Hunting Memories by Barb Hendee

Sometimes, I do read books about vampires. This is rare, as I kind of hate most modern vampire myths and their romanticization. (Because undead creatures who want to eat you drink your blood are so sexy.) Barb Hendee’s “Vampire Memories” books are an exception. All two of them.

Completely shunning the idea of Wangst=Otherness and that the best way to explore Otherness is to have a human woman moon over a Sexy Other in what is an almost inevitably creepy relationship, Hendee all but complete cuts out the human aspect and instead focuses almost entirely on the vampires themselves, who are human-like, but decidedly not human, and whose way of thinking is decidedly alien to our own. To Hendee’s vampires, humans are happy meals on legs, and the best reason to not eat the whole happy meal is that these happy meals sometimes have guns, and will totally alert the media. They also don’t have the time or interest for angsting about their immortal souls or pining for the one mortal who can save them. They crave companionship, but not necessarily love, and the companionship they crave is that of their own kind.

At the end of Blood Memories Eleisha, our small and waiflike main character who has the ability to make people long to protect her, an ability far more frightening than being able to create fear or desire in your target, had gathered the beginnings of a new, small family around her, and learned that they may not be alone.

Hunting Memories explores the consequences of that, and delves more into the history of the vampires, and their abilities. Blood Memories was pretty standalone, wrapping up pretty much every plotline that needed to be wrapped up, but Hunting Memories largely sets the stage for future books.

My sole problem was how much time was spent in the head of Julian, Eleisha’s enemy. No matter what the reason, dwelling inside the head of a psychopath who spends all his time thinking about murderous revenge and about how much he wants to make that nasty woman to thwarted him suffer (and how he wishes his victims looked more like her) just isn’t my thing. His subordinates were ok, though.

manga: Gintama Vol 13-14

Volume 13

Someone on the f-list recently theorized that the best volumes of Gintama tend to be the even numbered volumes, and that the odd numbered volumes are much weaker. This is certainly true of volume 13, which suffers from roughly three-fourths of the volume being a series of rather dull arcs, with the only real highlight being Kagura’s brief turn at impersonating Gin when Gin had a cold. Unfortunately, when the series is dull and the insanity isn’t over-the-top, all you can really notice is the grossness. The final arc-or rather, the beginning of what looks to be Gintama’s long-ish arcs, is much better.

( spoilers )

Volume 14 is here at Manga Bookshelf, which used to be Plain As Daylight.