Graphic Novel Review: Dusk by David Doub

Dusk (2009) is a self-published graphic novel written by David Doub and illustrated by four different artists, three on pencils and two doing inks. Although the story and concepts are interesting, the execution is uneven and falls short of the creators' ambitions. Drawn in the heavily chiaroscuro style typical of black and white comic art in general, the art does not always serve the story or the reader in the ways that it needs to.

The book consists of four stand-alone stories that are not obviously sequential in either narrative or timeline. In Chapter One, we meet Eve, an "enhanced" human who works for a vampire named Ash. Ash is a benevolent if somewhat avuncular figure whose interest in Eve seems wholly paternal. Eve herself acts in the capacity of a slayer or enforcer, à la Buffy or Anita Blake: petite and feminine (and appearing younger than her years, according to dialogue in Chapter Three) but able to kick plenty of butt. She is addicted to drinking small amounts of vampire blood, which in Doub's universe apparently doesn't turn a human into a vampire in and of itself. Ash reluctantly supplies her with blood, but it's unclear whether this elixir is responsible for her powers or not. In Chapter One, Eve is sent to track down a rogue vampire, with unhappy results.

Chapter Two shows us more of Eve's history, current living situation with Ash and past relationships. Ten years ago, she fled an abusive husband only to fall into the clutches of an evil vampire who enslaved her. I found the ending of this story rather touching, but it mostly serves as a retrospective on Eve herself. I wish we could have learned more about her experiences with her evil master, Van Kraken, and what happened to him. I really wanted to know more about Ash's "business trip" somewhere deep "beneath the Swiss Alps" (where he still has cell phone service).

In Chapter Three, Eve joins forces with another mortal hunter to stop a rogue vampire. We get more hints here about the vampire subculture which Eve and Ash apparently serve, but very few details.

In a story quite different from the previous three, Chapter Four deals with a bullied high school student who dabbles in black magic. Here, Eve displays a gift for the magical arts as she tries to stop the student from pulling a Carrie on his high school tormentors.

Artist Maki Naro (inks by Chris Scott) makes the most creative use of layout and composition in Chapters One and Two. However, sometimes creativity interferes with comprehension, and it's a little hard to follow what's going on. This is especially true in a couple of the action/fight sequences. The panels tend to have too much solid black, so that the black overwhelms the imagery rather than highlighting it by contrast.

Chapter Three, with pencils and ink by Jerry Gonzales, almost lost me completely. The art is a muddled mess, with characters who are indistinguishable from each other and long action sequences in which I couldn't figure out what the heck is going on. Blasting guns don't translate well to static graphics for panel after panel. Whole panels of dialogue are in unelucidated Italian or German, as well, and I'm afraid I'm a bit rusty in those languages. I'd have appreciated subtitles.

I'm glad I kept reading, however, because Chapter Four is the best of the book. Artist Franc Czuba (inks by Chris Scott) does a fine job here, albeit with a slightly jarring inconsistency with the interpretations of the characters in the previous three chapters. By the time I got to the very end of Dusk, which is not paginated, and saw Czuba's "Eve/Ash cover" full page graphic, I thought, "Wow. If only the whole book was that good!" I have no idea why Doub used multiple artists for this short work, or how he selected them, but he definitely did not get uniform results.

To the extent that I could tell from the stories, Doub's fictional universe is intriguing, and I'd like to learn more about it. Ash is an interesting character, and Eve herself is complex and multi-layered. The vampire protocols avoid cliché and establish some refreshing new conventions, and I'd love to have seen more explanations and details (and less gunfire for panel after panel). Doub is planning a second volume, and I hope that the artwork improves in consistency and clarity. I see a lot of potential in Dusk and its characters, and they deserve further development. Readers can keep updated on Doub's work at his page on Comicspace.com.

Book Review: Dark Road Rising by P.N. Elrod

The field of 21^st century vampire fiction is crammed with prolific and enthusiastic authors, most of them female and nearly all of them having published their first vampire story after the year 2000. Every one of them owes a large debt to the handful of authors who have been publishing vampire novels for decades, and who now have to fight for attention in the genre they helped to define.

Texas author P.N. Elrod is among the bona fide “ancestors” of such up-to-the-moment pop culture superstars as Stephenie Meyer and Charlaine Harris. Elrod has been publishing vampire fiction since 1990 and has created several memorable and varied vampire protagonists, including the 18^th century American Tory Jonathan Barrett, the ruthless despot Strahd, and Elrod’s revisionist take on Bram Stoker’s Quincey Morris.

But Elrod’s most complex and affecting character is Jack Fleming, a 1930s Chicago journalist who falls afoul of the Chicago Mob and is murdered—and subsequently embarks on the misadventures detailed in the Vampire Files series. Launched by Ace in 1990 with Bloodlist, the next five books of the series (Lifeblood, Bloodcircle, Art in the Blood, Fire in the Blood and Blood on the Water) shot off the presses within two years as mass market paperbacks. They shrank behind the laughable cover art typical of pulp vampire novels at the time (depicting a long-nailed, white faced ghoul with fangs hanging down to his chin like walrus tusks), but the quality of the books themselves attracted the attention of reviewers and serious vampire fans.

