by Brian Truitt- usaweekend.com
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.
Photos courtesy of HBO, Ace Publishing
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.
Dead Until Dark was your first book delving into the supernatural. Did you automatically take to the genre?
I loved it and I thought it was a really strong book, but it took my agent a very long time to sell it – longer than any other I’ve written. It took two years for him to place that book.
Was that just because of the time?
It was timing, and it was because people didn’t expect it from me. Of course, my agent submitted it to editors who had known me in the past, and they were going, “What the hell?! This is really different!” [Laughs.] And it’s partly because people really didn’t know how to market something like that then. Urban fantasy has boomed since then, but then people were going, “It’s not a mystery, it’s not horror, it’s not romance – where are we going to put it?” And that’s a huge problem for chain bookstores.
When you go back the other way, and deal with things not involving graves and vampires, will you have the opposite problem?
Maybe. But right now, I’m in the fortunate position of being pretty sellable.
Are you a fan of horror movies and that sort of thing?
Oh no no. I don’t watch horror movies at all – well, I don’t watch bloody horror movies, let me put it that way. I’m not really interested in people cutting off their hands and legs or being eviscerated. I’m more interested in the psychology. I was always interested in the weird, the macabre, the strange, the unusual, but I write conventional stuff until I reached a certain point in my life when I thought, “If I’m gonna do something different, now has to be the time.”
A Touch of Dead features Sookie short stories. For you, how does that format compare with writing a novel?
It’s flexing a different muscle. It can be fun to do stories that you could not do as part of a bigger book, and it’s also a chance to make some points that you don’t get to make in a longer format. I’ve written some that weren’t Sookies that were definitely a lot of fun for me to write because they were so different, like the one that was in the Horror Writers of America anthology. I had to join Horror Writers of America to put the story in there, but that’s OK. It’s called An Evening with Al Gore, and it was just a lot of fun to write something from a different point of view with different characters and get the ecological point in there. It’s always fun doing something different.
Vampires are having their day right now, but do you have any insight on what will be next? Werewolves? Mad scientists?
A lot of people think zombies, which can be amusing. Max Brooks’ World War Z is just a wonderful book, I love it. But I’m thinking now, how much can you do with zombies? They’re rotting! [Laughs] That’s just not attractive. I just can’t get into it. When you’re talking about rotting flesh, there’s just so much you can do! 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.
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.
Dead Until Dark was your first book delving into the supernatural. Did you automatically take to the genre?
I loved it and I thought it was a really strong book, but it took my agent a very long time to sell it – longer than any other I’ve written. It took two years for him to place that book.
Was that just because of the time?
It was timing, and it was because people didn’t expect it from me. Of course, my agent submitted it to editors who had known me in the past, and they were going, “What the hell?! This is really different!” [Laughs.] And it’s partly because people really didn’t know how to market something like that then. Urban fantasy has boomed since then, but then people were going, “It’s not a mystery, it’s not horror, it’s not romance – where are we going to put it?” And that’s a huge problem for chain bookstores.
When you go back the other way, and deal with things not involving graves and vampires, will you have the opposite problem?
Maybe. But right now, I’m in the fortunate position of being pretty sellable.
Are you a fan of horror movies and that sort of thing?
Oh no no. I don’t watch horror movies at all – well, I don’t watch bloody horror movies, let me put it that way. I’m not really interested in people cutting off their hands and legs or being eviscerated. I’m more interested in the psychology. I was always interested in the weird, the macabre, the strange, the unusual, but I write conventional stuff until I reached a certain point in my life when I thought, “If I’m gonna do something different, now has to be the time.”
A Touch of Dead features Sookie short stories. For you, how does that format compare with writing a novel?
It’s flexing a different muscle. It can be fun to do stories that you could not do as part of a bigger book, and it’s also a chance to make some points that you don’t get to make in a longer format. I’ve written some that weren’t Sookies that were definitely a lot of fun for me to write because they were so different, like the one that was in the Horror Writers of America anthology. I had to join Horror Writers of America to put the story in there, but that’s OK. It’s called An Evening with Al Gore, and it was just a lot of fun to write something from a different point of view with different characters and get the ecological point in there. It’s always fun doing something different.
Vampires are having their day right now, but do you have any insight on what will be next? Werewolves? Mad scientists?
A lot of people think zombies, which can be amusing. Max Brooks’ World War Z is just a wonderful book, I love it. But I’m thinking now, how much can you do with zombies? They’re rotting! [Laughs] That’s just not attractive. I just can’t get into it. When you’re talking about rotting flesh, there’s just so much you can do!
Kelly
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