dissecting trash

Now that my latest line edit is complete and the draft is off with a beta reader or two, I am allowing myself to once again read some trash.  In this case, the first four books of Charlaine Harris' Southern Vampire Mystery Series.  When J asked me what I thought of them, I said, "No one can ever call Twilight bad again."  But I said this with a big grin on my face.  I'm loving them.

So J asked me why, if I thought the writing was so bad.  This was difficult to answer.

The prose isn't great.  The plots are only ok, the pacing makes me want to skip pages every now and again.  So why am I engrossed?  Well, because I'm engrossed.  That ability to pull a reader into a world is nothing to discard.  Harris has created a very complex, fun universe that I can lose myself in for literal hours at a time.  

The characters are fun and more nuanced than I would have imagined.  I have a specific sense of who they are and the nature of their relationships even when the main character, Sookie (whose first person perspective we're reading), doesn't.  Harris nails Sookie's voice, as well as other characters in the book.

And Harris has a strong sense of humor.  She winks at the reader frequently, such as when the kind of dumb Sookie claims to be "self taught from genre novels."

That said, I still think of the books as trashy.  Partly thanks to the graphic sex scenes, partly due to the blatant fantasy wish fulfillment for every straight female reader, partly due to the fact that they turned the series into True Blood.  (By the way, very very different after season one.)  And yes, partly because the prose doesn't make me ache.

But that's ok, Eric does.  And we all need that every now and again.