True Blood Season 6, Episode 6: Don't You Feel Me

While possessed Lafayette tries to drown Sookie, her distress rings Bill’s Sookie alarm – he lets Warlow go so he can zoom to the rescue, slamming Lafayette against a tree before using faerie light as an exorcism. Post exorcism, Sookie gets to curse her father out.

Unfortunately, having saved Sookie, Billith then summons Warlow back; Sookie grabs his hands and they do a sunlight faerie teleportation thing (that’s new) to parallel faerie soft-focus world. Billith is not impressed and tries to find Jessica to ask her about the pull when he summoned her, but she’s missing. Billith realises his visions of vampires dying are happening and starts angsting

Solution! Induce a coma so he can talk to Lillith. Yes this is the level of logic Bill is working under now. I agree with Takehashi, Bill you are out of your ever loving mind. Bill glamours Takehashi into draining nearly all of his blood, leaving him for a day, then putting it back

In the land of saccharine twee, Warlow asks Sookie to engage in some bondage.  It seems with the sun sinking Warlow’s vampire nature comes out to play and he can’t always control himself, especially when he’s hungry. So they tie him to a stone which Warlow binds to the Earth with his light (I’m less worried about him moving the stone and more concerned about the fact you’re using VINES to try and pin a vampire, even with the knots sealed). Also Sookie sucks are tying knots and did Warlow deliberately choose a stress position?

They make small talk about Warlow being born in 3500 BC and how Sookie is special enough to be worth waiting for. Sookie asks why she thinks the contract was ok and he points out it was written in the 1700s, arranged marriages were hardly taboo at the time. It seems if Warlow turns Sookie it also helps him immensely with his hunger and pain – because they could both live just off each other’s blood. Just them together forever – which is totally not creepy coming from someone he just met.

At the vampire camp, Eric and Pam square off and Pam is not amused that Eric has made another vampire. They levitate into the air looking awesome – before blurring into motion, opening the gun ports at the side of the cell and killing the guards prepared to shoot them. The psychiatrist loves the show (I kind of like him in a deeply creeped out fashion) everyone else watches the show except Steve Newlin who is scared. Pam and Eric impale the guard with one of the stakes they’ve been given – driving the stake right through the bullet proof, one way glass separating them from the spectators. Eric looks through the hole and sees Steve who duly starts whimpering.

Truman and Eric engage in mutual taunting and Truman rolls out Nora information he got from that “vamp queen” Newlin. They inject her with a new plague they’ve created – hepatitis V, contagious, lethal and anti-vampire.

And Jason is volunteering to join the LAVTF – the anti-vampire police and he actually interviews really well because his long experience around vampires has given him a whole lot of experience and knowledge. He plays the part well and the enthused recruiter goes to get the boss, while Jason disgustedly mutters about them being “racist.”

He joins easily and begins regaling his fellow LAVTF members with tales of his exploits when he’s introduced to Sarah Newlin he pretends to be a stranger to her and she the same - after all, she’s hardly going to want to reveal she slept with Jason while with Truman. Which is exactly what he threatens her with which would work if he didn’t call her a “whore for Christ” which is wrong on many levels.

The Six Gun Tarot by R.S. Belcher

Summarising this book is a difficult task because there’s so much going on.

At the dawn of creation, god built the world on the bones of the defeated darkness. Step by step his angels drove it back, but there was one, the leader, the first, the source of the darkness that could not be stopped, could not be killed and instead had to be chained and buried in the Earth itself.

And now, those chains are loosening. The town of Golgotha in Nevada, a town that already attracts all things weird and bizarre, becomes the sight of the battle for the end of the world, a battle to keep the darkness chained. With powers from so many sources, under the eyes of the angel guardian and the best people Golgotha can throw against it - it's a diverse and powerful group, each with their own story and stake in the battle

This book is huge.

Not just in length – the world is vast and complicated with the story going back to the very creation of the universe, to a small town in Nevada where the strange and the unusual walk. There are a vast number of different powers and forces to incorporate into this small town, each of them having a massive effect of the overall story. The story itself is huge, with lots of different stories, lots of individual threads all coming together to form the whole.

And that’s told with a huge number of characters, each bringing more information, more world building, more angles and opinions and each being an essential part of the overall battle and progression. But each isn’t just a tool – they’re not just there for world building or to add their special powers or special resources or special insight – they’re all fully fledged, powerful characters in their own right. They all have histories, they all have links to other people, they all have their own wishes and desires – each of these many stories doesn’t just add to the whole, but they’re all deeply personal stories of the characters. They don’t just tell the story, they tell their stories.

The angel Biqa, at the dawn of creation conflicted and upset by God’s plan and his methods. Jim, the 15 year old boy running away from his past and that haunts him. Mutt, the Native American rejected by his people and facing resentment in the town. Maude, in an unhappy marriage for the sake of her daughter and trying to reconcile her current life with the teachings of her childhood that she intends to pass on. Mayor Harry, trying to reconcile his place as a pillar of the community and his Mormon faith with being gay and having found a man he loves. Augustus Shultz, still hurting and grieving from the death of his wife, caught between trying to hold onto her memory and finding love again. They all have their own, powerful stories to such a degree that I simply cannot pick out one protagonist because it’s all of their stories.

Even characters that are more referenced than having their own story told – like Sheriff Highfather- are still extremely rich characters with their own back stories, personalities and presence as full people in the book.