Dedicated fans of the HBO series True Blood (and of punny recipe titles) will get a kick out of this playful volume. The creator and an associate producer get help from a former New Orleans Times-Picayune staff writer Shalett and Louisiana native cooking teacher Bienvenu, and the result is part series scrapbook, with plenty of stills from the show and all recipe notes and chapter intros attributed to characters, and part cookbook and cocktail guide. Twenty of the book's 85 recipes are for drinks, purportedly from Fangtasia and Lou Pine's Biker Bar, for such concoctions as Dead on the Beach, Vampade, Moonshine Rising, and Hair of the Wolf. Though vampire references and related imagery are hardly appetizing, readers who look past that will find a few decadent recipes for mere mortals. In his preface, Ball specifically recommends Summer Tallulah Huckaby's Betrothal Biscuits. Other notable entries include Up-in-Arms Biscuits and Gravy, What a Fried Chicken, Confederate Ambrosia, The Pearl in My Oyster Po' Boy, A Hush-ed Puppy, and Sookie Stackhouse's Fried Apple Pies, Classic Chess Pie, and Glazed Fresh Strawberry Pie in the homestyle Southern collection. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

There are "unofficial" cookbooks for many popular books, movies, and TV series (e.g., Twilight, The Hunger Games, Mad Men, Downton Abbey), but creator-sanctioned cookbooks are more rare. This one by Sobol and Alan Ball, the associate producer and creator, respectively, of HBO's True Blood, is particularly immersive; each recipe (developed by cookbook author Marcelle Bienvenu) is introduced by a character from the show, and glossy photos of the actors and sets far outnumber those of dishes like The Pearl in My Oyster Po' Boy and Just Desserts Blood (Orange) Gelato. VERDICT This collection of feel-good Southern fare will please True Blood devotees. (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.