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 By David Bishop
What to expect: Oh, you know, Evil Vampire Overlords, Zombies, Big Tough War Action. All that cool stuff…
Review by Richmond Clements
After the rather splendid Dredd omnibus edition, Black Flame have had added another collection to their list, with this edition, which assembles the trilogy of Fiends novels by the prolific Mr Bishop.
I have reviewed all three of these books already, but for those of you who can’t remember, or can’t be bothered looking them up, here’s a short run down of what you get here:
Book 1: Operation Vampyr. In this one, we follow the exploits of a trio of soldiers as they each battle on a different front in the War, and at the same time, each is having their own particular encounter with Constanta and his undead troops. This book is enormous fun. The war is bloody, the horror horrible. It suffers from having somewhat of a sudden ending, but this is not the issue it was in the original edition, because in this one, you the reader can simply turn the page and plunge straight into-
Book 2: The Blood Red Army. In this book, we switch from the German to the Russian front lines and from third person to first person, as we view the siege of Leningrad through the eyes of a young Russian officer. This one, if I was forced to choose, would probably be my favourite book of the three. There is some real horror in this book, and by that I mean people doing bad things to other people, which to me is always more powerful than, for example, an army of zombies. Though to be fair, the zombies are pretty horrible too…
Book 3: The two groups of soldiers we have met in the previous volumes, one Russian and one German, at last meet up here, and decide to pool their resources against Constanta and his minions in their bonkers scheme. This is an extraordinarily satisfying climax to the trilogy, with the final showdown itself hovering just this side of insane.
But, as well as these three, frankly essential books, there is also something in the way of a bonus item tucked away at the end. Mr Bishop writes us an interesting after word, detailing the genesis of this project and hinting at the next chapter, and also showing us ‘behind the scenes’ as it were, by reprinting the original pitch Bishop wrote up for the series.
This extra is only a few pages, but is none the less a fascinating read. It’s these kind of details that we nerds love. More of these in future omnibus editions would be wonderful.
Buy this book!
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