Of course, by the time the second season of "True Blood" came to its predictably campy, chaotic conclusion on Sunday night, everyone, even Sookie, was looking a little pale. First there was Maryann's bloody, hedonistic ritual with its hilariously obnoxious send-up of the arbitrary stupidity of wedding traditions ("You're the maid of honor! You have to lick the egg!"). Then there was the moment we'd all been waiting for, when Sam finally punished Maryann for making the people of Bon Temps her human playthings.

Naturally we expected that Jason Stackhouse and Deputy Andy would only make a big mess of things, first by succumbing to Maryann's mind control, then by murdering poor confused, guilty Eggs and leaving Tara broken-hearted, lonely, and probably more bitter than ever. (What was the alternative? A happily married, relaxed Tara? This is a vampire soap, not a Disney movie.) At least under Maryann's power we caught a little glimpse of the sassy Lafayette we knew and loved before Eric had his way with him ("Worship him, bitches!" he instructed the half-crazed crowds at Maryann's sacrificial ritual).

And once the whole goofy, over-the-top maenad storyline lathered up into a great big egg-cracking, orgiastic mess, we knew we were in for a slow-motion Scooby Do ending:

"This town's a hell of a mess, and I'm man enough to know that I can't handle it myself," Sheriff Dearborne says to Deputy Andy.

"I am grateful that you would reveal your gift for the sake of the town," says Bill to Sam.

"It took me this long to realize it, but you suffer a lot more hiding something than you do if you face up to it," Sam says to Bill.

"I'm so sorry for bringing all this craziness into your house. I got sucked in because she made me feel like I was part of a family or something," Tara says to Sookie.

"Hey, you have a family," Sookie responds. "We're family. And tomorrow we're going to clean every single thing that monster touched in this house."

And then we're going to have a big bubble bath, and we're going to make a gigantic cherry pie, and we're going to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony, and oh yeah, then we'll bury your brand new boyfriend!

But that's "True Blood," isn't it? A queasy mix of sugary sweet love story, heart-sinking human tragedy and raunchy, gory madness, exactly the sort of twisted combination that has made Alan Ball's vampire dramedy the most popular show to air on HBO since "The Sopranos." Just as the morally upside-down mob microcosm captured our imaginations, so, too, does this dark (but often downright silly) world ruled by ignorant rednecks, self-righteous Christians and blood-sucking fiends. Yes, just when everyone's hugged and thanked their lucky stars and it looks like they'll all live happily ever after, some Yahtzee-playing vampire queen or pot-smoking demigod is about to roll into town and crush these sad little mortals under his/her/its merciless feet.

And where is Bill in all of this? In the last few scenes of the finale, we find him earnestly shaking in his shoes, waiting for Sookie to say she'll spend the rest of her mortal life as his lawfully wedded wife -- a union only legal in Vermont, don't you know. But Sookie – who appears to have noticed that she's awesome while Bill is sort of a wet rag of a man -- cringes and cries when faced with Bill's marriage proposal. She retreats to the bathroom to think it over for a minute. Seeing that Bill's diamond does look awfully nice on her hand, Sookie decides that she wants to spend the rest of her life with Mr. Boring, only to emerge to find Bill gone, with signs of a struggle! Bill has been overpowered, yet again!

So how much longer will saving this hapless dud of a dead man remain sexy to Sookie? Or, to put it another way, how much longer will this cartoonishly campy, darkly delirious, sappy Scooby snack of a soap keep us coming back, mouths agape, drooling hungrily for more?

Tune in next year to find out!

Whedon's original idea, to take "the little blonde girl who goes into a dark alley and gets killed in every horror movie" and make her the hero of the story, mutated into a remarkably flexible and inventive way to portray the terrors of adolescence. The supernatural elements of the stories provided Buffy and her friends with more than just monsters to kill; they served as metaphors for everyday identity crises and social anxieties, most famously when Buffy and her boyfriend, the redeemed vampire Angel, consummate their love, whereupon a gypsy curse renders him suddenly cruel and hateful.

