Booking Your Time - Fiends of the Rising Sun

The sequel to the Fiends of the Eastern Front, and to be honest, is quite a disappointment as compared to its predecessor.

The first obvious issue is that the author obviously knows nothing about Japanese culture, and the painful efforts that he tried to put in depicting Japanese culture put tears into my eyes. The author obviously cannot differentiate the different cultures in China, Thailand and Japan and tend to mix them all into a big stir fry pan, and the resulting Japanese - the large majority of them anyway, read as very out-of-place misfits to me.

Barring that, the story continues to make use of vampires in world war II, this time in the Pacific theatre, between the US marines and Japanese elite vampire unit. However, unlike the thick and long background and time dedicated to the first book, which is almost 3-times as long as this one, the Fiends of the Rising Sun did not have the time to develop the character properly - the priest who lost his faith, the religious marine, the cocky marine, the sadistic marine - are all two dimensional stereotype that never developed the kind of rapport I've got with the German soldiers and Russian grunts in the first book.

The result then became something like a "oh, he's gone, fine." approach to the story.

The story, to be honest, is reasonably alright. With the Rumanian vampire lord now deciding to give our Japanese war cabinet a little help by aiding in the construction of a Japanese vampire unit. The Japanese vampires then go around wrecking havoc amongst the ranks of the US marines in the pacific islands and bla bla bla until they are discovered and then fought against.

And that's that.

I guess the novelty went out of the book after the first one had so cleverly weaved - it's almost like a extension of the first one but without the suspense or the "umpf" that is present almost consistently in the first book - it took me 3 times as long to finish this one despite it being one third the length.

All in all, avoid this one. I think there are better books to read.

Of course, compared to 15 Hours, this is a blessing.

(o.o)