in-reading notes: dead until dark

I loved True Blood, and I wanted to read the books it was based on, and so far, it seems like the first book is basically the same as the first season, but there's some differences, too: No Tara, for one, which makes some of the scenes where she's picking fights either much calmer or non-existent, and makes Jason less of a character overall, and there's alot less sex because of it. LaFayette is hardly there at all, not even mentioned until almost half way through the book, which means his drug-dealing subplots are gone / never existed. Bill is much darker and stranger and more opaque, and it's harder to tell why he likes Sookie then it is in the show. Terry was in Vietnam, not in Iraq, and is much older, and he and Arlene apparently had a fling once, which isn't in the show. It's not quite a chapter per episode, which sort of makes things seem a little fast when you're thinking of the show, but it makes sense to the pacing of the book and shows just how quickly things do happen-- in the show, it seems like more time passed between the Meeting and Gran's murder, for instance. And there's alot of discriptions that aren't the same at all: Sam look different, Bill looks different, Sheriff Dearborne, Mike the Coroner, everyone is about as different in description as they can be except Sookie-- but the characters are right. Pretty much spot-on. Eric is exactly the same so far, but Pam is supposed to have looked like a milkmaid, and may have been combined with another woman called the bouncer at the bar; in the show, it's the same one.

I'm liking the book, but it's like I've seen it all before because I have-- there's kind of a feeling that things might turn out different in the end because of the changes the show made, and that'd be pretty sweet, a nice payoff for reading the book. The unrelenting southerness gets a little annoying, but as they're largely commenting on that, I can deal. And I am enjoying the read so far.