Club Dead characters

Appears from the start

A telepathic waitress at Merlotte's bar in Bon Temps, Louisiana, still with Bill Compton but no longer comfortable in the relationship. Twice now she has been hurt badly for the sake of vampire business, and she has begun to price her own cooperation. She is stubborn, practical and increasingly known among the supernatural community of the region as a human worth having, which is not the same thing as being safe.

Appears from the start

Sookie's vampire lover, a Bon Temps native who died in the Civil War and came home more than a century later. He has been working long nights on a confidential project for the vampire hierarchy of Louisiana and will not tell Sookie what it is. He is distracted, secretive and short with her, and at the start of the book he leaves town on business he describes only vaguely.

Appears from the start

Sookie's boss at Merlotte's and a shapeshifter, one of the few people in Bon Temps who knows most of what she is mixed up in. He does not hide his opinion that the vampires are using her, and he gives her time off and a certain amount of cover when she needs it.

First appears in chapter 2

The thousand-year-old Norse vampire who rules the vampires of northern Louisiana from his Shreveport bar, Fangtasia. Bill's disappearance is his problem as much as Sookie's, since a vampire cannot be taken out of a territory without insult to the one who holds it. He brings her the news, arranges her protection, and, as always, expects the arrangement to leave her further in his debt.

First appears in chapter 2

Eric's second at Fangtasia, blonde, dry and thoroughly unsentimental, who handles the practical side of running the bar and the territory while Eric travels.

First appears in chapter 3

The vampire who made Bill Compton into what he is, and to whom he is bound by the tie between maker and child. Sookie learns of her existence only when Bill vanishes, along with the fact that Bill had been intending to leave Bon Temps and go back to her.

First appears in chapter 4

A Shreveport werewolf who runs his family's surveying company and is sent to escort Sookie to Jackson, Mississippi, because his father's gambling debts are owed to vampires. Big, dark-haired and easy-tempered, he is decent to Sookie beyond what the errand requires, and openly unhappy about being anybody's collateral.

First appears in chapter 5

Alcide's former lover, a shapeshifter from Jackson who has moved on to a werewolf fiance but has not finished with Alcide. She is immediately and openly hostile to Sookie, and she takes every opportunity in company to humiliate her.

First appears in chapter 6

The vampire made from a famous singer, brain-damaged by a botched change and known to everyone by a nickname because his real name upsets him. He is sent to Jackson to help watch over Sookie, and he is as likely to cause an incident as to prevent one.

First appears in chapter 6

A friend of Sookie's from school who now runs a dress shop in Bon Temps and who turns up in Jackson on the arm of a wealthy vampire. She is glad to see Sookie and plainly nervous about being seen with her, and she is deeper into the vampire world than Sookie realized.

First appears in chapter 6

An old, wealthy Mississippi vampire, courteous in a formal Italian-American style, who keeps Tara Thornton as his companion and pays for her comfortably. He is well connected among the vampires of Jackson.

First appears in chapter 6

The bouncer at Josephine's, the Jackson bar the supernatural community calls Club Dead. He is a goblin, squat and smoldering to the touch, and he enforces the bar's single rule, that nobody starts a fight inside, with unarguable force.

First appears in chapter 7

The vampire King of Mississippi, who rules from a walled mansion outside Jackson. Genial, immensely old and entirely ruthless, he keeps a court of vampires and a staff of werewolves, and treats other kingdoms' property as fair game when it suits him.

First appears in chapter 2

The tattooed vampire who tends bar at Fangtasia, taken on after the previous bartender's destruction. He is part of Eric's small circle in Shreveport and takes a share in the decisions about what to do while Eric is away.