Stephanie Meyer Began Her Twilight Series

Tim Fraser for National Post“I’m constantly surprised by what the writers come up with,” Harris says of the show inspired by her Dead Until Dark series.

You need look no further than the Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings franchises to see how riled up fans can get when novel adaptations aren’t done just so. Those are movies, though, so maybe things are a little different in the TV world — at least, they are for Charlaine Harris. As the author behind the Dead Until Dark series that inspired HBO’s True Blood, Harris says she doesn’t mind one bit that the TV series and the books don’t quite match up — in fact, she prefers it that way.

“I think it gives you two entertainment experiences with the same characters, and there’s a lot to be said for that. I would be very bored if they copied the books exactly, and I’m never bored,” Harris says of the show, which she watches every week like any other devoted Trubie. “I love it. Love the show. I love the cast, I love the crew, I love Alan [Ball, series creator and producer]. We have a very cordial relationship, which is not the Hollywood norm, and I love doing appearances with them, it’s a lot of fun. And of course I’m constantly surprised by what he and his writers come up with.”

Although the show’s writers take some creative liberties, Harris says the drama does more or less follow the plot of her novels, and Season 4 (which premiered June 26) is on track with what happens in the fourth novel. Dead Until Dark, the first novel in the series – which is officially called The Southern Vampire Mysteries – came out in 2001, and Harris was seven books in before Ball started working on True Blood for HBO. When she first sold the rights, Harris says she wasn’t that excited – she’d sold rights before and nothing had ever come of it. But once she and her husband travelled out to see the shoot on location, she says it all started to feel real.

“My husband turned to me and he said, ‘This is all your fault.’ And I thought, ‘Well I guess it is,’ and I was really excited then because I thought this is actually going to happen and I’m really going to see it,” Harris says.

Of course, Harris is way ahead of Ball and his writers story-wise; the 11th book in the series, Dead Reckoning, came out this month, and Harris is already at work on book 12. The novel series is winding down, though, and she’s planning to make book 13 her last. In fact, Harris never intended for the series to last this long, and even though she wrote another series and some short stories concurrently, she says she’s ready to move on from Sookie Stackhouse and Bon Temps.

“I know that I’m in danger of becoming really stale and burned out so that’s why the last two books will be my last ones,” she says. “I have so many ideas. It was like, saying I wasn’t going to write Sookie anymore gave me a huge shot in the arm creatively and all of a sudden I thought, ‘I could write this, I could write that, I could write …’ So the world is full of things I would like to do.”

In the meantime, Harris is still deep in the Sookieverse, which follows the telepathic Louisiana waitress and her relationships with brooding vampires and other monstrosities. The Sookie Stackhouse Companion — which is not officially part of the series — is set to come out at the end of August and will be a compendium of various elements of the novels, including recipes (which Harris says were not her idea), a new novella and some added bonuses.

“It’s got secret conversations between Eric and Bill, that I didn’t write, but I think they’re hysterically funny,” Harris says. “One of my wonderful moderators on my board wrote them and I think they’re very funny.”

A lot of the material for the new book, such as a genealogy and a character list, was material Harris already had on hand to help her keep everything straight. Nonetheless, despite her best efforts, sometimes she slips up on the details.

“I’ve made lots of mistakes,” she says. “People are so kind to write in and tell me about them. People will say, ‘Did you realize that his eyes were brown in one book and blue in another?’ [And] I’m going, ‘No, and that is a key element of the books, his eye colour.’ I try to take it with a grain of salt, but honestly, I just hate it. I hate having made the mistake, I hate my editor not having caught it, and the three or five other people who read the book, they didn’t catch it.”

But nitpicking fans is just one variety of fan mail Harris receives. It seems everyone and their dog is invested in the very premise that got Harris started on the series in the first place: a mortal woman dating a vampire, and what would possess her to do such a thing. It’s not a new concept — when Dead Until Dark was released Buffy Summers had already gone steady with Angel on the WB’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Still, Harris’ treatment was years ahead of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight books, and involves a lot more sex, which Harris thinks is at the root of pop-culture’s continued love affair with vampires.

“I think part of it is the earnest hope that people who have been having sex for so many years have gotten very good at it,” she says. “The dark side of us always wants to be the person — whether man or woman — that can make the vampire love again: arouse those human emotions, become the one among all the millions of humans, throughout the thousands of years the vampire has lived, you want to be the one, the one. And I think that’s a very potent and powerful fantasy.

“I think also, in this culture, people are youth — and perfection-obsessed, and I think the vampire is the ultimate figure in that fantasy that we can stay young and fit without pain forever.”

On True Blood, those beautiful, youthful archetypes are played by the likes of Alexander Skarsgård, who fans seem to think Harris has on speed-dial. “People show up and want me to sign books to ‘Mrs. Alexander Skarsgård’ and I’m going, ‘That’s not going to happen,’ ” she says.

At this point in her career, though, Harris takes it all in stride. She started out as a conventional mystery writer in the early ’80s and is graciously professional about never-ending days of interviews, photo shoots and fan mail.

“It’s part of the job,” she says. And, since it’s a job she always wanted, even back when she was working menial jobs for minimum wage, it makes sense that she’s happy about it. “That was always my secret identity,” she says. “Charlaine Harris, writer.”