Interview: Charlaine Harris

JON GAMBRELL THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: July 12, 2009

INTERVIEW
MAGNOLIA, Ark. Vampires typically roam the fogged streets of London or the humid nights of New Orleans, opulent worlds filled with beautiful monsters and formal balls.

Trailer parks and honky-tonks didn't fit -- until author Charlaine Harris took a chance with a telepathic barmaid named Sookie Stackhouse.

Now, Harris' Southern Vampire Mysteries series has hit The New York Times' list of best-sellers, gained fans far beyond her south Arkansas town and inspired a television series on HBO. Though fueled by sex, violence and hints of humor, Harris' novels hold a mirror up to a South where race and societal change permeate through her prose.

Still, the mother of three said her only concern at first was finding something that would sell.

"I'm no crusader," Harris says. "I just like to make a point. If people get it, good. If they don't, OK."

Stackhouse's fictional hometown of Bon Temps, La., resembles the South in which Harris grew up, filled with waitresses who wear Keds sneakers and shop at Wal-Mart. Trailer homes dot the rural pastures of the north Louisiana town and pickup trucks fill the parking lot of the bar where Harris' heroine works.

For Kevin Durand, an associate philosophy professor at Henderson State University in Arkadelphia, life in Bon Temps evokes where his family once lived in Louisiana.

"As she describes the place, it's a place I've been," said Durand, who specializes in pop culture ghouls and vampires. "I've seen all of those things before."

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