Non-Comic post: Personal Update and Book Babbling

Hi Guys! Thanks for all the recommendations! I've read some of them before but some of them are new to me. :-) I'll definitely have to give them a try!

Basically what happened, if you're curious, is that I had an assignment of considerable size due. Finished it. Then, fumble fingers that I am, deleted it. And I'm not talking recycle bin either. (Let me tell you though, that just killed THAT habit quick. From now on, the recycle bin is my best friend!)

I did manage to redo it in time, but holy crap, I could have cried.

What I ended up reading to cheer myself up was my old copy of Those Who Hunt the Night, by Barbara Hambly. Which remains the only vampire novel (or rather duology) that I can actually stand.

It features an ex-spy philologist at the turn of the twentieth century who gets hired/enlisted/blackmailed by a vampire to find a vampire killer. It's got a very nice atmospheric element.

Hambly's kind of hit or miss with me. Her Star Wars books tend to suck for example. But her vampire stuff is great.

For one thing...her vampires aren't angsty. While all the Louises and the Angels and the Edward Cullens and the Vampire the Masquerade/Requiem sorts are moping over the ills of long life and nifty powers, Don Simon Ysidro would just walk in, sneer at them, and get his shit done. Or hire some human guy to do it. :-)

And there's no "Oh, I drink cows blood! I'd NEVER hurt a human!" crap going on either. The Vampires in Hambly have to kill their victims ultimately. It's how they stay alive. They're genuinely monsters. Albeit appealing ones. But it makes the quandary of the main character much more interesting. He's pretty much stuck helping a race of serial killers who are liable to eat him without conscience when he's done.

The main character's wife is pretty cool too. As she's a physician (naturally given the time period, she's more involved with research than with actual patients) and is more interested in the medical theories behind vampirism than in fleeing in terror from them. She also gets to be more prominent in the sequel, where she essentially hires the vampire to save her husband.

The most appealing character, of course, is the vampire. As is pretty much a necessity in this kind of story. And Don Simon Ysidro is probably my favorite vampire character in pretty much anything. He's dispassionate, practical and fairly inhuman and a walking relic of a previous time. He probably gets a bit closer to the angsty cliche in the second book, but it's more a faint melancholy than the usual mopey mess. And it doesn't stop him from getting things done.

I HATE angsty vampires. You have cool powers, you don't age, and you eat people. Deal with it. :-)

It's not a terribly good mystery. I judge mysteries on the basis of whether the audience could, theoretically, figure it out before hand. I don't really think it's possible in this story. But at the same time, it's a fun story that hangs together fairly logically and has appealing characters, and I was much cheered up afterward.