Dead Until Dark characters

Appears from the start

A waitress in her mid-twenties at Merlotte's bar in the small northern Louisiana town of Bon Temps. She has been able to hear other people's thoughts since childhood, a talent she calls her disability and hides as best she can; the town has settled on treating her as simple. She lives with her grandmother in the old family house, swims and sunbathes to keep some pleasure in her life, and has never managed a normal relationship because she always knows what a man is thinking. The public existence of vampires, revealed a couple of years earlier once a synthetic blood made it possible for them to live openly, fascinates her, and she has been waiting for one to walk into the bar.

Appears from the start

A vampire who has returned to Bon Temps to claim the house his family left him across the cemetery from the Stackhouse place. He was born in the area, fought in the Civil War, and did not come home from it as a living man. Courteous, old-fashioned, and deliberately mainstreaming into human society now that vampires are public, he drinks bottled synthetic blood and wants to be accepted as a taxpaying resident. Sookie is drawn to him above all because his mind is completely silent to her, which is the first rest she has ever had in company.

Appears from the start

The owner of Merlotte's bar and grill and Sookie's boss for several years. He is a compact, red-gold-haired man who arrived in Bon Temps from somewhere else, keeps his private life entirely to himself, and lives in a trailer behind his own bar. He looks out for Sookie, is plainly attracted to her, and disapproves of her interest in vampires. Sookie has never been able to read him properly: where other minds give her words and pictures, his gives her a shifting blur she cannot settle on.

Appears from the start

Sookie's older brother, who works for the parish road crew and has inherited the family house's other half of trouble. Good-looking, vain, and constantly involved with women, he treats Bon Temps as his personal hunting ground and has slept with a great many of the local waitresses and barflies. He and Sookie love each other but scrape against each other constantly; he has never been comfortable with her telepathy.

Also known as Gran

Appears from the start

Sookie and Jason's grandmother, who raised them both after their parents drowned in a flash flood when Sookie was seven. She is elderly, sharp, endlessly busy, and unembarrassed by her granddaughter's gift. She belongs to the Descendants of the Glorious Dead, a local club devoted to Civil War history, and is delighted at the idea of a genuine veteran of that war living down the road.

Appears from the start

A red-haired waitress at Merlotte's, several times married and currently between husbands, with two small children. She is Sookie's closest friend at work, warm and gossipy, and comfortable with Sookie in a way most of the town is not.

Appears from the start

The short-order cook at Merlotte's, a flamboyant Black man who wears makeup and bright nail polish and takes obvious pleasure in unsettling the bar's more conventional customers. He is a good cook, an unreliable employee, and one of the few people in Bon Temps who does not treat Sookie as damaged.

Appears from the start

A waitress at Merlotte's who works the shift opposite Sookie's. She has a taste for rough company and for men who will hurt her a little, and she has been seen with vampires. She and Sookie have never liked each other much.

First appears in chapter 3

A detective with the Bon Temps police, from an old local family that has come down in the world. He is stubborn, not stupid, and openly suspicious of Jason Stackhouse once the local women start turning up dead. Sookie has known him and his sister Portia all her life.

First appears in chapter 4

A member of the parish road crew alongside Jason and one of Arlene's former husbands. He is a small, wiry Cajun with a thick accent that comes and goes, an easy manner with women, and a habit of turning up wherever people are talking. He remains friendly with Arlene and is around her children often.

First appears in chapter 5

A vampire well over a thousand years old, Norse by origin, tall and blond and openly amused by almost everything. He owns Fangtasia, a vampire bar in Shreveport built to sell the experience of vampires to tourists, and holds authority over the vampires of the surrounding territory, Bill included. He is immediately interested in Sookie once he learns what she can do, and treats that interest as a claim.

First appears in chapter 5

Eric's second at Fangtasia, a blonde vampire who works the door in a trailing black gown as part of the bar's act and is far more practical than the costume suggests. She is dry, direct, and unbothered by human feeling, and she takes a certain liking to Sookie.

First appears in chapter 10

A vampire made from a famous singer whose body was taken from a morgue by an admiring attendant. The change went wrong because he was already too far gone, leaving him simple, unpredictable, and prone to violence if startled. Other vampires keep him quietly employed, never speak his human name in front of him, and call him Bubba; he prefers the blood of cats to anything bottled.