The Sookie Stackhouse Mysteries/Headscratchers


 * This one came to me while watching True Blood: One of the things that drew Sookie to Bill was that she couldn't hear his thoughts. So how could Sookie miss the fact that she couldn't read Sam's mind, either?
 * She can, although she senses more often his feelings than his thoughts -- but she gets some of those, too.
 * And she also stated (earlier in the series) that she tried to avoid reading his mind, as whenever she read her bosses mind she kept quitting (cause she didn't like what she saw or something), so she always had to have her guard up
 * Weres and shifters are harder to read but not impossible, but some ordinary people are harder to read too. Until she knew that weres and shifters existed, Sookie just thought they were harder than usual. (Sam can also shield completely when he tries, but Sookie never noticed him doing it until the first book).


 * Why did drinking synthetic blood help Sookie recover from in Club Dead? Shouldn't they have given her a transfusion of her own blood type? I mean, I can see Eric and Bill making that mistake because they're vampires and it just wouldn't occur to them, but Alcide should have known better.
 * In Club Dead, how did get into  without an invitation?
 * Bubba is stated in 'Dead To The World' to not need an invitation to enter. He's 'Special'.


 * In All Together Dead, why did Quinn kill  Even Barry the Bellboy was disgusted by this.
 * Sookie provided good service to Andre and Sophie-Anne on both a professional and personal level, and Andre responded by trying to enslave her because she was such a useful commodity. He wasn't sorry, he didn't get that it was wrong, and he would have done it again in a heartbeat--who cares that it was out of his great love for Sophie-Anne? Yes, it's disturbing that his death brings Sookie such pleasure--Sookie's pretty creeped out by it too--but I cannot blame her at all.
 * Also, Lorena and Debbie were just trying to kill her. Andre was trying to enslave her. To own her, control her, make her into a possession. That, to me at least, is far creepier than the angry/jealous women trying to eliminate an obstacle in their paths. Barry the Bellboy was weirded out, but he didn't know the whole story behind it.
 * All Together Dead has some of the best examples of Idiot Ball juggling by millennia old master vamps in the series. Best example: Queen Sophie-Anne's party flies to Rhodes in a daytime flight. Why??? The entire cream of Louisiana vamps were helpless, 20,000 feet in the air, in wooden coffins, during daylight. One bomb or one random plane crash would have destroyed the lot of them. I would expect them to do any of the following: (1) fly under their own power at night; (2) in (1) was not possible, fly in a plane at night, where at least they would have a chance to fly to safety if anything happened; (3) if neither (1) nor (2) would be possible, at least fly in an armored, foam-packed coffin that locks from the inside and that might survive an impact from flying altitude. Then there is the whole . ..


 * Throughout Dead Until Dark, Sam is depicted as a great guy who genuinely cares about Sookie and does everything he can to protect her.  To make matters worse, he shows no guilt whatsoever when he gets caught the next morning. Sookie is furious for all of thirty seconds, and then the incident is never mentioned again. What the heck?
 * Yeah, Sam's not as great of a guy as some people want to believe. That's not the last time he does something of dubious morality.
 * It's not just the fact that he did something so creepy that bugs me, it's fact that Sookie seems to forget about it almost immediately.
 * Sookie's pretty good at ignoring things she doesn't want to think about. Doubtless she developed this as a self-defense mechanism for eavesdropping on people's brains, plus her childhood sexual abuse (see IJBM below this one). The fact that her boss is a Peeping Tom is much lower on the list than knowing that Bob beats his wife or Alice wishes her kids had never been born. I agree it's obnoxious, but I think it's consistent with Sookie's characterization.


 * Sookie seems to be remarkably unscarred from such piddling things as, oh, molestation. It comes up for a bit, then everything's A-OK.
 * Sookie is rather good at ignoring, suppressing and rationalizing the unpleasant things in her life.
 * And it's starting to show in later books. Now she's sort of unpleasant, in my opinion.


