Dead Until Dark, Charlaine Harris

Alien Figure Running With Beer Mug, from the PSB Gallery of Thrift Store Art

(July 8) Yuck. This is one of those books that make you feel dumber for having read them; I finished it only to see if Harris ever lifted it out of the dime-store-romance bracket. She did not.

The concept is a wacky mishmash -- DUD mixes the romance novel with the murder mystery, hewing closely to all the conventions of both of those "gendres," then adds a thin veneer of sci-fi (vampirism and shapeshifterism) and a thin veneer of fantasy (telepathy).

Harris could have been so creative with this, but instead put in the barest of minimum efforts. The characters are one-dimensional and often incoherent, both the romance and the mystery are predictable, the telepathy device is vaguely sketched out and seems to come into play only when convenient, the vampirism is cursory as well.

Worse, Harris is careless with the "craft" of telling her story, which is kind of insulting to the reader in the end. DUD is supposed to be a first-person narrative, but other characters' points of view crop up randomly, even when the narrator isn't mind-reading; there are lots of lazy writing shortcuts, like "he said nostalgically" and "he guessed softly," and some downright ineptness, like "'Sure,' I said, after a notable pause"; there are lots of continuity errors -- for example, at one point, a vampire gives a talk at a historical society meeting, which turns out to be scheduled for 7:30 p.m., but the rest of the time during this one-month period this same vampire can't be out and about before 10 p.m. because it's summer and the days are long. There's an unmistakable atmosphere of cranking it out to get the book up to 300 pages and paycheque time.

I was totally shocked by this -- since it's the basis of the beloved TV show True Blood, I thought it would be at least as good, and probably better than, Twilight... but, believe it or not, Twilight somehow leaves it in the dust.