A Novel by Hideyuki Kikuchi (Author), and Yoshitaka Amano (Illustrator)

With a series like Hideyuki Kikuchi’s Vampire Hunter D, a book series that clocks in at almost FIFTY novels and counting, it would be easy to get intimidated and not dive in. However, I whole-heartedly recommend checking them out if you have even a passing affinity for the two classic animated films produced under the same banner. Those movies only scratch the surface of what the series is about, and the books have proven to be a playground for all sorts of cool stuff that expands the story. Sure, some books are hits, and others have some problems, but overall, you can’t find anything that harkens back to classic pulp stories of yesteryear such as Conan, quite like The Vampire Hunter D series. Today, we are looking at the fifth book in the series, The Stuff of Dreams, a book that is as equally flawed as it is interesting.

“In a world where even the smallest and most remote village is being terrorized by the monsters that stalk the night, there is a hamlet, prosperous and peaceful, where mortals and vampires have lived in harmony for years. It is there that 17-year-old Sybille Schmitz has slept, neither waking nor aging, for 30 years since first receiving the vampire’s immortal kiss. The mysterious Vampire Hunter D is lured to the tranquil oasis by recurrent dreams of the beautiful, undying girl bathed in an eerie blue light and dancing in a ghostly chateau.”

One of the immediate things that jumped out to me reading Vampire Hunter D – The Stuff of Dreams was just how different to the previous four novels this one was. Unlike the previous volumes, which included dreary settings that push an uncomfortable aura throughout the narrative, the seemingly un-named “village where Sybille Schmitz sleeps” is a bustling lively town full of interesting characters that D comes in contact with. It’s almost like D has walked directly into a fantasy novel which somehow feels off…Compared to the previous book’s setting, which insisted it was a utopia (and it was anything but), it seems this unnamed city nearly fits the bill. This setting and the overall manner in which characters interacted with D immediately made me not trust a single thing that was going on, and with good reason!

This is a sort of book that the reader has to REALLY pay attention to, because there is a reason for this aforementioned weird plotline, and once it starts unraveling into something of a “dream within a dream” Inception-esque ball of chaos, it’s really easy to get a bit lost. There were times when I questioned if I had accidentally skipped pages or something, which usually isn’t a good thing. The book constantly questions what is and isn’t happening at any given time, and takes the tried-and-true Vampire Hunter D tropes into all sorts of different places. I’m not sure if Hideyuki Kikuchi was successful in what he was trying to achieve here, and honestly, I felt like the plot somewhat got away from him at times. The story he was trying to tell is similar to something a writer like Neil Gaiman would crank out, or perhaps a Steven Moffatt era Doctor Who episode.

The ideas in this book help do a lot of world-building for “The Frontier” that the stories take place in. Readers get an idea of some of the technologies that exist (in areas that haven’t completely fallen into the Dark Ages) and learn a bit more about the relationship between The Nobility and humans in the past. It’s definitely an interesting concept to have a single beacon of hope out there where the two races could somehow coexist, especially considering the power struggle multiple millennia in the making they find themselves in.

The only real problem I had was that no matter how interesting things got, I couldn’t help thinking that nothing really mattered because the reality warping makes nothing really stick. The way the book handles character interactions is also somewhat of a double-edged sword here. On one hand, you get to see D interact with numerous characters he usually doesn’t associate with, but his interactions almost boil down to “D is very beautiful, and everyone swoons for him” and “D stood there unmoving and silent”. That sort of thing works in previous stories because his stoicism is played up during fights, but here there is not much fighting, and he ends up being a “stick in the mud” that slows down his own story.

Overall, I hate to say it, but this is the weakest novel in this series so far. The plot is confusing, it’s written in a repetitive manner, and D comes across boring due to his intense stoicism. I’m not sure what happened other than the author tried something different, and it didn’t work, but hat’s off to him for making an effort. If the entire 50 book series boils down to the same plot from book one (vampire bites girl and is attacking/trying to seduce her, D has to fight them) over and over again, that would get old real fast. Not every book can be a classic, and I’m sure there are plenty more great stories to come. Join me again soon as I slowly chug through these at a glacial pace, perhaps one day I will have read them all!

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