Charlaine Harris, the author of the Sookie Stackhouse novels, is about to squeeze the last drop of “True Blood” - but she's not about to slink quietly into the shadows.
“On the page, I have two more [Sookie] books,” Harris tells PopcornBiz of her plans to conclude the vampire saga that served as the source material for the hot HBO series. “I'm writing Book Twelve and then there will be Book Thirteen. And then I'll think of something else new and wonderful to do."
And while fans of fang-banging in Bon Temps won’t want to hear it, the novelist expects to bring the entire franchise to a definitive end. “I think it'll be total closure,” she says. “I don't go back to things once I've finished them. That's kind of what I do. I don't want to write Sookie after I get stale. Yeah, I'll miss them, I'm sure, because I have lived with them for quite a long time - 12 years now. And it did take two years to sell the first book. But I think writers like to do different things. At least this writer does.”
Harris does have one project already in the pipeline taking take her into unexplored territory: comic books. “I'm going to be working on a graphic novel next,” she reveals. “I’m very excited about that. It’s called Cemetery Girl with Christopher Golden, and it's a very exciting opportunity.” Harris first envisioned the storyline – which centers on a woman who finds herself living in a cemetery with no memory of her past but a clear sense of a mysterious threat hanging over her – as a traditional novel, but back-burnered it until horror and fantasy author Golden, who’s penned prose adventures of characters like Hellboy and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, convinced her it would be a perfect fit for the graphic novel format.
“We're buddies, and I'm really looking forward to trying to collaborate with someone and looking forward to being in a different media,” says Harris, whose next task is selecting an artist to collaborate with. “The publishing company that I've been with, Penguin, is going into graphic novels, so it's a great book with a very original concept. We're doing it in a three-book arc, and we are going to be working on it very soon. It should be out next year.”
