''ALL anyone's thinking about here is sex, sex, sex!'' bemoans mind reader Sookie Stackhouse, the hyper-sexualised protagonist of True Blood. ''Well you don't need to be telepathic to pick up on that,'' quips her 170-year-old vampire lover, Bill.
A glorious marriage of best-selling fantasy writer Charlaine Harris and screen genius Alan Ball (Six Feet Under, American Beauty), the series is the much-lauded crown jewel of HBO's post-Sex-and-Sopranos era.
Though Twilight taught us the virtue, danger and angst of a wistful human-vampire affair, what is remarkably clever about True Blood is its deftly blended cocktail of old-world romance, lustful deviance and wickedly dry humour. In the claustrophobic southern township of Bon Temps, danger, desire and the macabre are all intertwined.
It's violent, it's sexy, it's unabashed - like every urge we're taught to ignore, wrapped in HBO-standard scriptwriting.
Harris, 58, began penning the Southern Vampire Mysteries in 2001, the series proving so popular by the time book seven was published that the author gave Ball licence to create and screen a television pilot in 2008: True Blood. Opening to modest ratings, the show's audience grew to more than 4 million - more than doubling within a year.
Along with the series' teen-skewed peers, Twilight and The Vampire Diaries, the sudden omnipresence of vampires in pop culture is a reflection of the gloomy zeitgeist surrounding it, Harris says.
''Traditionally, people turn to fantasy literature during depressed economic times and I think that is at least part of the reason why vampires have become so popular,'' she says. ''Then, of course, there's the whole sexual proficiency thing - people are always thinking that, with the prospect of eternal life, vampires have learnt some things.''
Famously deviant, Harris's vampires come across as the antithesis of Twilight-style chastity: because after all, this is goddamn immortality - not purgatory.
''I would think, especially in terms of vampires, that eventually, after hundreds of years of life, you would have explored all of your avenues and know what you enjoyed and be ready to do lots of it,'' she laughs.
But the mere mortals inhabiting Bon Temps also prove sexually curiouser and curiouser: Aussie Ryan Kwanten - Vinnie from Summer Bay - found his character Jason Stackhouse in near-naked escapades in most first-season episodes. (This is not to mention the character's nasty day-long erection resulting from experimentation with narcotic-like vampire blood.)
''With people, it's a little harder because a lot of them don't know what they want. Life is a series of experiments for them,'' muses Harris.
Both the books and the TV series have been lauded for their artfully articulated parallels between the fictional struggle for vampire-human equality and the gay rights movement of yesteryear. This is best seeded in little details, such as southern road signage in the show's magnificent opening credits: ''GOD HATES FANGS''.
Series creator Ball is an openly gay homosexual-rights advocate, while Harris is an interested follower of the movement.
''It seemed like an obvious parallel to me when I started forming the world that I wanted to write about,'' she says.
''If vampires were trying to become citizens, they would be met with obstacles. Even though they'd look like us, and act - to some extent - like us, they'd have a basic difference and that difference keeps them from the life that other people enjoy. It's an important movement in our culture and it's kind of a disgrace that there even has to be a gay-rights movement.''
For the married mother of three from Arkansas, shaping the decidedly progressive characters was a natural development in the narrative process.
''It just seems to me that if you had eternity to experiment in - you would!'' she shrugs. ''All writers are interested in stretching outside the boundaries of what they know in order to figure out the way the world would work if it had these differences.''
Though each of Harris's Southern Vampire Mystery books - she is currently finishing number 11 - have been reworked into a complete season of the show, adapting from page to screen was a hands-off process for the author. This left Ball and his writers with considerable creative flexibility to curate new plot arcs and deviations from her source material.
Consider it high-end fan fiction for the screen.
''I think Alan's a genius,'' she smiles. ''Of course, he's going to go in different directions in some storylines. I think that his writers are so talented that they're naturally going to want to develop storylines of their own.''
With season three, we find Sookie Stackhouse torn between that agonising decision of good-guy Bill or bad-boy Eric. And if this seems like a predictably virtuous plot, fear not - with regard to all things chaste, both Sookie and the writers have long since given up.
True Blood screens Tuesdays at 8.30pm on Showcase HD. Charlaine Harris will be in Melbourne on September 26. Details: www.thehubproductions.com.
S ource: The Age
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