Southern Vampires

Okay, I admit it, I am hooked on True Blood, the new show on HBO. I have been sick for the last few weeks but I have decided to focus less on my illness and more on this amazing new show that has me entirely intrigued.

The show comes from Charlaine Harris' Southern Vampire novels. It centers on a fictional town in Louisiana called Bon Temps and it is set in a post Katrina South where Vampires are the new racial flavor among the citizens of the USA. We meet Sookie Stackhouse, a bar maid with telepathic powers and the mysterious Bill Compton, the local Vampire, claiming his family's ancestoral home and trying his best to mainstream, a Vampire among humans after centuries of solitude beyond the company of Vampires who he says are more apt to be cruel and have less humanity in them.

I am fascinated by the growing relationship between these two as they struggle with their otherness and their inability to be completely comfortable among so called normal people. I think I identify with them because being a witch is a sort of otherness. I confess to a sort of soap opera mentality to a certain extent, but I am also very aware of the differences I have with other people of mainstream religion and the Wiccan/Pagan world of witchcraft. I love the notion that these two people, these two characters, will somehow create a safe haven for each other.

One of the things that Sookie appreciates about Bill is that she can't read his mind, his thoughts do not intrude on her and she loves the silence he emits. Bill appreciates Sookie because she is at ease with him, unafraid of his being a Vampire and accepting of him when others distrust him and fear him. Both feed on each other for this emotional comfort. You have to ask the question, who is the Vampire and who is the victim.

In the middle of this unconventional love affair is a mystery waiting to be solved and this creates tension for the two, making their fledgeling relationship even more difficult. There have been two murders (so far) of women who have sexual relationships with Vampires and there are two suspects, Sookie's brother Jason and Sookie's Vampire, Bill.

Bill and Jason are extreme opposites in many instances. Jason is a womanizer to the "nth" degree, self absorbed and self indulgent. Bill is a Southern Gentleman, having lost his human life during the Civil War period of American history. He is courtly and gentle and polite and very charming. Jason is impulsive and inconsiderate and ignorant whereas Bill is careful and calculating, as a Vampire would be with an expanded history of experience as he walked through the decades to peer into human life. But there are similarities between the two men in her life, though the goals and aims are quite different. Jason seeks to control women for sex and pleasure and his own selfish needs. Bill seeks to control people for his one need, the desire to drink real human blood as opposed to the artificial blood developed by the Japanese (TruBlood) that may solve his nutritional needs but do nothing to kill his insticts. The Vampire himself must do that.

And not all Vampires want to mainstream. Take for instance Malcom, Liam and Diane. They are the stereotype Vampire, the sort of Vampires who don't want to follow the new directives from "Vamp Central". They create tension for Sookie and Bill beyond what tension there may already be. As Malcolm said to Bill during a confrontation: "Honey, what good is being a Vampire if you can't kill people?" They frighten Sookie, and they should because they are evil. But they do something insidious, they make her afraid of all other Vampires, and question her relationship with Bill who, when you get past the personalities are just as they, a hunter who loves the chase and the capture. Their behaviour taints her image of Bill as a potential suitor.

So how does she reconcile these things in her heart so she can fall in love and make love to this devistatingly handsome man whose thoughts she can't read? How does she loose herself and claim her own sense of her sexual self? Can Bill free her and love her without hurting her with his Vampire ways?

Who knows, but the tension is delicious.