% of respondents said that they wished they had someone to watch it with, so they could talk about the developments or, as one person said, “just to know that I’m not weird for loving it so much.” So those people are in this book: bloggers, podcasters, industry professionals, screenwriters, journalists, academics, authors, artists, critics, roleplayers, vampyres, and vampires — it’s the face of the fan like you’ve never seen it, and what we talk about is as