Living Dead in Dallas Sookie Stackhouse Southern Vampire Mystery #2 by Charlaine Harris

Read by Johanna Parker Published by Recorded Books

Living Dead in Dallas
Sookie Stackhouse Southern Vampire Mystery #2
By Charlaine Harris
read by Johanna Parker
Published by Recorded Books
Approx 8.5 hours

Okay we have to wait for a few months before the return of the series "True Blood" on HBO and the return of Sookie Stackhouse, but during the interim I highly recommend picking up the books either regular or audio and enjoy the other storis in the Sookie Stackhouse Southern Vampire Mysteries. I was told, due to my love of vampire and zombie stories, that I should check out the Sookie stories. I then read a collection of short stories that had a story by Charlaine Harris that took place in the Sookie world but was Sookie-less and found the writing very entertaining. By the way, the main reason I picked up the book was because it also featured a Harry Dresden story by my favorite author, Jim Butcher. So, liking the storytelling and the humor in the short story, I tried out Ms. Harris' novels. I read the first book just as season one of "True Blood" was at midpoint. After reading the book I had to check out the series and have been hooked on both ever since.

The Sookie Stackhouse series tells of a romantic world where vampires have "come out of the coffin," and are mainstreaming (trying to live alongside humans, rather than living ON humans). With the invention of a synthetic blood, now available in six-packs, the vampires can live without killing, but not all vampires are mainstreaming.

"Living Dead in Dallas" pretty much covers what was in season two of the "True Blood" TV series. I will tell you that the TV series took lots of poetic license and added things in here and there that kept to the main theme of this book but made for some more visually stimulating stories. For example, Maenad, a female follower of Dionysus(I'll explain more about the Maenad later) in the tv series pretty much took over Bon Temps, Sookie's hometown, while she was away in Dallas, giving a bigger role to Michelle Forbes, who played Admiral Cain on Battlestar Galactica. So that was okay.