Charlaine Harris – After Dead

96. After Dead: What Came Next in the World of Sookie Stackhouse by Charlaine Harris (2013)
Southern Vampire Mysteries, Epilogue

Read my review of book:
1. Dead Until Dark 2. Living Dead in Dallas 3. Club Dead 4. Dead to the World 5. Dead as a Doornail 6. Definitely Dead	7. All Together Dead 8. From Dead to Worse 9. Dead and Gone 10. Dead in the Family 11. Dead Reckoning 12. Deadlocked 13. Dead Ever After Short Stories. A Touch of Dead

Length: 208 pages
Genre: Fantasy

Started/Finished: 16 December 2013

Where did it come from? The library.
Why do I have it? I was checking out Dead Ever After and the librarian told me that this one was coming out, and told me she’d add a hold to my account.

If “what happened next”
is so important, why not
write one more *real* book?

Summary: This is not a novel, or even a collection of short stories, but more like an encyclopedia – except it only covers what happens to the various characters from the previous 13-plus books after the end of Dead Ever After. Each character gets a short blurb of a sentence or two, and never longer than a (very small) page or so.

Review: My first thought when I finished this “book” – which took me less than an hour to flip through – was “weak sauce”. Maybe because I am not a rabid fangirl for this series, but my reaction to 90% of the content of this book was “Who cares?”. I’ve enjoyed the books (more so in the beginning than towards the end of the series, admittedly), and I like the show, but I could count the number of characters whose post-series lives I was even vaguely curious about on fewer than two hands. Sookie, Eric, Bill, Sam, Jason, maybe Tara and Amelia and Quinn and Hunter. That’s about it. Do I really need to spend the other 200 pages reading about what happened to John Q. Random Vampire that played a bit part in book 3 and has never been heard from again? No. No I do not. And even when I was interested in the characters, the stories of what happened for the rest of their lives were either incredibly prosaic (married, kids, some good times and some bad times, blah blah) and therefore dull, or frustratingly vague (mostly to act as teasers for spin-off series, I’m guessing.) The only interesting information could easily have been worked into an epilogue to the last book, where it actually might have been worked into some kind of scene or story instead of being presented in this bullet-point style and padded with a bunch of filler. 2 out of 5 stars.

Recommendation: Unless you are a huge, Sookie-verse-encyclopedia-reading, rabid devotee of the series, I’d take a pass. For more casual fans of the series, there’s not really any critical information in here that you’re missing.

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