Dead until Dark
Charlaine Harris
Beat my low expectations
I read Dead Until Dark ten years ago (06-Sep-2012). I had heard vaguely of a new (not that new, by that time, but new to me) genre in which werewolves, vampires, etc, inhabit our modern cities. As is usually the case with new literary genres, critics spoke of it with contempt. However, one should not condemn anything without knowledge, and if a body of art is highly popular, it's usually worth a look. Not saying that everything popular has merit, but the fact that a large number of people like something is good enough reason to give it a chance.
So, having heard that Charlaine Harris was a name to conjure with, and also having heard of Sookie Stackhouse, I chose this novel because it was the first in the Sookie Stackhouse series. It was an experiment that paid off for me, though a little indirectly.
Dead Until Dark is not great, but it is not terrible. The characters were not uninteresting, and some effort and imagination had gone into world-building. But the story didn't grab me -- it felt more like monster show-and-tell than an actual plot. I began with the first book in the series with the idea that I might continue on, but in fact I was not motivated to read even the next book, and thus, aside from this one book and a few stories in anthologies, Sookie Stackhouse remains mostly unknown to me.
But I was primed to think that perhaps this was a genre worthy of attention. Six years later I knew it was called "Urban Fantasy". I had by that time read Charles Stross's UF-adjacent Laundry Files series. On 2-Sep-2018, I read Patricia Briggs's Moon Called. That was very good. Since then Urban Fantasy has become one of my favorite genres (e.g. Ilona Andrews, Ben Aaronovitch, Seanan McGuire), and Briggs remains my favorite Urban Fantasy author.
Sookie Stackhouse still holds that fond place in my memory as my first Urban Fantasy kiss. I have no particular desire to see her ever again, but I will always remember her.