**SPOILER ALERT** This post discusses Charlaine Harris’s Dead Ever After and makes some reference to the conclusion. If you haven’t yet read the book and want to be surprised, don’t read this post! **SPOILER ALERT**

Poor Charlaine Harris. She announced that she was ending the Sookie Stackhouse series (which has been going since 2001). In her final book, Dead Ever After, she resolved Sookie’s love life, which has been nothing if not chaotic. And all hell broke loose.

Harris’s fans, or rather Sookie’s fans, were furious. They wanted her to end up with one of the numerous other guys in her life, both dead and living. Harris has gotten hundreds of one-star reviews on Amazon and vicious criticism on both Goodreads and the forum on her own Web site. These readers don’t necessarily object to her writing, but they’re livid over the fact that she chose somebody other than their favorite character as Sookie’s final true love.

Now I started reading the Sookie series when it first came out and I stuck with it up through Dead In the Family, when I began to lose track of characters and subplots since there were so many by then. But I’ve also read all of Charlaine Harris’s other series.

She has three that I’m aware of. Her Aurora Teagarden books are cozy mysteries. Her Lily Bard mysteries are considerably darker, but still have some cozy elements. Neither of these series is paranormal and Harris brought them both to a close by having the heroine find her true love and settle down (although Lily and her true love actually make a brief appearance in the Sookie series, a sort of wink to those of us who were familiar with Harris’s other books). Harris also started another series while she was doing the Sookie books, once again somewhat grittier, featuring Harper Connelly, a kind of psychic who can find dead bodies no matter how obscurely buried. And once again, Harris brought the series to a close, this time after four books (although she’s also published a series of Harper Connelly graphic novels).

In other words, Harris has a history finishing series once they’ve run their course. My guess is that she would have done the same thing earlier with the Sookie series had it not been so phenomenally successful. And had it not been turned into True Blood.

True Blood obviously boosted Harris’s popularity tremendously. But it also created problems. First of all, of course, the books and the series diverge sharply in their stories. But I think people who started reading Harris’s books after they started watching True Blood tended to conflate the two. Thus instead of the character Eric Northman, they saw Alexander Skarsgard. And instead of vampire Bill, they saw Stephen Moyer. They expected Harris to honor their preferences. They particularly loved Alexander Skarsgard, and they wanted him to win Sookie—not Eric, mind you, or not the Eric that Harris had created over the years who was an extremely problematic character, but Alexander. He’s admittedly very hot.

So Harris went and broke their hearts. And, as the folks at Wonkette might say, there’s a lot of butthurt out there. But really, what could Harris have done? She needed to end the series. And ending the series meant that somebody had to win Sookie and somebody had to lose. She didn’t choose Alexander Skarsgard for her own good reasons, and his legion of fans is irate.

But I have a feeling Harris would have gotten push-back no matter what character she chose to match with Sookie. And I give her credit for choosing her ending based on the books and not on True Blood and its fans.

However, what’s happening to Harris should strike terror in the hearts of other series authors who’ve made a point of giving their heroines multiple lovers. Sooner or later, those series must end, which may mean narrowing those options down to one (yeah, I’m talkin’ to you, Janet Evanovich). And when that happens, readers will not be happy. At that point, I suggest those writers check out what Harris has to say: “I wrote the best book I could, and I’m confident I stayed true to the characters I’d been writing for so many years.” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/may/10/charlaine-harris-sookie-stackhouse-true-blood)

If you can say that, I’d say you’ve pretty much laid the whole thing to rest.

So long, Sookie. It’s been fun.