 * We are told in the first book that being a vampire is some sort of biological condition, meaning that they are just normal people who seem like vampires. No one questions why they live forever and they're blood is like a drug. And once more, the whole "being-a-condition" thing is entirely forgotten after the first book.
 * People accept the quasi-immortality and addictive blood as part of the "condition". It's as simple as that. And since Sookie is the narrator, once she is disabused of the notion that vampirism is "just a disease" it doesn't get mentioned again because she doesn't believe it anymore. Again: it's as simple as that.
 * That's too big of a stretch for so many people to believe. Sure, a few might not believe, but that's just stupid, even for a vampire book.
 * Which would you be quicker to believe, that there's a chronic medical condition that makes people act like vampires, or that the supernatural beings you know only from movies and books actually exist? Besides, the notion that people will ignore or explain away anything they don't want to acknowledge isn't exactly unique to this series.


 * Whatever happened to the kittens Bob had with that cat? They never explicitly said he fathered them, but it's implied. Are they with the mother? Did Bella drink them?
 * Bob confirms that they are not his in 'Dead Reckoning'.


 * Sookie must taste awful and should be drained dry any day now. Vampire blood seems to be as permanent in the human body as the donor themselves (therefore the human's blood cells will never be able to produce enough heme to overtake it), and she has been on the receiving end of enough "transfusions" that Eric is wary of giving her any more in case he turns her. She mentions in Dead in the Family that he has stopped feeding from her entirely except for in his "happy moments", which is problematic on account of the fact that 1] she's mostly comprised of his and Bill's blood so she can't taste very human (or good) anymore and 2] if he keeps at it, he should eventually turn her even if he doesn't mean to, simply by eliminating all of her blood cells.
 * She could still produce her own red blood cells but as vampires are pretty much immortal so their blood would continue to circulate.


 * Anyone else feel that the characters are more insufferable in later books? YMMV, I know, but Sookie just makes me want to rip her arms off.
 * Why are there so many continuity errors in the later books?
 * Sookie misses an awful lot of work to go galavanting around and solving crimes. In the second book, she and Sam arrange it so she can work a lot before her trip to Dallas, to make up the hours she'd miss. But in later books, she goes on more adventures, and she makes no effort to work up a special schedule.
 * Sam probably just didn't roster her on on those days.
 * Speaking of her work schedule, Sookie tells us how lenient her hours are (as Merlotte's is a quiet family place.) How is it that Sam let's her take off work and gives her barely any hours, yet she's able to afford her taxes, houses, upkeep, Internet, T.V., and such? Does she earn that much?
 * She gets paid for her work with the supes (though that aspect seems to have been dropped), and she probably has some money from her grandma's will.
 * Sam's her friend and a good worker (and also lusts after her), which would explain why she still has a job. As for her money, she mentions she still has money from the estates of  and Hadley.
 * Speaking of money, why isn't Sookie using her mental powers to get money? She says she enjoys her job: fine. But she also seems to be constantly worried about money. I'm not talking become a millionaire or anything, but a few trips to a casino is too much to ask?
 * Using her power to gamble may not have occurred to her, or she may think that would be unethical.


 * Anyone kind of bothered by the fact that Sookie became a lot more likeable and plucky after she was tortured in cold blood?


 * Sookie/Harris make sure to mention the word-of-the-day calender every single time a word with more than three syllables shows up in order to excuse an "uneducated bar waitress" knowing such "big" words. How condescending this is to both educated and uneducated people is a matter of YMMV, but I don't get why they bother when it's also made evident that Sookie enjoys reading a lot. Wouldn't that be enough to bolster her vocabulary?


 * Sookie doesn't have much of a reaction to learning that Mr. Cataliades and his nieces are part demon. I realize that by this point she's become pretty desensitized to supernatural stuff, but still, they're demons, and Sookie considers herself a Christian. Wouldn't she at least make sure they aren't really servants of Satan before she gets in a car with them?


 * Why does Sookie randomly decide to introduce Quinn to the lieutenant governor and his wife as "John Quinn"? If she didn't know his first name and thought it would be weird to introduce him by his last name only, then why not let him introduce himself?


 * In Dead and Gone, Sookie calls Bill and asks him to come over and check Tray's darkened house because she's afraid to go in by herself. Why didn't she just use her telepathy to see if anyone was home and what their mental state might be?
 * There could easily have been non-humans in the house. She can usually sense the 'blank' space left by vampires, but a shifter who can shield their mind or one of the fae species could have caught her unawares.


 * In the later books, characters suddenly start saying "you-all" when addressing more than one person. WTF? Any Southerner will tell you the word is y'all. We might say "you all" when we're being extra careful about our speech, but I have literally never seen "you all" spelled with a hyphen before.