Story by Sherrilyn Kenyon, Art by Claudia Campos
St. Martin’s Griffin, 208 pp.
Rating: 13+

After reading the first few pages of this volume, I flipped the book over and read the summary on the back, something I rarely do. I was told that the Dark-Hunters are “mad, bad, and immoral,” that they “fight rough and play hard,” and that they are “the scary things that go bump in the night” and apparently “love every minute of it.” Oh… dear.

I’ll come clean: I read a lot of paranormal romance. Sherrilyn Kenyon’s Dark-Hunter series would have crossed my path eventually, and it was a tough decision to start the manga before the novels. I know very well that books like this are in no way impressive literary conquests, so I had a pretty good idea what I was getting into here. The thing is, I had trouble with the format. In a novel, the type of cheese offered in the summary on the back is normally handled with a wink and a smile. In a comic, I’m seeing the characters react to these lines. When they take comical/appalling lines seriously, I don’t know how to process that. The dialogue here is also way cheesier than what you’d normally find in a manga, which is incredible but true.

I’ll also put this on the table, since I’m getting these things off my chest: there’s a key element of paranormal romance missing from this volume: sex. The 13+ rating probably has everything to do with that, but for me, that sort of misses the point of these types of stories. There’s still romance, but I know it’s not going to go the usual places. Admittedly, sex isn’t in all paranormal romance (Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles feature… I don’t know, degenitaled/impotent vampires?), but, you know. It helps. Having not read Sherrilyn Kenyon’s books, I wouldn’t know if the original had sex, but considering one of the characters is an ancient sex slave and the books are titled things like Fantasy Lover and Night Pleasures, I’m guessing the sex was a pretty key element.

Aside from my whiny complaints of too much cheese here and not enough there, the story is reasonably solid as far as these things go. Amanda appears to be the “normal” one in a large family of witches, but she finds her life turned around when she is mistaken for her vampire-hunting twin sister and is abducted and handcuffed to a vampire named Hunter. Hunter is actually a Dark-Hunter that is after an ancient soul-sucking daimon, another type of vampire. Because their handcuffs can only be unlocked by a Greek God, Amanda inadvertently finds out that Hunter is an ancient Greek general named Kyrian who was kin to Amanda’s brother-in-law, also an ancient Greek general. A visit to her brother-in-law’s house yields the correct Greek God, along with an explanation of how all this Dark-Hunter, Greek God, daimon, and vampire stuff fits together. To make things interesting, there is also a tale of ancient treachery and revenge thrown in for good measure, and Amanda and Kyrian get close, as you may expect in this type of story. After some light bonding, they prepare to slay the ancient evil that hunts them.

The explanation was a little overwhelming in parts, and some things didn’t make sense since they were the plots of other Dark-Hunter novels. Amanda’s brother-in-law, for instance, has his own story that is only alluded to here, and the mechanics of Amanda’s family are not adequately explained. Admittedly, I was hooked by the cliffhanger on the last page, and with all that exposition out of the way, the next volume should go much more smoothly.

Volume one of The Dark-Hunters is available now.