This hybrid of teen angst and pulp adventure may not have made for the kind of mass-market success demanded by network television, but it was too yummy to simply subside into a cultural footnote. The spirit of Buffy Summers is perpetuated not just in official "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" media, but also in a thriving genre of popular fiction, usually labeled "urban fantasy," in which young female protagonists get to battle monsters and demons while working through the conundrums of early adulthood -- which often amount to the same thing. If you don't feel like schlepping to the comics store for the latest sliver of Buffy (or you don't like negotiating the ick factor in Whedon's current series, "Dollhouse") you can satisfy those cravings by getting to know Rachel Morgan, Mercy Thompson or Anita Blake.

Or, for that matter, Sookie Stackhouse. HBO's "True Blood," based on the Southern Vampire books by Charlaine Harris, may have underwhelmed critics initially, but it's proven itself to be highly addictive, like many urban fantasy series. The first episode of the show's second season was HBO's highest-rated single episode since the finale of "The Sopranos." At a time when, except for a handful of shows like "Lost," TV has begun to back away from imaginative serialized dramas, urban fantasy novels make for a tasty substitute. More and more often, on nights when my brain is just too weary for Ian McEwan but not soft enough to settle for "The Mentalist," I find myself switching off the set and nestling into the sofa with a page turner about a girl who reminds me of nothing so much as the savior of Sunnydale High.

"Urban fantasy" may seem a peculiar label for the Sookie Stackhouse novels, which are set in the small town of Bon Temps, La. In fact, the label is contested, since the term "urban fantasy" (meaning fantasies set in the contemporary world) was first applied to the work of such writers as Neil Gaiman and John Crowley, whose aspirations are more literary. Sometimes these Buffyesque novels are called "paranormal romances" after a subset of the romance genre that specializes in human heroines finding true love in the arms of supernatural beings, usually vampires, à la the hugely popular Twilight Saga.

But the genre breaks several of the core tenets of romance fiction, most notably by eschewing the conventional "happily ever after" ending and depicting romantic relationships as uncertain and ambiguous. Bookstores manifest this genre confusion by shelving the books haphazardly, in their romance, science fiction or horror sections, none of which is a perfect fit. With that caveat, since a better label has yet to present itself, we'll stick with "urban fantasy."

Most fans would agree that one of the genre's pioneers was Laurell K. Hamilton, whose Anita Blake series began even before Buffy's television incarnation, with the novel "Guilty Pleasures," published in 1993. Anita is an animator-for-hire, licensed to temporarily raise the dead so that they can be questioned by the living on matters both legal and personal. In essence, she's a private detective of the hard-boiled school, but operating in a version of the contemporary world in which creatures from folklore -- vampires, werewolves and more -- have been uneasily integrated into human society. The early Anita Blake novels are dark and grisly, shadowed by Anita's ambivalent relationship to her own capacity for violence and her fear of becoming "one of the monsters." She's isolated and angry, like many a noir protagonist, with no real love life to speak of. She lavishes far more attention on the finer points of concealed weaponry (at any given moment she's packing a couple of guns and four or five blades) than on the charms of any of the men around her.

If, like me, you approached Hamilton's series haphazardly, reading the first book and then inadvertently skipping ahead to, say, Book 14, "Danse Macabre," you'll be in for a shock. The Anita who hunkered down every night with a collection of stuffed penguins in a poignant effort to cling to the last shred of her innocence in "Guilty Pleasures" had been transformed into an erotic ringmaster. She's sleeping with seven different men, often several at a go, with the occasional one-shot tryst on the side. Hamilton offers an elaborate rationale for this erotic explosion; it involves a communicable "metaphysical" infection Anita contracted from her main vampire squeeze, Jean-Claude, but I confess that I've never been able to make much sense of it.

