Sookie Stackhouse, Charlaine Harris & Her Southern Vampire Series, HBO's Trueblood and Literary Space

I took most of the day off from work and entered what Ruth L. Hubbard called “literary space” in a 1969 research article. My territory was the world created by Charlaine Harris in her Southern Vampire series, which is receiving vast public attention since used as the basis for the HBO series Trueblood.

Sookie Stackhouse is the hero of this compelling world, which occupies a small corner of northern Louisiana. The tall, dark, handsome love interest in the first novel, Dead Until Dark, is the vampire Bill, who just happens to be dead – until dark.

I entered this steamy world from about 10 p.m. last night until 1 this afternoon, with some time out for sleep. The experience of so fully entering a fictional world that blots out the here-and-now reality set me to thinking about what makes the experience of watching the TV serial qualitatively different from reading the book.

Hubbard’s article (Inner Designs in Language Arts, volume 66) has shaped my thinking about the experience of reading long past the influence normally held by academic research. Hubbard interviewed seven- and nine-year-olds with open-ended questions. She found that children, like adults, enter into what she calls "literary space," defined as that mental area in which the story events feel as if they are happening to you even though you know they're not. It is a state of mind in which the distinction between oneself and the story blurs. It is characterized by complete concentration on the book that blocks out attention to the outside world, and the sense that what happens in the story "fells like" it is happening to you.

Obviously, I am influenced by my experience watching Trueblood, because a month ago I didn’t know who Charlaine Harris was. Now, I’ve read the first book and avidly await the arrival of the next four.

One way that the books are different from watching TV is that I can enter the literary space of the novels and occupy it for hours and hours.

I also enjoy imagining the characters, instead of seeing the writers' and directors' visual interpretations. Anna Paquin’s Sookie structured my imaginary Sookie, but my vampire Bill is as much influenced by Anne Rice’s Lestat as actor Stephen Moyer.

Rice’s vampire world became overly convoluted in Queen of the Damned and her writing overwrought. Tale of the Body Thief redeemed her quartet of Vampire Chronicles. Down-to-earth Sookie Stackhouse’s common sense will, hopefully, be a counterweight to Harris going in that direction. In the meantime, I’m looking forward to my next escape into the literary space that Harris has created.