30 Days of Night Vol. 3: Run Alice Run by Steve Niles
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This volume picks up at the end of the vampire raid on the Los Angeles FBI offices, a raid whose primary goal is to retrieve the remains of Stella Olemaun. The vampire-savvy agent, Alice Blood, seems to be the sole survivor (more properly, only one not turned into a vampire for Eben Olemaun's army of the undead.) The balance of the book turns Eben Olemaun's war in a new direction, toward the European old guard. In the original book, this division is introduced between the old-world vampires who want to remain myth and quietly live out their immortal days, and the hot-headed American vampires who are eager to war and watch the world burn.
I enjoyed this volume more than the previous one, but not nearly so much as the original story. Sadly, I suspect the reason that I preferred it to the last volume is that it's so fast-paced and action-packed that I had no time to notice that it's often not clear why characters are doing what they're doing (or, more damningly, that they sometimes adopt behavior that seems at odds with the character as established through his or her recent behavior.) While I seem to have leap-frogged material and may have missed an answer, I continue to be perplexed by an anomaly from the original book and that's why Eben is so easily able to defeat any other vampire. He's vampire superman, and it's not clear why he should be.
As I wrote in my review of Volume 2, at this point the series doesn't really distinguish itself among the mass of modern-day vampire stories. The original book, I felt, did build a novel concept that made it more interesting and intense than usual. The book is well-written and gruesomely drawn, but so are tons of other vampire stories. Having read three volumes, I'm over this series, but it is well constructed - if a bit Hollywood.
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