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of the Eastern Front: Operation Vampyr
Fiends of the Eastern
Front: Operation Vampyr
David Bishop
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What to Expect:
Vampires and World War 2. All in the same story. What more do you want?
Review by Richmond
Clements
21st
March 06
I’ve a couple of anecdotes about this book. The first
one was when I opened the package from Black Flame with this and a couple of other
books in it, and my eight year old son was looking through them. As he’s
learning about WWII, this one caught his eye. ‘What’s this one about?’
‘It’s about vampires in World War Two.’
‘WOW! Cool!’
The next place
when I was reading the book in work, and the same question was asked by a workmate.
I told him and his answer was… something similar: ‘F**k! What sort
of drugs were they taking to come up with that?’
You know, they’re
both right. The idea behind the Fiends series is completely mental. It’d
take an effort of enormous proportions to mess it up. So we the readers should
thank god that the task of bringing the series to life in a series of novels was
given to David Bishop, and not some lesser writer.
Even at that, Bishop could easily have settled for hammering
out a retread of the original strip, and we would have bought it, and probably
even have been content with that. Instead though, he opens the world up, and goes
to town with the idea of vampires in a modern theatre of war. We follow what are
initially, three separate narratives, as an infantry soldier, a pilot and a tank
commander each has their own series of encounters with the mysterious Romanian
troops. As things progress these soldiers find their stories merging, as their
experiences draw them closer to each other, and to the vampire at the heart of
the undead army.
Having grown used
to the style Bishop employs in his Dante novels, the approach here takes a while
to get used to. As befits the WW II setting and subject matter, the tone of the
novel is more sombre and the style darker, more serious. That’s not to say
there is a lack of action. Bishops throws in many battle scenes, on land and in
the air, but the ‘war is hell’ message is never far from the fore
as he doesn’t fail to show us the end result of all the flashes and bangs.
The action is more reminiscent of the ‘Saving Private Ryan’ approach,
rather than that of gung-ho epics like ‘The Longest Day’.
But, to me at least,
this doesn’t read like a vampire novel, and it’s just as well, as
I’m not the biggest fan of them. No, Bishop's seems to have first written
a boys' own war adventure, then thrown a load of undead into the mix to see what
would happen. This works well, as most of the book is spent with the reader getting
to know the main human characters, so by the end we are invested in them and their
battle against the vampire troops, which I hope will escalate in the next book
in the series.
This approach,
while logical when knowing there are a couple more to come, delivers a rather
sudden ending to this volume. Yes, on finishing this book, the reader is definitely
going to want to read the next in the series, but if you didn’t know there
was another one, I reckon you’d fell a bit let down on the final page.
BUT… having
said that, it is a cracking read. Then again I knew the next volume was on the
way (in fact, it’s on the shelf waiting its turn) - so I loved this.
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