Pale Fallen Angels, Parts 3 & 4 is the title of this one.
This was, to my eyes, a much different read than most of the other VHD books. After we got away from the frontier and into the village proper, with high-tech brothels and mad scientist lairs and vampire fortresses, and you know what? I liked it.
Also, things were different this time around with the dangers presented. Previously, people or things were described as dangerous beyond compare, but they were dealt with relatively easily by the beautiful man in black and his voracious left hand. But in this book, D isn’t only in danger, he is hurt pretty badly more than once.
So I really enjoyed this one. My Vampire Hunter D steam had been flagging, to be honest, but this volume reinvigorated my enthusiasm for the series. I’ll probably start the next one before the first quarter of 2023 is up.
For my first read of the year, this was pretty nice. Next up, If Chins Could Kill, the autobiography of Bruce Campbell. I usually limit myself to one or two non-fiction works per year, as there is enough of this hellscape poking through my daily life to begin with, but I’m an Ashley J. Williams fanboy from way back.
As a matter of fact, the first time I stole anything was from a food market in San Antonio, TX, while my father was away in Georgia, training to be a Customs Agent. This left my mom on her own to wrangle me, an eleven- to twelve-year-old boy, as best she could, and believe you me, she did the job.
I was in the store with her and ran across an unsupervised sticker sheet. Right in the middle of it was a skull with eyeballs which said EVIL DEAD 2, and I had to have it. To be perfectly frank, I had no idea what the hell an Evil Dead was at the time, but the imagery did it for me. I slipped that sticker sheet into my pocket (careful not to fold that one sticker, of course) and we went about our shopping.
Later, after I’d applied the Evil Dead 2 sticker to my skateboard (because where else would it go?) I was so proud of it I showed it off to my mom, rather foolishly, in hindsight. She went ooh and ahh and asked me where I got such a lovely thing, which should have been an enormous red flag, but I was too full of myself to realize it.
I told her I’d gotten it at the store, and she rose up like the angry sea. “When?” she bellowed. “I didn’t buy it for you, so when?!”
With a firm grip on my arm, she marched me back to the market to turn me in. (It was only half a mile, according to Google Maps, but that’s a long freakin’ way to be dragged, I’m here to tell you.) She made me tell the manager what I’d done, and he was very stern and everything and told me I was going to be watched like a hawk every time I went into his store. He took a picture of me and put it on the wall and told me next time, it would be the police.
Then, while I was bawling about it, he told my mother in Spanish they didn’t even sell those stickers there and he didn’t know where they’d come from, so maybe take it easy?
I knew enough Spanish by then to know that the universe had turned on me, but I figured I had gotten away with enough that things probably evened out. But I didn’t let her know that, because that would unveil how much Spanish I really understood by then. Heh.
Anyway. I liked this Vampire Hunter D book. -TB