With the completion of Tunnels of Blood I have completed the Vampire Blood trilogy of The Saga of Darren Shan, which means I'm officially 25% done with the series. Dang... 🥀😞
The endings to these books are super top notch. Darren Shan does an excellent job at making the relatively short books feel significantly longer by adding so much action, and so many plot twists.
Darren was an absolute mastermind as he manipulated Murlough beautifully. He showed a strong ability to think under pressure, with his back against the wall. While Murlough was fairly easy to trick, as the book explains, the stakes were high and failure meant utter and complete disaster. With how insane Murlough was, the danger really felt authentic. To this day Murlough still feels super sinister! He felt like the most sinister bad guy in the series so far. R.V. was pretty bad but, Murlough is like a less intelligent, more serial killer-ish Joker type of bad guy🃏. He gives me the creeps.
A memorable moment was when Murlough stated how the tunnels beneath the city were similar to the veins of a person, like tunnels of blood. Referring to the book title like that was really smooth. Again Murlough is nuts, and it felt really believable. 😟😳
The short lived fight between Mr. Crepsley and Murlough was actually so epic. The swiftness, brutality, and realistic nature of the clash was pretty next level. For such a violent scene to take place on Christmas morning, in Debbie's house where many nice memories took place, is pretty profound. The slow suspense of Darren's plan, leading up to this last phase was pretty exciting.
Another thing that strikes me more than it did during previous reads was, how legitimate of a force the vampaneze seemingly are. Years ago when I read this, for whatever reason I kind of underestimated the vampaneze. But I sort of understand now, by the way Mr. Crepsley speaks on them, calls them 'kin', and their overall serious nature, I get the impression that the vampaneze are far from pushovers or just some strange nutty vampires. Murlough is not a proper example of a vampaneze, he was clearly more unhinged than your average vampaneze.
Darren decorating the Christmas tree for Debbie before he departs was nice. I wonder if this is symbolic. As I said before, Christmas as far as I remember, isn't actually brought up much going forward. Maybe this signifies Darren exiting that phase of his life for good, growing, maturing into his new life.
As I look to the next trilogy, I'm curious to see how the intensity ramps up. This is one of the most impressive aspects of this series. I distinctly remember how the series gets grittier progressively, I'm curious to re-experience that and see how I feel about it this time.
Onto the Vampire Rites trilogy!!!
