This book is the final instalment of Darren Shan's vampire saga - and as such, I will in this post be giving away major spoilers for the series as a whole in my ruminations on the series' overall plot, characters, themes and whatnot. You've been warned. (Check through all 11 of my previous posts this month if you want extremely-brief spoiler-free overviews of all the other books in the saga. If you're not bothered about me spoiling what is a Thoroughly Solid children's/teenagers' fantasy series, go ahead and read this one.)
First off a quick note on the premise as a whole. While there have been a slew of vampire series across both adult- and youth-oriented reading markets in recent decades, and admittedly I have read very few of these (yes, I've never read Twilight, and I'm not likely to), the creative approach taken towards vampirism in world-building terms here is well-developed and innovative in ways I doubt many comparable series have been. They have culture, history, traditions, and so on, that go far beyond just "sparkling in the sunlight and having beef with werewolves". And across the saga you really get a feel of immersion in the vampire world; helped no doubt by the fact that Shan, while he could never be accused of being some poetic or prosaically-experimental genius, is a damn good writer who consistently comes up with good, bitesize stories, and tells them well, using both well-fleshed-out characters with meaningful arcs and punchy dynamic descriptions and action scenes to do so.
Thematically, I think the saga can be split into four distinct chunks that parallel its sub-trilogies. The first three are a pretty by-the-book coming-of-age deal, albeit with vampirism as a context, in which the protagonist (also, confusingly, named Darren Shan) learns how to stand on his own two feet and assert himself as a person, bonds with new people who accept him for who he is and a mentor who promises to take him to new heights, falls in love, yada yada yada. The next three are much more concerned with how one as a newfound adult tries to integrate with a new strange society (so just, society then); the challenges faced by Darren in books four to six really force him to grow in the main ways we saw he was stunted in the introductory three. The third sub-trilogy doesn't impose much depth of character development from its happenings, and so the themes of growth and self-worth are less clear, but here also we should consider that it is going on against the backdrop of the vampire-vampaneze war - and this makes for great stuff in that it can really get into dealing with themes of hate, revenge, right and wrong in messy conflicts; things like that. Finally the fourth wraps up the whole saga pretty much perfectly on a developmental level in my opinion, dealing heavily with concepts of destiny, mortality and sacrifice - woven deftly into the narration as Darren has to face these weighty themes head on.
Plotwise I've talked briefly about all eleven prior instalments already, and am hesitant to talk about what happens in this the final one, because that does really spoil the whole series, and I'm already going to be dropping several fat spoilers in the next paragraph about characters, so I'll do you the mercy of not ruining the saga as a whole. But trust me, the ending is pretty epic; unexpected, well-earned, and totally logical within the constructed world. Looking back over the whole saga it is honestly hard to spot anything that stands out as an obvious plot-hole, which is pretty impressive for a twelve-book teen series - and while the pacing may feel too slow or too fast at times, it packs its punches where it needs to and tells everything that needs to be told; there are actually not many elements you could take out of any one book and have the whole thing have the same story impact. Which is a sign of great writing.
Okay, and finally - the characters. Major spoilers coming up in this bit. Darren, the narrating protagonist, is arguably quite bland and overdependent on luck or contrivance for his victories; but I don't have a problem with this for two reasons: firstly, bear in mind that he is functioning not only as a vampiric being in his own right but also as the "innocent" audience-explanatory bridge into that world, and the tensions of this probably made him pretty hard to write about, let alone from; secondly, aside from the fact that luck is a touchstone of vampire religion anyhoo and so this is a silly criticism, I actually think the ways in which his successes are contrived are well-explained enough by the lore to be able to overlook this criticism as well. My primary gripe with Darren as a whole lies at the very beginning of his story - I know he had to save Steve, but the kid we're introduced to at the start of the book just deciding that becoming a half-vampire vampire's assistant for the rest of his now-much-longer life is a step he's willing to take to see his friend survive struck me as something of a leap. But now we've mentioned Steve, so let's talk about Steve; and, oh, Steve Leonard/Leopard, why are you the way that you are? Getting rejected by Mr Crepsley must have been a blow, but a blow serious enough to devote your entire life to hunting and killing vampires, even becoming a vampaneze (even the Vampaneze Lord later on), in order to enact vengeance upon? As a revenge motive it doesn't quite ring true. But then, Mr Crepsley did say his blood had darkness in it; and we can kind of see this - Steve is by any account not a nice kid at the start of the series, even though he's Darren's best friend; and the fact that even at such a young age he devoted so much time and effort into researching the occult does sound the warning gong to my ears. The "I can taste evil in his blood" explanation is a little hokey but it feeds directly into the final set of conflicts and betrayals in the last six books so I can accept it. Next up, Mr Crepsley - and I've gotta say, I don't actually have much to say about him; the archetypal grouch-with-a-heart-of-gold that anyone plunged into the vampire world would want as their father substitute; my only complaint would be that he died too early, but it was entirely justified and in fact demanded by the story, so, yeh. Then of course Kurda Smalht/Harkat Mulds - the Vampire Prince who turned traitorous ally-to-the-vampaneze and was executed then brought back as a Little Person to aid Darren and Mr Crepsley in their quests. I just love this character, on both sides of his afterlife. Or however the story's internal metaphysics is meant to conceptualize this kind of transformation, I'm not entirely clear. Kurda is a brilliant vampire character for his willingness to transgress the strictly-upheld norms of his society with excellent reasoning behind why he does what he does, even if you (as the readers) won't notice or appreciate it at the time. Harkat is just a fantastically different, sturdy, amusing absolute dude who brings a weird kind of morbid liveliness into every scene he plays any significant role in. Oh man, there are so many great characters in this series that I would be here all night if I were to talk about all of them; Debbie and Alice Walker, Vancha March, Seba Nile, Gavner Purl, Mr Tall, RV... the list continues. But the final one I will talk about here is, you guessed it, that most superlatively sinister of evil entities, Mr Tiny. I think Shan in writing Tiny as the supreme antagonist to the whole saga is a stroke of pure brilliance; he's so unassuming in his depiction and yet oozes a malevolence in dialogue that very few "bad guys" achieve and the whole thing strikes a totally discombobulating inscrutability that genuinely sets you on edge. And then as the series progresses from your first introduction to Mr Tiny and you see, or rather come to suspect via hearsay (which only adds to the mystique) of all the truly heinous acts he has committed, the schemes he's schemes, the machinations he's machinated; and by the revelation of his final goals in the last sub-trilogy you are literally even rooting for the vampaneze over Mr Tiny.
As I think I may have mentioned in my post about the first instalment of this series, this is a saga I've read before - but only once, when I was about fourteen. Revisiting it as an adult I still enjoyed it a great deal; in fact probably moreso in many places as I was able to appreciate the depth of obvious plot-planning and integrated world-building that Shan has put into this, as I was reading it, from knowing what was coming up. There were also many bits that I'd forgotten and were great second-time-round surprises that even with foresight the text itself does make it hard to see coming. I'd strongly recommend this to teenage readers with a thing for horror or fantasy, all the way down to age eleven or so if you're a kid with a strong stomach - because dark and gruesome as it is, it's the kind of thing that will exhilarate you far more than give you nightmares. Though it may well do that too. You have been warned...