This change led to consternation among some of Hamilton's longtime fans, who insistently voice their dismay on the Amazon reader reviews for each book. "Orgy after orgy," complains one reviewer of "Danse Macabre," "[Anita] is naked for nearly the whole book. For someone who started out so shy and modest in the first book, she has certainly gone hog wild." The outcry occasionally provokes a grumpy response from Hamilton, who accuses her critics of resisting "uncomfortable" material. In truth, there's far less sex in the later Anita Blake books than there is talking about sex and about Hamilton's byzantine and unfathomable explanations for why Anita has to have it with so many men when she supposedly doesn't really want to. Still, I sympathize with the fans' exasperation. Despite their objections, the most recent Anita Blake novel, the 17th, "Skin Trade," zoomed instantly to the No. 1 spot on Publishers Weekly's bestseller list.

Even if the Anita Blake refuseniks are, as Hamilton maintains, merely a "minority," the fuss over Anita's personal life exemplifies a perennial argument in urban fantasy: the ratio of crime to sex, or more broadly, of mystery to relationships. In a posting in the Publishers Weekly blog Genreville, novelist John Levitt explained that he regards his own books as urban fantasy, as opposed to Hamilton's and Harris', which he considers paranormal romances. Grouping himself with Jim Butcher, whose Harry Dresden novels about a P.I.-wizard in Chicago were inspired by the Anita Blake series, he claims a shared "lineage" with Butcher that includes Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. The urban fantasy hero, Levitt writes, is a "troubled loner," who "has romantic hopes, but they're never the focus of the books." Harris and Hamilton, he claims, come from "the romance tradition," where "an essential element always remains about whether or not it's a good idea to do the vampire, werewolf, or both."

This grievous misrepresentation of both the Sookie Stackhouse and the Anita Blake books makes sense when you realize that all the other writers with whom Levitt claims kinship are male authors of detective fiction, a far less despised genre than romance. In his haste to dissociate himself from girly books, Levitt overlooks the fact that neither Sookie nor Anita enjoys a love life anything like those customarily depicted in romance novels, and Harris' Southern Vampire novels always revolve around the need to solve a crime. (Harris started out as a writer of conventional mysteries.)

Furthermore, while nothing about Anita's personal life bears much resemblance to the experiences of the average woman, Sookie is another matter. She misses her dead grandmother, worries about her feckless brother, baby-sits her friend's kids, commiserates with her co-workers, goes shopping with her best friend, quarrels with her neighbors and so on, in addition to wondering whether it's a good idea to do the vampire or the werewolf. Like Buffy, she exists in a complex web of relationships, which Harris has the temerity to consider as important as anything else in her imagined world. "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" was in part a critique of the self-pity and emotional poverty of noir heroism, in which the loner hero's efforts to save innocent people leaves him too damaged to connect with them. Buffy, by contrast, steadfastly refused to give up on having a life. Or, as she once put it while fighting off a demonic attack on her high school prom, "I'm gonna give you all a nice, fun, normal evening if I have to kill every person on the face of the Earth to do it."

The best urban fantasy doesn't just set a detective story in an alternate world where vampires, werewolves, demons and fairies are real. Like "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," it also uses the supernatural material to reimagine the challenges of young adulthood -- the quest for love among them -- on a heroic scale. Kim Harrison's Rachel Morgan series (another bestseller-list staple), about a witch trying to make a place for herself in a world where she doesn't really fit, is one of the most inventive and popular. After getting squeezed out of a job in law enforcement, Rachel hangs out a shingle with two other oddball refugees. Her close friendship with her roommate and business partner, a vampire named Ivy, is complicated by Ivy's history of abuse at the hands of her vampiric mentor and her attraction to Rachel, who considers herself straight, and can't sort out her genuine love for Ivy from the hypnotic attraction that vampires exert over their human companions. Let's just say that -- bloodsucking aside -- it's a situation not unfamiliar to many women during those muddled post-collegiate years.