At that time, Anne Rice was the reigning queen of vampire fiction and her mass-murderous, utterly inhuman vampires defined the trope. Jack Fleming fit into a different and far more authentic model. Like Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Saint-Germain, Fleming retained a conscience and a connection to humanity, and he didn’t need to kill humans to survive. In fact, he tried to avoid preying on humans at all, and became a nocturnal habitué of the Chicago stockyards for his fresh meals. In the first book, Fleming is befriended by an English actor-turned-private-detective named Charles Escott, who offers the newborn vampire a badly needed job. But Fleming’s unlife is complicated by the fact that he can’t untangle himself from his connections to the organized crime network in Chicago—the harder he tries, the deeper he seems to get. It doesn’t help that he falls in love with a singer and former mobster’s moll, Bobbi Smythe, or that several of his best friends are gangsters, including African-American Shoe Coldfield.

In 1998, the series resumed with A Chill in the Blood, but now Ace was releasing the titles in hardcover editions first, and they appeared at much longer intervals. From Book 7 on, the novels form a very tight story arc, each successive volume continuing the narrative from the previous books with scarcely a beat pause. Dark Road Rising (Ace: September 1, 2009) is the twelfth in the series, and readers have been waiting four years since the initial release of Number 11, Song in the Dark.

Dark Road Rising opens a few minutes after the ending of Song in the Dark, with Fleming driving Gabriel “Whitey” Kroun, one of the few other vampires he’s met since his own turning, to a safe place where Kroun can recover from the violent events that concluded the previous book. Fleming has been recovering himself from the aftereffects of severe trauma following his brutal torture by a gangland thug in Cold Streets, book 10 of the series. Some of his vampire powers, such as the ability to hypnotize others, have been lost or sharply curtailed, and Fleming has no idea how to heal himself or whether he even can. He is therefore very interested in the fact that Kroun lacks some of Fleming’s gifts, such as the capacity for dematerializing, which Kroun attributes to the fact that his death left him with a bullet permanently lodged in his skull.

There are other differences between the two, but most intriguing to Fleming is the fact that Kroun has no memory at all of how he was “infected” by vampirism or what kind of life he had before he awakened in his grave. While Dark Road Rising does advance some of the characters’ stories slightly, it focuses principally on Kroun’s efforts to unravel the mysteries of his own identity and how he came to be dead and a vampire. Kroun appears to know things about vampires that Fleming does not, but he doesn’t share Fleming’s driving need to learn more about what he knows and how he learned it. As Kroun persists in tracking down ever more disturbing clues about his past, Fleming’s own recent history sneaks up behind him and catches him while he’s preoccupied with Kroun.

Because of the strong focus on Kroun and his story, Dark Road Rising is structured differently than any of the preceding books in the series. Elrod favors the first person point of view, but all her previous books have been narrated by their protagonist. Dark Road Rising features a dual first person narrative, with chapters alternating between Fleming and Kroun. This device was used by Adrienne Barbeau and Michael Scott in Vampyres of Hollywood, but I think Elrod pulls it off much more successfully. The two narrative voices are more distinctive in Dark Road Rising, although I tend to feel that first person narrative is very limiting for an author.

Dark Road Rising is the best book yet in the Vampire Files series, further developing the numerous complex characters and taking us, once again, into some very rough territory. My sole criticism is that I found the story a little difficult to follow. I used to grumble that the early Vampire Files novels spent too much time reiterating basic facts and past events in each book, for the benefit of those readers “just tuning in.” Elrod has definitely overcome that tendency. Unfortunately, she has now swung a bit too far in the other direction, especially given the fact that the last few books have been released several years apart. Dark Road Rising assumes that the readers will have read Lady Crymsyn, Cold Streets and Song in the Dark and remember them all in great detail. It continues all the story threads without explaining them even briefly, and there isn’t a way to quickly look up the Cliff Notes version and refresh one’s memory. Given that Song in the Dark was published four years ago, and that the series has evolved a large cast of characters and a complicated tapestry of plot, just a little backing-and-filling in Dark Road Rising would have been very helpful.

Despite this caveat, I highly and enthusiastically recommend Dark Road Rising. Jack Fleming is a “good guy vampire” but these are not romantic stories. Elrod doesn’t flinch from gritty details, or the kind of brutal violence that you’d expect from the series milieu, 1930s Chicago. The supernatural elements—vampires and at least one ghost—are treated with matter-of-fact respect, as Elrod emphasizes character and plot rather than gimmickry and camp.

It’s hard to say whether the Vampire Files series will continue. The first six books have been reissued in a two-volume omnibus edition. A new signed and numbered Jack Fleming novella, The Devil You Know, is currently available for order exclusively on Elrod’s website. Fleming also appears in an occasional short story.