One of the brothers, a sickly man named Grove, has the special ability to astral project a super-powered “soul” from his body that can lay waste to any foes that comes in his way, the cost of this is that Grove is seen teetering on the brink of death. In a direct contrast, the book version of these characters are reprehensible villains that have a reputation for basically trying to murder anyone they see as threats. When members of this group start dying off, you genuinely feel bad. If they aren’t cracking jokes and otherwise serving as the comic relief, they have a somewhat playful rivalry with D, more helping each other than not. In Bloodlust, the group is never as antagonistic as they are in the book and are somewhat likeable. It seems it is commonplace in the future to hire large groups of hunters to go against nobles, since the survival rate against such a foe is pretty low, thus why the rival even exists. One of the more significant differences lies in the Marcus Brothers themselves, a group of rival vampire hunters that are after the same noble that D has been hired to kill. Beautiful illustrations by Yoshitaka Amano complement the post-apocalyptic plot, filled with chilling twists.” The dying man is taking no chances, and has also enlisted the Marcus family, a renegade clan of four brothers and a sister who don’t care who they kill as long as they get paid.

In the nightmare world of 12090 A.D., finding Meierlink before he reaches the spaceport in the Clayborn States and gets off the planet will be hard enough, but D has more than just Meierlink to worry about.

Though humans speak well of Meierlink, the price on his head is too high for D to ignore and he sets out to save her before she can be turned into an undead creature of the night. The vampire hunter known only as D has been hired by a wealthy, dying man to find his daughter, who was kidnapped by the powerful vampire Lord Meierlink. “The third volume of the popular Japanese series Vampire Hunter D comes to America in Vampire Hunter D: Demon Deathchase. This is honestly one of the few times where, upon reading the book, I feel that the movie was a lot better than the source material. For the most part, the stories are pretty similar, but unlike the first novel which served the basis for the 1985 original film, the two diverge from each other in quite surprising ways. Like most people in The West, I am coming at this book from the vantagepoint of somebody that previously watched the 2000 animated feature film Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust, which was based on this very novel.

It’s been a while since I last read through a Vampire Hunter D novel, and with FORTY on the market, I bet get to reading soon! Last year, I read a bunch of vampire books around Halloween, so I may try to do some more of that this year and this is the perfect start to my fall reading. A Book by Hideyuki Kikuchi, third in the series

Demon deathchase