30 Days of Night by Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith30 Days of Night, story by Steve Niles and illus­trated by Ben Tem­ple­smith, pub­lished Decem­ber 2004 by IDW Pub­lish­ing. This graphic novel is a straight up hor­ror story. You have a secluded town with more than 400 res­i­dents liv­ing in sub-zero weather where the sun doesn’t rise for 30 days. Wel­come to Bar­row, Alaska which turns out to be an ideal place for noc­tur­nal preda­tors that find the day­light intru­sive and sees the town as a untapped food source.

The story opens with the last day of sun­set. The sher­iff and his wife are get­ting calls from all over town about some local thefts and a stranger in a bar caus­ing mis­chief. It isn’t too long after the sun has set that the hus­band and wife team start to spot signs of trou­ble: a bon­fire of cell phones are found in a pit and com­mu­ni­ca­tions are down all over town. The stranger from the bar that they end up putting in jail proves to be some­thing other than “human” and this leads to the begin­ning of the end for the town.

A meet is set up amongst the vam­pires who have con­gre­gated to Bar­row, Alaska. The leader of the group has been sum­moned and things don’t turn out as planned. That was the biggest sur­prise of this entire novel. The town how­ever ends up on the wrong side of a bat­tle and the town folk are mas­sa­cred. Well, not all of them. There are some sur­vivors which includes the sher­iff and his wife, hid­ing from the preda­tors. Mean­while, the story shifts to New Orleans where a shaman or voodoo priest­ess has some­one inter­cept cor­re­spon­dence that exposes a sus­pi­cious meet­ing between two uniden­ti­fied par­ties in Alaska. She seems to know what this meet entails so she sends her son with a cam­era to get footage of the planned event.

My thoughts: Last I’d checked, vam­pires were sup­posed to be scary. This graphic novel had a pre­dictable sto­ry­line save one plot twist toward the end which didn’t make all that much sense to me and defies the story’s own logic. The art­work is pretty raw uti­liz­ing col­ors that empha­size the blood and facial struc­tures and the freez­ing cold tem­per­a­tures of the tun­dra. While the dia­logue is clear, a few of the frames were a bit unclear. Fur­ther­more, the story was a lit­tle bit of noth­ing for such a high price at $17.99 (paperback):

  • Not much in the way of com­plex­ity of plot
  • Lack of orig­i­nal plot line (but then how many dif­fer­ent ways can you tell a vam­pire story)
  • Not much in the way of characterization
  • Raw art­work that looked pretty simplistic
  • Lack of logic continuity
  • Short, short, short story that left me feel­ing under­whelmed for my money

The part of the story that made me raise my eye­brows was when the sher­iff, Eben, decides to save them all by turn­ing into one of them. Now let’s go back, one of the sur­vivors had been scratched by one of the vam­pires and was trans­formed. Imme­di­ately he started attack­ing the humans. Not so with Eben who man­aged to draw a sam­ple of blood from the vam­pire and inject him­self with it. Instead of attack­ing his wife or any of the other sur­vivors, Eben is in con­trol of his thoughts and blood lust and man­ages to kill the leader of the vam­pire clan and save the day– at a cost. This was not explained. Why was Eben’s response so different?

Then there’s the romance which was ok in a hokey kind of way. I guess that part of the story arc was sup­posed to engage the heart and it barely did that for lack of char­ac­ter devel­op­ment. I came away from this story not a fan and com­pletely under­whelmed. What I did like was the atmos­phere and the set­ting. I don’t get to visit Alaska often in my fic­tion read­ing (at one time I wanted to move there, too). All the talk of this graphic novel being “great” has led me to believe that if you think that some­thing is great just because other peo­ple say it is then it is. It’s not. I was duped by the hype. There seems to be a motion pic­ture in the works and more sequels on the shelf. All in all, it was an inter­est­ing visit to Bar­row, Alaska but I think the one visit will have to be enough. My grade, C.

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