HBO's True Blood: Did You Know The Show Is Based On A Series Of Novels?

HBO has a huge hit series with True Blood, but the strange tales of Sookie Stackhouse and weird happenings in her Louisiana, backwater town of Bon Temps all began with Dead Until Dark, a supernatural thriller with a generous helping of romance, written by Charlaine Harris. Amazon reviewer Susan Shedd says:

I am a big Charlaine Harris fan and only mildly interested in vampires. But the combination of a an uncontrollably mind-reading heroine, newly legal vampires, a serial killer, a shape-shifter — how could I resist? I find I don’t want to say much at all about the plot, as it’s too easy to give away some really exciting twists. It’s fair to say that the story postulates vampires as a newly-emerged legal minority (word is they’ve been victimized by superstition, when really the poor people have been subjected to a terrible virus) with attendant vampire-philics and phobics roiling the waters of cultural change. Vampires can now subsist on artificial blood, so they don’t have to be a danger to anyone. Harris has thought through vampire culture and the interaction of that culture with “normal” society to great effect — the book would be fun to read just for that.

As the series goes on, even more supernatural forces are revealed to be at play in Bon Temps. Witches, werewolves, werecats, faeries, demons, and even practitioners of Voodoo and Senteria can be found among the citizenry of Bon Temps.

Every one of the first eight books in the series—and these are the books that launched the megahit HBO series—has an average review rating of 4-5 out of 5 stars, and all the Kindle editions are currently priced at $7.99 each (price set by the publisher). If you’ve been watching the HBO show and wondering what the filmmakers changed, or left out, from the books, here’s your chance to find out, straight from the source! And if you don’t have HBO and have been wondering what all the fuss is about, you can see for yourself, either by reading the books or by getting caught up on the series with Amazon Instant Videos.

Following after Dead Until Dark, in order, the first eight books in the series are:

Living Dead in Dallas

These eight volumes can also be purchased as a Kindle “boxed set”, priced at $63.99.

P.S., to fans of the HBO show – if you’ve been loving the show’s theme song, I Wanna Do Bad Things With You by Jace Everett, Amazon’s got it as an MP3 for 99 cents! DRM-free, and totally iTunes-compatible. There are several soundtrack albums available for the series, too.