remains of his lover around in a crystal compote jar and relieving a news anchor of his spine on live television, not to mention a rendezvous between former lovers that gave new meaning to the phrase “angry sex”. The novel is based on the Southern Vampires books “True Blood” by Ball and Charlaine Harris where in how about a telepathic waitress and her cohort of supernatural pals in rural Louisiana to be, say, plausible, but shock for shock’s sake shakes us out of the creepy, kinky and curiously charming world.
In the fourth season Ball got in a new baddie Marnie (brilliant Irish actress Fiona Shaw), a Wiccan who runs the local coven and is interested in the stretching the limits of necromancy, which understandably gives the undead the heebie-jeebies. In the third season of “True Blood” the climax featured our heroine Sookie (Anna Paquin), vampire boyfriend Bill (Stephen Moyer) and vamp bigwig Eric (Alexander Skarsgard) had dispatched, Hoffa-style, Russell Edgington, the Mississippi vampire regent who was proving to be a bit of a public relations nightmare for the pro-mainstreaming American Vampire League. In this season many of the characters have undergone radical shifts since last we saw them and notably, the (un)death of Russell has left a power vacuum in Louisiana, which is filled most unexpectedly; Jason, finally coming into his own as a man, faces another evolution; and Bill’s vampire daughter Jessica is battling her primal instincts and trying to stay true to lunky but loveable human boyfriend Hoyt.
For people wanting to watch Joe Manganiello will be happy to know she is back as Werewolf Alcide along with a host of other creatures, supernatural and otherwise, including a female cage fighter, a schoolteacher-shapeshifter, and various and sundry Wiccans. Though Ball asked reviewers pretty-please to not divulge certain plot points, notably where Sookie has been hanging out lately, even though the first few minutes of the premiere is widely available online and spells it out pretty clearly.
