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VtM - Review: Vampire Diary: The Embrace
Review by Tim Olivas (16 Apr 95)
Vampire Diary: The Embrace is a book written and illustrated by Robert Weinberg and Mark
Rein(dot)Hagen. To quote the book's back cover, "In the shadows of Los Angeles, an ancient vampire
courts Auston Jacobson, a night- club bartender. Slowly but surely, Auston succumbs to that dark call.
Can he resist the Embrace, the gateway to an eternity of damnation? And will his master's dark command
threaten the most beautiful, most perfect love he has ever felt?" This story will apparently form the basis
of Aaron Spelling's new show Kindred, the World of Darkness's first endevour into television.
Fans of Nick Bantock's Griffin and Sabine might be interested to know that Embrace's form was inspired
by that series. It is bound like an actual diary, with a (non-functional) lock. It also contains one letter and
one greeting card. Every page is handwritten and illustrated, as if the viewpoint character, Auston, had
scribbled and sketched in it in his spare time.
Unfortunately, the authors fall into the mimetic fallacy: by trying to make their book resemble a "real"
diary as much as possible, they subject us to the sort of entries you'd expect to find in the diary of a
twentysomething barkeep. "This is the first entry I've written in a while, and I feel pretty much like a jerk
writing it. An exhausted, overworked, disgusted JERK." This doesn't make readers feel Auston's
problems--it just makes them turn the page.
Similarly, Auston's writing isn't exactly polished prose. He writes in cliches ("...but for her, it's just a
game") and banalities ("...if the Menedez brothers can get off scott free, anything is possible"), his only
means of emphasis obscenity ("Our chickenshit manager is such a first class dickwad!"), repetition ("I
want to scream I want to scream I want to scream" --he can't be all that rattled if he can write it three
times), and the way he draws and writes. The last is the most effective device. For example, when he is
upset, his handwriting gets shaky and large, and when he thinks his words are cribbed close like notes.
Though the art, like the writing, tries to be too much like the idle work of a young, unremarkable man,
some of the images are quite well done. The drawing of a puppet sucking blood from a roach, for
example, is charged with emotion. Other drawings are just random, like a full page devoted to a Yoo-hoo
bottle...perhaps an attempt to imitate Warhol. :) Most annoying, are the portraits of Claudius and his
crowd. They look like comic-book villians of the most cliched kind: fluffy sideburns, Fu Manchu
moustaches, dramatic body piercings, and so on. Presumably, these pronounced physical characteristics
will help us keep them straight later in the series when it becomes more obvious that they all have exactly
the same malevolently alien personality.
Yes, later in the series. Can you doubt it? The ending is left completely in the air. Either this is simply an
introduction to the TV show, or there are many more Vampire Diaries (tm) to come. This is not bad in
itself; there is nothing wrong with characters carrying over from book to book. However, at the end of
Embrace I felt like I had not been told a story but rather the prelude to a story. There is no closure or
completion. To provide a counterexample, Bantock's book Griffon and Sabine is the first in a trilogy of
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