Books: Vampire Hunter D: Mysterious Journey to the North Sea, Part Two (Hideyuki Kikuchi)

When I received the first installment of Mysterious Journey to the North Sea, I had to wonder: How would the nominally fleet-on-its-feet Vampire Hunter D deal with suddenly having twice as much room to tell its story? This is a series I’ve savored for being fast and furious, and for not getting bogged down in the kind of prolonged plot gymnastics that are the stock in trade of most fantasy novels these days. The idea of seeing it bloat up into something big and boring didn’t thrill me.

The good news: for the most part, that hasn’t happened. The second half of North Sea, by and large, contains the same spring-heeled step as the first, and preserves the lively pace of the whole rest of the series. Hideyuki Kikuchi has made good use of the additional length of the book — he gives us details about the world he’s created and the people in it that don’t feel like filler. In each book he’s used the locale — whether it’s a city that floats above the surface of the earth or a frightened frontier town — to address different aspects of his outlandish setting. He does that here, too, with his seaside setting of Florence, a former resort for the Nobility (i.e. vampires), overlooking an ocean brimming with monsters … and with the hidden laboratory of the mysterious Baron Meinster. There’s not much more about everyone’s favorite Vampire Hunter, though, but I suspect only because a little goes a long way — and we get one amazing hint near the end of this book about what D really is.

Article originally written for AMN. Click here to read full text.