True Blood : Necks Overflowing With Rivers of Metaphor

From the New York Times

It seems like too much futile work in the heat of August — work bound to lead only to phony conclusions — to decipher how the sanguivorous have become the meat and drink of popular culture at the end of the first decade of the 21st century.

Though here we are in the summer of 2009 with the rage for “Twilight” continuing, the vampire movie “Thirst” claiming this year’s jury prize at Cannes, the supernatural series “Being Human” on BBC America, and others arriving on CW and AMC.

HBO’s “True Blood” has been credited with revivifying the channel’s fortunes. The Sookie Stackhouse novels by Charlaine Harris, which inspired the series, currently occupy seven of the top 20 spots on The New York Times’s paperback mass-market fiction best-seller list. The show, a mishmash of Flannery O’Connor aspirations and Anne Rice pop blood hunger, threatens to surpass “Sex and the City” as the most-watched series in HBO’s history after “The Sopranos.”