A siren’s song has been drawing young men to their deaths in the hills outside of Anise Village. No one in the village is able to locate where the song is coming from, so an outsider is hired to unlock the strange secret.

The village of Shirley’s Door has a dark secret. A yearly ritualistic sacrifice meant to protect the town and keep the monsters at bay. When an outsider finds himself caught between the young woman being sacrificed and her beau, the whole village itself might be doomed.

Countless years ago, two sides in a devastating war create their own living weapons. Genetically engineered creatures set to fight to the death; and though the war has been over for centuries, two remaining individuals are still set to battle. And in doing so, they could re-ignite a fight that has been dormant for a very long time.

Readers who have been a part of the graphic novel/manga/anime fandom for some time will immediately recognize the name ‘Vampire Hunter D’. Western audiences were introduced to the character via the first animated movie in the late 80’s, with the novels themselves not coming out in translated form until some years later. Individuals, like myself, were ecstatic with the release of each novel and while some are better than others, we still seek to collect them all.

While Dark Nocturne is labelled as number 10 in the Vampire Hunter series, it could actually fit any where in the early series itself. It is compromised of three short stories that were published independently in magazines before being collected for the novel here.

With all this being said, unfortunately I find Dark Nocturne to be one of the weakest books in the series. The stories themselves do not have to coherency of earlier novels and the characterization is often very weak. They feel as if they were written much earlier than previous novels, when Kikuchi was just beginning to write about D and had yet to get a hold on the character himself.

Compared to other novels in the series with the same protagonist, the D here feels off somehow. He is flippant and at times almost uncaring; and while in other stories D can be off putting, it is not to this degree. It was actually hard to like him, while he is a character I have enjoyed reading about for some time.

Purists like myself will of course want to add this book to their collection so they might have the whole set. Casual readers will want to skip this one as it does not add anything to the series and I think can be ignored as a whole.

Skip Dark Nocturne, dear readers. As much as I love Vampire Hunter D, I cannot in good faith recommend this one.