“Epic” is such an overused word. Everything from Harry Potter to Lawrence of Arabia to (gag, retch) Twilight gets the “epic” label. Keep this up and before long, everything will be epic — which means that by that token nothing is epic, and the whole idea of epic has been ruined to boot.
With this in mind, I hope I don't get yelled at too much if I apply the “epic” label to Vampire Hunter D: Pale Fallen Angel. The book is 324 pages and it's not even the whole story — it's just the first half of what was published in Japan as four separate books, each one only slightly shorter than any of the previous VHD novels. To not use the word “epic” for something of that scope seems like a mistake. The only thing remotely close to PFA among VHD's previous episodes was the two-part Mysterious Journey to the North Sea, long rumored to be the source material for a VHD animated series. (Hey, we're getting an animated Guin; if we get a new animated VHD on top of that I might have to retire early.)
I should note that “epic” is not automatically a synonym for “quality”. With North Sea, the extra effort to show us that much more of the D-verse was worth it. With Angel, I feel like Kikuchi is getting a bit overdrawn at the fantasy bank. The book teeters between being epic and merely long — $14.95 worth of long — with enough adventure and calamity and mishap and comings and goings to grant it fail-safe redundancy. By the time I got to the three-quarter mark for the volume (which isn’t even the halfway mark for the whole story) I started doing that thing where you thumb through the rest of the book to see how much further you really do have to go. Turns out the excerpt in the back and the note from the author shaved off a good twenty-seven pages. Lucky me.
Article originally written for AMN. Click here to read full text.
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I LOVED Vampire Hunter D (that was the cartoon where the guy had the talking hand, right?). It was one of my first forays into Anime.
Too bad it sounds like the book is a bummer.
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Go back and dig up the earlier books in the series, and you'll probably get hooked. This one is for the diehard fans, I think; by the time you get this far in you'll either already be a fan or be prepared to skip over it in favor of the better ones.
I confess that the first book in the series didn't impress me at the time I read it, but as the series as a whole has grown on me, I might revisit it with fresh eyes.
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