30 Days of Night: Red Snow

by Ben Templesmith

So once again, I'm dipping my toes in 30 Days of Night water, and find this outing to be better than some of the others.  A lot of that has to do with Templesmith's art, even if his writing is a little stiff here, and too constrained by the dictates of the franchise.

This story is set in 1941, somewhere north and cold along the Russian front.  It follows a group of German soldiers, a group of Soviet soldiers (with a random British guy accompanying them), and a Russian peasant family who live in the area.  These disparate groups end up in the same place, at the same time that a bunch of vampires appear and attack.  The humans have to work (uneasily) together to try to survive.

As usual with these books, (with the exception of the brilliant 30 Days Til Death series by David Lapham), the vampires are total ciphers, and the people don't get much more development.  Russians and Germans hate each other?  Shocking!  Peasants afraid of Soviets?  What they needed was a good long political argument when they were all trapped in the tunnels together.

And really - again with everyone hiding in basements?  There was too much here that was borrowed from the first volume, and not enough of Templesmith's usual madness.  Still and all, it's a decent read.