Dead Until Dark (Easton Press Signed Collector's Edition)

HARRIS, Charlaine. Dead Until Dark. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 2010.

Octavo. Full red leather. Spine with five raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. Gold stamped design to covers. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. 312 pp. Signed Collector's Edition. Part of the Easton Press Signed Modern Classics series. Signed by the author on the special signature page. Includes signed Certificate of Authenticity, edition card, and bookplate adhered to front endpaper. Originally published New York: Ace Books, 2001.

Charlaine Harris (b. 1951) was born in Tunica, Mississippi, and has spent her career writing mystery and fantasy fiction set in the American South. She published two standalone mysteries and several mystery series before beginning the Southern Vampire Mysteries — also known as the Sookie Stackhouse novels — with Dead Until Dark in 2001. The series ran to thirteen novels, was translated into many languages, and has sold more than forty million copies worldwide. Harris has also written the Midnight, Texas series and several other mystery sequences, but it is Sookie Stackhouse for which she is best known, and it is Dead Until Dark that established everything the series became.

The novel is set in Bon Temps, Louisiana, a small town in which vampires have recently "come out of the coffin" — having been made legally possible by the development of a synthetic blood substitute called Tru Blood, vampires have declared themselves to the world and sought civil rights. Sookie Stackhouse is a cocktail waitress at Merlotte's Bar, a young woman with a singular disadvantage in a world of ordinary human interaction: she is telepathic and cannot stop hearing the thoughts of everyone around her. The one exception is vampires, whose minds are silent to her — which is why, when Bill Compton walks into the bar one evening, she finds herself attracted to him in a way she has never been able to be attracted to anyone else. She cannot hear what he is thinking, and the silence is its own form of intimacy.

What follows is part romance, part murder mystery — a series of women in Bon Temps are being killed, each of them connected to vampires, and suspicion falls on Bill — and entirely aware of its own absurdity, which Harris handles with the deadpan comic timing that distinguishes the series from less self-aware entries in the paranormal romance genre. The HBO television adaptation, True Blood, premiered in 2008 and ran for seven seasons, significantly expanding the readership of the original novels and turning Bon Temps into one of the more recognisable fictional locations in contemporary popular culture.

Near fine. Some very mild markings along gilt edges; otherwise fine throughout.

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Catalogue Number: HH000555