In your 20s (the age of most urban fantasy heroines), love and sex can seem like a powerful magnetic field, distorting your perceptions of yourself and other people. If you succumb, will you be surrendering control over your own destiny, which is still coming into focus? It's a question with particular relevance to young women, and the mesmeric power of vampires and other supernatural lovers in urban fantasies speaks to the fear of losing your bearings should you fall under the spell of an especially irresistible suitor. Mercy Thompson, the heroine of a series by Patricia Briggs, is a part-Native American shape-shifter with the ability to transform herself into a coyote. Independently minded, she's nevertheless strongly attracted to her neighbor, Adam, the alpha of a pack of werewolves and therefore the absolute head of their hierarchical society. If she agrees to be his mate, she'll become just another subordinate figure in the pack, in thrall to his sheltering, but ultimately controlling personality.

Whether vampire, werewolf or even djinn (as in Rachel Caine's Weather Warden series), the urban fantasy heroine's lovers usually possess superhuman powers, while her own special abilities (Sookie Stackhouse's telepathy, the shrouded heritage of Ilona Andrews' Kate Daniels, the hybrid potential of Jeaniene Frost's Cat Crawfield) have yet to be fully explored. He's unlikely to feel threatened or unmanned by her emerging strength, which is nice (this is fantasy, after all), since many of the heroines are formidable, physically as well as preternaturally. Candy, a blogger at the delightful Web site Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, has suggested that the genre is really "about women, and putting women in control, and how we're still not comfortable enough to put it in real-life/realistic fiction terms yet" -- which is why the typical, kick-ass urban fantasy heroine cuts her swath through a fantastical version of our world.

True, but part of the pleasure of genre fiction is the license it offers to explore the desires we have in spite of ourselves, and urban fantasy seems equally concerned with the erotic allure of masculine power and how women come to terms with it. The teenage narrator of Stephenie Meyer's "Twilight" may swoon in the arms of her masterful vampire boyfriend without a second thought, but the adult heroines created by Hamilton, Briggs, Harris and dozens of other authors oscillate between resistance and consent, worrying away at insolvable romantic algorithms. Is it possible to bed an alpha male without submitting to his will? Does his protection come at too high a cost? And can a man who sometimes needs your protection ever be quite as exciting?

A surprising number of urban fantasy heroines get into romantic triangles with a vampire and a werewolf, a rivalry redolent of more than a B-movie monster feud. If vampires are upper-class -- rich, well-dressed, owners of nightclubs and vast yet shadowy business interests -- werewolves tend to be blue-collar types, working in construction and driving pickup trucks. Vampires engage in labyrinthine political intrigues, while werewolves prize loyalty to their pack mates over everything else, potentially at the expense of their commitment to the heroine, who can feel excluded from the intense, nonverbal connection they share and their obsession with pecking orders.

Class as much as sex is an urban fantasy preoccupation. Mercy Thompson works as an auto mechanic and owns her own garage, so the self-sufficiency she fiercely cherishes is won by the sweat of her brow. Among the stream of thoughts Sookie Stackhouse unwillingly picks up from the human beings around her is contempt from middle-class people who foolishly regard her -- a barmaid who never went to college -- as negligible. Anita Blake and Rachel Morgan take jobs as bodyguards. Damali, the heroine of L.A. Banks' Vampire Huntress series, is an African-American spoken-word performer. Most of these women (in classic private-eye fashion) worry about paying the rent, which can make the blandishments of those wealthy vampires even more tempting. The werewolf, a creature of the day, feels closer to home, but the nocturnal vampire promises a whole new life.

