bookheaven | Carmilla Volume 2: The Last Vampire Hunter

Carmilla Volume 2: The Last Vampire Hunter by Amy Chu

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This takes place directly after the first volume and for me had a lot of the same pacing issues (again Chu might have her hands tied by what Dark Horse is willing to allow) but also there are some questionable story telling choices.

Athena, now that Carmilla is 'dead' has gone to San Francisco in search of her family and manages it in a shockingly short amount of time. Only what she finds is the truth about her grandfather Yeh Yeh and her 'big brother' who reminds me of Claudia, forever a child. Only Wing is the head of a gang of vampires and is pretty much psychotic.

Athena has a choice join her brother or destroy him. With the help of one of his men - the one who helped turn him - and the night clerk from her hostel (whom Athena has a mutual crush on), you can imagine which she choses.

So again, this is so rushed. Jess, the clerk, is barely developed nor is Wing really. Carmilla puts in an appearance which honestly doesn't do much other than set up the chance at volume three. Athena underreacts to just about everything around her and I really hope the ending had more of a time jump than it seemed to have in order to make it work.

What I did like a lot was the use of multiple non-eastern european vampire types. Almost every culture has some form of them and Chu uses multiples from Asian, naturally since this is a story, in part about Asian in America culture. I really liked that.

I also am a fan of what Chu was trying to do with Tak, her one ally in the vampire world. So much of the horrible things that were done to Asians in America is ignored by the history books. We know of course of the terrible things done to Africans, all the incredibly crappy things done to Native Americas; we learn about how the Irish and Italians 'need not apply' for jobs in the late 1800s early 1900s but how many of us learned that the only ethnic group to have official exclusion laws written about them like the Chinese had? So Chu's attempt to shine a light on this, especially given how the Chinese were exploited in the railroad and mining industries was welcome. I just wish both the story telling and the art were more even.

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