Wednesday, October 7, 2009

'True Blood' boosts Charlaine Harris' starpower

From USA weekend

Even if you’ve faithfully watched both seasons of HBO’s hit vampire series True Blood, based on Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse novels, you’ve only seen a glimpse into the writer's colorful world. And keen TV watchers finally got to see the author on screen with her creations — she had a cameo in a bar scene during True Blood’s season finale last month. Long before Anna Paquin put on the Merlotte’s waitress uniform as the on-screen Sookie, Harris introduced the spunky Louisiana telepath in the 2001 novel Dead Until Dark. Many vampires, werewolves, shapeshifters and a fairy godmother later, her series is going strong, with a new short-story compilation A Touch of Dead in stores this week and the 11th Sookie novel, Dead in the Family, scheduled for a May release. In addition, the fourth book in her Harper Connelly Mysteries series, Grave Secret, comes out next month (read the first chapter here), and later this month Harris, 58, will be the official queen of New Orleans’ annual Vampire Ball. I caught up with the Arkansas-based author recently for an upcoming cover story about vampires, but read below about how Harris got into writing about the supernatural and what she thinks the next big thing involving the undead will be.

Trueblood09_33 Your books were already popular by themselves, but they’ve seemed to have taken on a whole new life thanks to True Blood.
Yeah, I’ve gained a whole new group of readers, which has been of course wonderful. But the new readers seem to see the books in a different light than the readers I had before. They see the characters on television, and I think sometimes they wonder why the characters in the books aren’t cooperating more with the ones on the screen.

read on

1 comments:

Rita said...

Why should the books be as the True
Blood HBO show?The books were there
before the show,they are Ms.CH,and
True Blood is Alan Ball's he does as
he sees it best.And so does Ms.CH
sure i would like to see more of the
books in the show but i will take what i can get hopefully a little
more Eric and Sookie,and i love the
books,way to go Ms.CH.