Where working-class characters in literary fiction are often depicted as tragic and helpless, the urban fantasy heroine gets to surprise everyone by using her talents to save the world ("a lot," as Buffy's famous -- and premature -- epitaph added). Sookie, who turns out to have a good head for strategy as well as detection, consults for the vampire bigwigs, and Rachel bravely rescues a local tycoon from a netherworld known as the ever-after. Which is not to say that our heroines are always virtuous. Like the male protagonists of detective fiction, they tend to be hotheaded, smart-mouthed, petulant and even selfish, flaws that distinguish them from the typical romance heroine, who (to my mind) is a bland goody-two-shoes. Perhaps the trait that most distinguishes urban fantasy from its genre ancestors and bedfellows is its cheeky humor -- sharp-edged, slangy and wised-up, ever ready to stick a pin in the portentous and self-important -- a direct inheritance from "Buffy the Vampire Slayer."

Urban fantasy has its own conventions -- it is a genre, after all -- and like any convention they can be employed mechanically or lose their luster with overuse. You won't find much in the way of deathless prose on these pages. (Harris' and Briggs' books are probably the best written of the bunch while Harrison's are the most original.) Nevertheless, urban fantasy -- a cross of fairy tale, noir and classic coming-of-age narrative -- is peculiarly suited to wrestling with the quandaries of early 21st-century womanhood, which is itself a hybrid of age-old preconceptions and fledgling, undreamed-of promise. Buffy, I think, would be proud.

While most of our day-to-day interactions with strangers are openly barbarous -- shouting on the freeway, eye-rolling in the grocery line -- we wish them the best underneath it all, don't we? On the other hand, it's always the most polite and respectful types who turn out to be experimenting with homemade hand grenades in their basements or stockpiling firearms in their sheds.

This paradox of polite savagery lies at the heart of Alan Ball's "True Blood," which returns for a second season (9 p.m., June 14, on HBO). The drama series repeatedly toys with notions of so-called civilized society, forcing us to question what makes a person (or vampire) morally upright or fundamentally depraved. While the vampires of "True Blood" share an unfortunate habit of sinking their fangs into innocent necks the second a mortal refuses to cooperate with their requests, they usually do ask first -- often quite nicely. Despite giving the outward appearance of unmannerly ways, the vampires seem to respect long-standing traditions and rules governing their behavior. When the first season drew to a close, Bill (Stephen Moyer) was pulled into a ghastly vampire tribunal that was nonetheless conducted in the most courteous manner by a ghoulish Magister (Zeljko Ivanek). Even Bill, who's slow to mind authority, acquiesced to the Magister's ruling, then apologized sweetly to Jessica (Deborah Ann Woll) for having to turn her into a vampire -- albeit one who's far less gracious and accommodating than he is.

As the second season of "True Blood" returns, our favorite vampires find themselves confronted by a force far more powerful and demonic than anything they've encountered before -- but that doesn't make them any less conciliatory and refined. When Sookie threatens to call the cops on Eric (Alexander Skarsgard), he bares his fangs at her, then says, softly, "I do not respond well to threats. But perhaps we can come to some sort of arrangement."

Vampires use good manners to restrain their underlying temperamental, impulsive natures; Christians use them to veil their rage. We see more of the latter when Jason Stackhouse (Ryan Kwanten), distraught over the death of his girlfriend and his grandmother, finds himself turning to the Lord -- or rather, the Lord's sinister disciples -- for solace. A Christian youth leader and his wife take an interest in Jason and welcome him into their flock, where we're reacquainted with countless evangelical clichés: the ambiguously gay preacher, the desperately horny good-girl wife, the slutty Christian rocker chick, the vaguely homoerotic/homophobic God-fearing jock. Like us, Jason is alternately amused and repelled by the whole off-kilter circus, at least until he takes a spin through the woods with the minister to shoot at pictures of vampires with a paint gun -- which just goes to show that most of the time, a person's moral allegiance boils down to which side seems like more fun. Just as Jason was seduced into doing V and holding a vampire captive by his manipulative but sexy evil-hippie girlfriend last season, this season he may be lured into God's herd by a Christian, paint-gun version of Mr. Toad's Wild Ride.

