Record of a Fallen Vampire 7

Kyo Shirodaira / Yuri Kimura – Viz – 2009 – 9 volumes

Now, there are two schools of thought regarding what happened in this volume (these schools of thought may only exist in my head, but they exist nonetheless).  Let me see if I can talk through this.

Now, it’s significant that, with Strauss’s side of the story revealed in this volume, something we’ve been waiting for the entire series, literally everything has been overturned.  I was pretty sure something like this was going to happen, but I didn’t think the story transformation would be so complete.  There was something wrong with Strauss, something strange about his act and all the horrible crimes he was charged with.  His view offers a satisfying explanation, shames the other characters, and just reverses the whole point of the story.  And comes handily back to the aliens after all this time.

Normally when this happens, I hate it.  I love well-wrought twists in the story, something Record of a Fallen Vampire is masterful with, but it’s ridiculous when everything is reversed.  There’s usually no real reason for it.  Why tell a story only to reverse it for the shock value?  I can recognize it as a pretty ridiculous storytelling technique.

And yet, when Record of a Fallen Vampire does it, it makes so much sense.  It’s pretty clear that this was how the story has been laid out from the beginning, and everything that’s happened ties back into this explanation and is explained to my satisfaction.  As I said, I value a good twist.  This series has been doing great ones for the last several volumes, and this one was the last and greatest of them.  In the essay in the back, Kyo Shirodaira mentions that this is the last twist, promise, and that the story will just tie up the loose ends and wrap itself up from here.

Shirodaira also mentions that this story is his response to unreliable memory, and how in narratives the fact that nobody really remembers anything perfectly is something that is forgiven for the sake of the story.  It’s natural to forget details, both significant and small, over the course of several years, and of course the characters here have had 1,000 years to let their memories sit and to shape them and recall only the parts that suit their particular version of the truth.  I liked it a whole lot better when I read that, too.

There’s one final twist at the end.  Not one as significant as the explanation of Strauss’s role, but one that sort of ties two characters together that shouldn’t be linked.  The link is significant, but since the reader doesn’t directly “know” either of the characters, the twist isn’t really as big a shock, more like… Big News of the type that most other series pull off.  Small potatoes in the scope of things here.

Record of a Fallen Vampire is amazing.  I promise.  I’m sure nothing the story will finish with will be able to top this volume, but I am looking forward to a satisfying conclusion (and learning what’s up with the aliens) all the same.

This was a review copy provided by Viz.