Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Vampire Hunter D: The Stuff of Dreams - Hideyuki Kikuchi, Kevin Leahy (trans)



Lookit'im. Look at that face. What a prissy boy.

This book contained the sentence of ZOMGWTFBBQ, only two men hitting on D, and NO THREAT OF RAPE TO THE MAIN GIRLY.

I feel I must state that again; the 17 year old girl in this book was never under threat of rape. By anyone. At all. Ever.

I was amazed, and pleased. It made the book more fun, less infuriating. But I still don't think there was a point to fighting the giant chickens or the floating blood bubbles that appeared after them. Methinks Hideyuki realised that unless he forced the issue, there weren't going to be any big scary weird monsters slain in the book.

Here, D dreams, and when he wakes, finds the village he visited in the dream. Everyone is expecting him - they all dreamed about him in return. No one knows why he has been called, or what he is supposed to do. The only hint he has is in the keeping of a sleeping girl, who has slept for thirty odd years after being bitten by a vampire.

It is about dreams, various sorts of dreams, and dreams within dreams, and after a little while becomes terribly confusing, until the end - one of those lucid moments dreams occasionally grant you, when everything becomes clear.

This is definitly one of the better D books so far. It poses an interesting question; if vampires dream, what do they dream of?

Verdict: If anyone actually reads these things, then you already know what I think about these books.

5 comments:

  1. Vampires dream of sheep with mouths that drip gore and wolves drained of blood.

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  2. Vampires don't appear to dream of anything nearly as interesting, alas.

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  3. +++Lookit'im. Look at that face. What a prissy boy.+++

    There's a "Things I have learned from computer games" thread on RPGnet at the moment, and one of the things one apparently learns from the more anime-inspired ones is that, and I quote, "there is no problem that can't be solved by finding the right pastel-haired pretty-boy and beating the crap out of him."

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  4. Matthew - that's because it's true! Although they usually turn out to be uber-heroes, so wailing on them is liable to get you hurt.

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