So once again, just as we're starting to warm up to our deathly pale but diplomatic vampire friends, we're treated to Ball's rather prosaic enjoyment of stock Southern Christian characters who would only seem fresh and original to a Frenchman. Why do the religious depictions in this show always feel like they're created for the benefit of New Yorkers and European tourists? Meanwhile, the rest of us actually grew up next door to God's faithful carnies, and would really rather avert our eyes from the 50 millionth depiction of Hell House ("United States of Tara"), abstinence-pledging teens ("Weeds," "The Goode Family") and homophobic closeted gay preachers (omnipresent).

Yes, we get it. The point is to grapple with who's good and who's evil and what kinds of choices fall somewhere in between: Eric helps Bill while quietly stalking Sookie; LaFayette plays whatever angle he can to get what he wants; Tara has strong convictions, but her lack of faith in herself leaves her vulnerable to getting used; Sookie is morally upright but filled with both empathy (her weakness?) and a taste for the dark side (her strength?).

And then there's Bill, a character who, despite being a vampire, seems designed to reflect the virtues and flaws of Western man. He embraces certain standards of politeness and diplomacy, but his civility often appears skin-deep, a desperate means of tamping down his savage, bloodthirsty nature. When he warns Sookie that his charge, Jessica, as a young, newly made vampire, will have serious problems with impulse control, he also underscores how long and hard he's struggled (like the Western world itself!) to get a handle on his own dark urges and slippery desires. Wait, now. Is Bill a vampire, a married man lingering outside a massage parlor, or a world leader with his finger hovering over an ominous red button?

But if Bill represents a judicious but secretly bloodthirsty superpower, then Maryann (Michelle Forbes) is a rogue state teeming with terrorists and corrupt generals -- maybe somewhere in the tropics (Indonesia?), given Maryann's penchant for fat joints and fruity drinks. For the barely restrained hedonists among us (I think that's all of us, actually), Forbes is a joy to watch. That woman was born to play the role of smug, sybaritic seductress, sighing happily over her lush spread of fruits and pastries and fresh coffee, then rolling up a gargantuan spliff to share with Tara. Whether she's charming the otherwise surly crowd at Merlotte's into dancing and carousing like a Dionysian trollop or wandering through her lavish grounds in a delighted haze of self-satisfaction, Maryann represents a complete surrender to carnal desire. Of course, without any boundaries or rules or structure to guide the proceedings, Maryann's pleasure dome is sure to devolve into chaos, and there's not much doubt that, given her glowering looks and habit of hanging out with enormous pigs, Maryann represents chaotic evil, and not chaotic good.

So let's pretend we're Dungeons and Dragons geeks for a minute and figure this out: If Maryann is chaotic evil, then Bill is lawful neutral (highly honorable but prone to good or evil behaviors depending on the circumstances), Eric could be characterized as lawful evil (morally corrupt but at least beholden to higher laws), the Christians might be thought of as lawful good (although their rules of kindness and charity are often twisted to enact vengeance against sinners, made reprehensible by their habit of having way more fun), Sookie is chaotic good (confidently breaks the rules based on her own pure-hearted but sometimes misguided instincts), LaFayette, like any scrappy, self-serving survivor, is chaotic neutral, and Jason can only be summed up as highly suggestible.

But the more we try to package and label these characters in order to understand them better, the more they slip out of our grasp. What do we really mean by "good," and what good is a good that's used to justify an evil? What honor is there in respecting laws that were created by inherently corrupt, self-serving individuals who, through cultural reproduction, aim (consciously or unconsciously) to maintain the supremacy of an elite few?

Of course, the show's opening credits, a montage of blood and snakes, preachers and pole dancers, rotting creatures and ruby red lips, make it clear that this state of moral confusion and ambiguity is the whole point. "I used to get so mad when people judged vampires just for being different," Sookie tells Bill on another one of their harrowing late-night drives through the swampy hinterlands. "It's like they were judging me, too. I told myself their fear was nothing but small-mindedness, but maybe that's just what I wanted to believe, because the more open my mind gets, the more evil I see."

