A Touch of Dead: Sookie Stackhouse short stories

A collection of five Sookie Stackhouse short stories just came out this week, A Touch of Dead:Sookie Stackhouse: The Complete Stories by Charlaine Harris. The Sookie novels and stories are those on which True Blood is based. These five stories are all previously published pieces and, as the title suggests, all of the short stories featuring Sookie to date. There have also been four other short stories published so far featuring the "Sookieverse" but not Sookie herself. (See list at the end of this post.) "The Britlingens Go To Hell" (2009) sounds especially intriguing. The Britlingens are inter-dimensional warriors who first pop up at a national vampire convention in All Together Dead (2007).

The first story in A Touch of Dead is "Fairy Dust", which first appeared in the anthology Powers of Detection (2006). In Sookietime, it falls after Dead to the World (2004) and features the fairy twins Claudine and Claude. It turns out that their are actually part of a fairy triplet set. But the third triplet, Claudette, has turned up dead. That's where the title comes from; fairies turn to fairy dust when they die. The remaining twins enlist Sookie's help to figure out which of three suspects offed their sister. And, as we learn in the most recent Sookie novel Dead and Gone (2009), having fairies ticked off at you can get very unpleasant. Better not to bump off fairies if you don't just have to.

Claude and Claudine are particularly attractive to humans. "Claude looked like a Clavin Klein underwear model," Sookie observes; "in fact if the designer had been there, he'd have signed the twins on the spot, and there'd have been drool all over the contract." They are even more attractive to vampires.

"Dracula Night" first appeared in Charlaine Harris, et al, Many Bloody Returns: Tales of Birthdays with Bite (2007). The copy of the original anthology I saw doesn't specify that it's for "young adult" readers. But it does seem to be more of a "story for the whole family" (the TV euphemism for "safe for kids to watch"). In the introduction to A Touch of Dead, Harris says that this one of the five "was the most fun to write" but that she also had to "smooth out the edges of the story". She also says this was the hardest to place in the novel's chronology, but she positions it as just prior to Dead As A Doornail (2005).

Sookie's fantasy life is tamer than usual. And the hottest sex comes when Sookie shows up at Fangtasia:

Eric's eyes were blazing with excitement. Without a word, he dipped me as though we were dancing and planted a hell of a kiss on me: lips, tongue, the entire osculant assemblage. Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy. When I was quivering, he assisted me to rise. His brilliant smile revealed glistening fangs. Eric had enjoyed himself.

Other than Sookie smooching with Eric, the story itself is about a Halloween party at Fangtasia and which Eric is sure that Count Dracula himself will show up. I suppose the only real addition to the Sookieverse here is that it actually includes Dracula, aka Vlad Tepes in life. Pam tells Sookie:

"His own people regarded him with fear, of course. But the local vamps admired Vlad so much they actually brought him over when he was dying, thus ushering in the new era of the vampire. After monks buried him on an island called Snagov, he rose on the third night to become the first modern vampire. Up until then, the vampires were like ... well, disgusting. Completely secret. Ragged, filthy, living in holes in cemeteries, like animals. But Vlad Dracul had been a ruler, and he wasn't going to dress in rags and live in a hole for any reason." Pam sounded proud.

I think it's kind of a throwaway fun story, so it's probably not worth quibbling about seeming inconsistencies. For instance, Pam explains to Sookie rules about vampires killing other vampires that don't seem quite to match with Eric's staking the bartender in the first novel Dead Until Dark (2001) or even one of the vampire trials Sookie observes in All Together Dead (2007). I don't have the earlier version in front of me. But I'm pretty sure this is one of the aspects she cleaned up a bit in this version, although at the cost of introducing another inconsistency and slightly weakening the plot premise.

Unlike the other stories, this one doesn't seem to add anything to the relationships among the various characters.

"One Word Answer" originally appeared in the anthology Bite (2005) and is the one of the five that adds the most to the ongoing narrative in the novel series. The action here is just prior to Definitely Dead (2006) and is important enough to the larger story that Harris had to recapitulate part of it in that novel. But even knowing the basic plot before I read it, there was still a nice twist at the end.

This one sets the stage for Sookie's own involvement with the Vampire Queen of Louisiana in New Orleans, which is where Definitely Dead is set. Sookie's cousin Hadley is first introduced in "One Word Answer", a character who is important to more than one later development in the Sookie saga. Sookie learns what Hadley has been up to since the last time she heard from her: "My cousin Hadley, the cheerleader, had become a vampire lesbian voodooienne. Who knew?"

Sookie's sardonic sense of humor has a memorable moment when she meets an unpleasant looking vampire named Waldo:

Most vampires are good-looking or extremely talented in some way or another. Naturally, when a vamp brings a human over, the vamp's likely to pick a human who attracted him or her by beauty or some necessary skill. I didn't know who the heck had brought over Waldo, but I figured it was somebody crazy.

I found the story "Lucky" to be the most fun of the five. It features Amelia, a witch who becomes Sookie's friend in Definitely Dead. This one falls after All Together Dead and first appeared in the collection Unusual Suspects (2008).

It also features Bob the cat, who is one of my favorite characters. This is set post-Katrina and the Katrina refugee situation figures into the plot. Like all the first four stories, it's a mystery. In this case, Sookie and Amelia are trying to figure out who's been going into the office of Sookie's friend and insurance agent Greg Aubert, who has his own special twist on the insurance business. You want this guy for your insurance agent, trust me!

There's a good scene with Sookie reading minds in Merlotte's bar, when Greg comes in with his wife Christy, his son Little Greg, and his daughter Lindsay, "who had the mistaken idea that she looked like Christina Aguilera." Sookie relates:

After I'd brought them their drinks and turned in their food order, I puttered around studying the Aubert family. They seemed so typical it just hurt. Little Greg thought about his girlfriend mostly, and I learned more than I wanted to know.

The final story, "Gift Wrap", is the most charming. It features one of Sookie's most exotic relatives, a story about a Werewolf feud and a couple of really good Christmas presents for Sookie. One of them she finds unexpectedly in the woods. This one originally appeared in Wolfsbane and Mistletoe (2008), as in Sookietime falls just before the apocalyptic events of Dead and Gone (2009).

Cover of Must Love Hellhounds: I'm not sure if that's a Britlingen in that picture or not, but it could be

Via www.charlaineharris.com, here are the other short stories to date from the Sookieverse but without Sookie herself 07/26/09:

"Dancers in the Dark" novella in Night's Edge (2004)

"Tacky" in My Big Fat Supernatural Wedding (2006)

"The Britlingens Go To Hell" in Must Love Hellhounds (2009)

“Bacon" in Strange Brew (2009)

Tags: charlaine harris, sookie stackhouse, true blood