True Blood's Harris Looks Ahead

Charlaine Harris--the best-selling author of the Southern Vampire Mysteries series (aka the Sookie Stackhouse series)--saw her work adapted as the hit TV show, True Blood, on HBO this year, and the book series continues with Dead and Gone, which is being previewed on Harris' Web site.

The series began in 2001 with Dead Until Dark, and the next installment hits stores in May 2009. True Blood, from Six Feet Under creator Alan Ball, returns with a second season in the summer of '09. The first season drops on DVD on May 12.

Harris--who is also the author of the Harper Connelly fantasy series and two mystery series, Aurora Teagarden and Lily Bard--talked to SCI FI Wire about Sookie, True Blood and her other work in this exclusive interview.

You started off in the mystery field. What initially inspired you to try your hand at fantasy with the Sookie Stackhouse series?

Harris: My mystery career was not flourishing. I was firmly stuck in the midlist. I wanted to appeal to a broader readership, and I was tired of the restrictions of writing conventional mysteries. It seemed to me that forging a path into the paranormal was the best answer. At the time I wrote Dead Until Dark, that territory was largely unmapped.

How do you keep the mystery aspect of the novels plausible when working in a fantasy setting in which the implausible is the norm?

Harris: Like mysteries aren't implausible? When was the last time your grandmother solved a murder by her knowledge of neighborhood life? And I don't know many private eyes who work for free because they're so determined to get to the bottom of a case that's no longer theirs. Genre writing largely consists of making the incredible believable ... no matter what the genre.


OK, so why vampires, and why Louisiana?

Harris: I was sure vampires would be fun to write, and I wanted to take a direction that was new and fresh. (At the time, it was!) I decided to be the anti-Anne Rice. (This is not a knock on her work, but an attitude.) Since she took romantic southern Louisiana, I'd take the northern part, which is much more prosaic. Since her vampires were romantic and pay a lot of attention to their clothes, mine would shop at the mall and have ordinary names. That can only go so far; after all, I had no intention of writing a parody or of mocking her work, which I admire. After deciding your style of writing for the work you want to do, you have to construct a credible world.

How did you go about constructing that credible world? What kinds of questions did you ask yourself in order to flesh out the setting?

Harris: My key question was "What kind of woman would want to date a vampire?" After I'd started building Sookie's character from that premise, I asked myself, "Why would the vampires want the world to know they were real, after all those years of concealment?" And then I asked myself, "How would the average man on the street react when he was in the company of a vampire?" That led to host of more questions, about how the government would react, how different societies across the globe would deal with vampires, about how the vampires would try to present themselves in their public relations campaign ... it just got to be more and more fun.

Where did the idea for the synthetic blood come from?

Harris:I had to have a reason for the vampires to become public, to want to mainstream. So I had to give them a talking point in their campaign, and that talking point was the fact that they didn't have to prey on humans anymore, now that synthetic blood had become available.

What was it like seeing your work adapted into a television series?

Harris: I love Alan [Ball], and I think he's a genius at casting. It's been tremendously exciting, and the fact that Alan and his staff and the people at HBO have treated my books and me with great respect is just gravy on the whole deal.

How has True Blood diverged from your books?

Harris: The most obvious is that all the secondary characters have a much more extensive part of the storyline. This had to be, since [star] Anna [Paquin, who plays Sookie,] couldn't be on camera in every single scene. My books are written in the first person, and that simply had to be altered to make the material work for television. That change, in turn, sparked more ideas for the writers. I've enjoyed being surprised by the original storylines in True Blood.

The ninth Sookie Stackhouse book, Dead and Gone, is due out in May of next year. What can you tell us about it?

Harris: Ha! Well, it has another great Lisa Desimini cover. And there's more supernatural warfare in it. It's more unified than the previous book, which turned out to be a series of episodes. The Werewolves finally come out into the open. Sookie learns a lot more about her great-grandfather. She has surprising encounters with most of her suitors, past and present.


You've also got another paranormal-mystery hybrid series, featuring the dead-finding clairvoyant Harper Connelly. With the success of True Blood, have there been lots of Hollywood inquiries into that property? Any possibility we'll see that brought to a screen (either silver or small)?

Harris: So far, no bites on Harper. There's been interest in my mystery heroine Lily Bard several times, but nothing's firmed up yet. Lily is without a doubt the darkest character I've ever written, and one of the toughest. I'd love to see a really good treatment of her difficult life.

I'm sure you and your publishers expected to get a sales bump from the TV series, but I'm sure no one expected you to end up with seven New York Times best-sellers all at once--what was that like?

Harris: That's still ongoing, believe it or not. All the books have been on the extended or print list for the last five weeks, give or take a week. And the boxed set is a hugely popular Christmas gift, apparently. Thanks, Alan Ball! For me personally, it hasn't made that much difference. I'm still faced with the problems I had before: a looming deadline, a book that won't write itself. Being the prom queen for a season hasn't changed the work any. --John Joseph Adams