Bill, looking paler than ever, responds with his usual slightly condescending but patient tone. "Sookie, most of us, vampire or human or otherwise, are capable of both good and evil, often simultaneously." So there you have it: good and evil, at the same time. Civilized and chaotic. Polite inquiries masking a barely containable, savage rage. "Not to be disrespectful, but if I don't get this money, someone is going to die." Hmm. Maybe "True Blood" is a little less cartoonish and over-the-top than it sometimes seems. Or maybe we're too overwhelmed or distracted or disenchanted to recognize the true nature of this cartoonish, over-the-top, morally mixed-up world we're living in.

Personally, if I had to choose between a nice guy who owns a bar and can turn himself into a really cute dog, and a guy who sucks my blood, talks in a creepy accent, has no sense of humor whatsoever, and looks pale and sickly most of the time, I think I'd stick to the dog-man.

But then, if we learned one thing by Sunday night's finale of HBO's vampire series "True Blood," it's that no one knows Sookie Stackhouse's mind except for Sookie Stackhouse herself. So when Bill returned from the grave yet again looking just like his usual ghoulish self, it was no surprise that Sookie embraced him and left poor Sam to lick his wounds -- literally and figuratively.

 Put yourself in her shoes, though. If you could read the minds of mortals, like Sookie can, an immortal with a taste for human blood and no annoying thoughts in his head might just look like your dream man, fangs or no fangs.

 And while we're at it, if you were a bitter, homeless, drunk woman who's alienated her mom, her best friend and her lover like Tara has, you'd happily take shelter in a rich lady's house, snack on her fresh fruits, wear her pretty outfits and suspend your disbelief over her strange "I just like to help people" story.

 The question is, what is newcomer Maryann's (Michelle Forbes) real story? Where did she come from, and why does Sam seem to know her already? Is she some other variety of magical being, a new species that's neither vampire nor shapeshifter?

 And what does Sam plan to do with all that cash from his safe? Who attacked Lafayette (Nelsan Ellis) and are those his painted toenails in Andy Bellefleur's (Chris Bauer) car?

Yes, Sunday night's finale ended with just as many cliffhangers as there were resolutions to season-long mysteries. But what else would you expect from a series that's based on Charlaine Harris' "Southern Vampire" series of page turners? If the answers to the big questions felt a little predictable by the show's final episode, that was quickly solved  by introducing a whole new set of questions.

Alan Ball's perverse, off-kilter series has leaned heavily on this formula from the start. Just when one plot point seemed exhausted, a new wrinkle arises, whether it's seemingly nice Sam sniffing a dead girl's sheets or Sookie's grandmother showing up dead on her kitchen floor. Sure, there's something a little dissatisfying about the mystery-around-every-corner format, but whatever "True Blood" lacks in substance, it makes up for in flair. From Jason Stackhouse's nefarious hippie girlfriend to Lafayette's colorful assortment of clients to Bill's good Christian girl turned impatient, bloodthirsty vampire-slut, "True Blood" has paved its own, sometimes rocky path as one part vampire mystery, two parts campy, foolish fun.

The only upcoming twist that looks a little less than promising is Jason Stackhouse's apparent transformation into a born-again Christian intent on snuffing out the evils of vampires from the face of the earth. Enduring the terrible Southern accents on this show is bad enough, without a clichéd herd of Bible-thumping fundamentalists to drag us through every worn-out stereotype in the book. The nice thing about Sookie and Sam and Tara and Bill, after all, is that they're new to us. We're not sure what drives them or what they're capable of just yet. In contrast, those old familiar saccharine smiles and cries of "Praise Jesus!" are just a few clicks away on TBN at all times. To most of us in this country, evangelical Christian shenanigans are old news. When it comes to the second season of this sultry, suspenseful vampire tale, let's hope Alan Ball sticks to some fresh blood.