Nancy A. Collins

I was looking forward to this novel, having truly enjoyed the animated series.

And man was I disappointed. It seems that main comic Blade Runner series will remain the flagship for a long time to come.

Art is interesting, slightly on a cartoonish side of things, but OK. Most important it is consistent throughout the volume. Coloring is also beautifully done. So graphically very well done work.

Problem is in the story. Story must be the most bland story I read in a while (including comics and prose fiction, even poetry I might add). It is just that story goes from A to B to C to D, even after first issue I knew exactly where this story will go. There is no dramatic element, no place where you wonder if our heroes will survive, will they manage to overcome the next hurdle. There is nothing because from the start it is visible there is no danger to our heroes. Yes, people will die but this happens in the background, almost noiseless because these characters are there just to show how bad things are but we could just as well be without these characters. They add no ..... weight?..... to the story, they are just part of the set, basically nothing.

Don't get me wrong, this is comic, I do not expect some high level of story presentation. But let us look at the stories like Conan, various crime stories (pulp fiction) and even let us go to the main story line of Blade Runner comics - we all know our heroes will survive, but these comics kept me interested to see what is going on, what is lurking behind the next corner, how will our heroes handle it, I mean some kind of progress of both characters and the story, some hint of challenge. This is what makes good story. Otherwise we could all read phone books or political pamphlets for entertainment.

All of this is missing from this volume. Everything is just straight forward, everyone is highly knowledgeable, highly capable that basically there is no ..... story. Two panels could have made the whole volume - Elle coming into the town outside LA on one panel and Elle leaving the city with all dead bad guys in the background on another panel.

Hopefully author's will improve in follow up stories about the Elle. Animated series was great, I truly enjoyed it, I just wish they build up the equivalent story-wise in graphical format.

And one thing that is so cringy and you cannot miss it on pages of this comic, is political messaging. I understand that this is now trendy and everything but it just makes the entire story blah - Russian mafia leading the fracking company that looks like Sauron's lair with all the smoke and towers, good guys living in, for all means and purposes, Eden with enough propellers on all the wind turbines to be able to elevate few miles above ground. Living in such a clean condition and in harmony with nature that I was ..... huh? I mean, what, in else completely polluted world few miles outside LA you basically have equivalent of zero pollution area, clean beautiful blue sky (as opposed to dark, ridiculous smoke area of fracking company) where you can grow food without any problems to feed hundreds o people (in bloody desert)? Not to mention that hover bikes that noone saw for decades, oh yeah they can be fixed in couple of days by only changing the circuit board in mechanic shop in the middle of nowhere (whaaat?). And this Eden of course is built and led by the best and brightest from all over - scientists, engineers, medical personnel etc. I mean in any apocalyptic, dystopian story this would be the Holy Grail for all people to find and live there and it exists just outside of LA, few days ride away. I mean, what? I could just see common sense (and I mean it in terms of fiction story) going out the window.

As I said, this political element and preachiness just kills of the story.

In summary, interesting. But nowhere near the quality of the main Blade Runner series.… (mer)

Stylishly dated, somewhat slight vampire fiction from the late 1980s. After ‘Salem’s Lot (1975), Interview with a Vampire (1976), The Delicate Dependency (1982), and Fevre Dream (1982) but before Lucius Shepard’s The Golden (1993). Unfortunately, Sunglasses After Dark isn’t comparable to any of these other, better novels. So, what does it have to offer (other than its vastly superior cover, by Mel Odom: seriously, look at that lusciously stark cover art, and imagine it coolly regarding you from a wire stand in an Ohio airport in the first year of George H. W. Bush’s only term)? The novel follows the lurching story of Sonja Blue, once an heiress with a bright future and now virtually orphaned after being brutally attacked and cast aside. Much of the novel (its best passages) sketches out the trajectory of Sonja’s second maturation. She moonlights as a prostitute in Europe, befriends an occult scholar, learns how to kill (there's a striking scene where she kills a vampire who's been snaring his prey by pretending to be the ghost of Jim Morrison, near the singer's grave in Paris), and makes new enemies in the largely disguised society of “Pretenders,” which consists of various creatures of the night, both vampires and otherwise. Here you can see gritty urban fantasy in its middle years, halfway between Fritz Leiber’s “Megapolisomancy” and Mike Mignola‘s weird fairytale underground. Collins brings a resolutely punky black-leather-and-mirrorshades sensibility to complement the grunginess of the urban vampire tale (as opposed to the gothic-historical flair of Rice, Talbot, Martin, and Shepard). Partly this comes out in the novel’s surprisingly graphic violence, which borders on splatterpunk, even by paperback horror standards in the 1980s. Partly it comes out in Collins’ ability to translate native gothicisms of the subgenre into spiky, modern prose that wears its cool factor on its sleeve without irony or self-consciousness. An irritating subplot involving a televangelist’s demonic widow (probably modeled after Tammy Faye Baker, whose involvement in Jim Bakker’s downfall was highly mediated from 1987-1989) adds nothing. An excellent taste of Collins’ language: “They were Siamese twins, joined at the groin by a traitorous piece of meat.”… (mer)

A long time ago, in a land far away... I was a teenager during the vampire craze. Vampires were EVERYWHERE. And I mean everywhere. Every book store pushed vampire books and you just couldn't escape them.

Vamps was one of those books I was eying down but I never got the chance to pick up. I was fortunate to find it on sale at a local book outlet store so I decided that now was the time! I would pick up this book and see if it held up to what my expectations were back in ye olde high school days.

Honestly, the book was what I would have ATE UP in high school but it didn't interest me as much now.

It was dramatic. It had gossip. It was essentially the soap opera/"reality" tv but in vampire YA form. While I had my issues with it as an adult reader, I was glued to it as it brought back that nostalgia from my high school days. I definitely didn't enjoy the whiny and mean lead character, but I also REALLY wanted to find out what was going to happen... It's like binging reality tv. You just HAVE to know.

So, will I be holding this book up as the best book of all time? No. Am I still going to try to find the rest of the books in this series and finish them to bring back the memories of my youth? HECK YES. It's messy, but I don't care. I came for an escape with this book not for some theme filled message essay writing fuel.

Two out of five stars.… (mer)