Booking Your Time - Fiends of the Eastern Front

This book has 2 of my favourite genre - war and vampires, so needless to say I eagerly grabbed the book from the shelf and started digging into it the moment I found it lying forgotten somewhere around my bookshelf a couple of nights ago. (And I do have a lot of books, my last Excel spreadsheet exceeded 18,000 books to date, not including those belonging to my sons.)

The Fiends of the Eastern Front is pretty interesting, not a particularly fantastic one, but one that's pretty unique - an interesting mix of World War II and vampires - specifically, the role of vampires in World War II, at the Russian Theatre.

The story is pretty good, and allows for diversity as it follows 4 different perspectives in the war - a German Infantry Private, a Stuka Pilot, a Panzer commander, and a group of Russian grunts. Each has their own unique encounters with the vampires which is used as a weapon by the German high command against the Russians.

The concept of having elite vampire troops in World War II, piloting black canopied Hurricane fighters, specialised in night missions is just one of those little things that is quite refreshing to read, and definitely a first for me. Reading Fiends of the Eastern Front is a little like watching DayBreakers - it presents several interesting ideas but failed to become something greater as it proceeds towards its inevitably predictable ending.

The language is precise and easy to read, but the book is quite lengthy, taking me almost 3 nights to complete, but since the book uses paragraphs to divide the different story arcs, it is almost like reading a couple of different yet related snippets, so the different story arcs usually manage to keep my interest long enough.

The story started right before the day where Operation Babarossa is launched, until the eventual retreat of the German armed forces from Russia. The battle scenes are well described, with or without the vampires - it couldn't compare to masterpieces like those presented by Stephen E.Ambrose or Erik Durschmied but it is more than a match for many other war-related novels that I've had the bad luck to read (I'm talking about you, 15 Hours!)

Definitely a reasonably good read to pick up, furthermore, where else can you find vampires and World War II put together? I'm going to start on Fiends of the Rising Sun, which apparently is a related story by the same author about Japanese vampires.

Can't wait. Banzai + Blood = Blazai!

(o.o)