Horror Novel Review Darren Shan The Darren Shan Saga 3 Tunnels Of Blood

Tweet

spoiler alerts 2001 Harper Collins. The book begins with a teaser chapter in which Darren, the half-vampire, is clearly trying to kill his Master, Mr. Crepsley, a full vampire. The circumstances leading to this intense drama are then related in the first half of the book. Darren has to leave the Vampire Circus to go with Mr. Crepsley to the big city. Evra, the snake boy accompanies them. Mr. Crepsley has some unspecified business in the city, and he refuses to talk to the boys about it. They just see him coming and going at odd times. Darren meets a young woman, called Debbie, with whom he is starting to fall in love, but he is unable to admit to being a vampire, so she finds his behaviour strange. She is however very sympathetic to Evra’s scaly skin problem (without knowing its real nature). Darren finds a newspaper report on the viscous murders occurring in the city. Bodies have been found drained of blood. Darren realizes that the deaths coincide with Mr. Crepsley movements. He decides to follow the Master one night. He sees him following another man into some underground tunnels. Darren watches as Mr. Crepsley clearly prepares to kill the man. Darren’s attack on Mr. Crepsley (seen in the opening chapter) is now explained. Darren attacks his master, and the man about to have been attacked, escapes. Angered, and then understanding, Mr. Crepsley explains what happened. The man he was stalking was the murderer. He was trying to catch him. The killer is in fact a member of a separate vampire species, known as The Vampaneze. The Vampaneze believe that it is a vampire’s sacred duty to kill humans to save their souls and that it is OK to kill people in order to feed. This philosophy has led to war between vampires and Vampaneze for generations. There is however a truce, and the killer as a renegade and a psychotic whose actions could break the peace agreement. Crepsley is afraid that his actions could make the people of the world aware of vampires. Darren and his allies now set up a trap for the killer Vampaneze. They use Darren’s friend Debbie as bait, and when the Vampaneze attacks here, they kill him. Darren now makes Debbie forget about him forever by inducing amnesia. (In fact she will return in a later book) An increasingly darker edge is establishing itself, with many important threads developing for later work in a compulsively readable horror story. . Arthur Chappell