In the year 2000, the incredibly talented animation team Production I.G. released a 48-minute film that rocked the socks off everyone from James Cameron on down: Blood: The Last Vampire.  The story was simple enough: Saya, a vampire hunter who only looks like a teenage girl, goes undercover at an air force base in Japan to destroy demons lurking there and finds a great deal more than she bargained for.  It looks and sounds terrific, has become a perennial best seller on home video, and a live-action version directed by Hong Kong veteran Ronny Yu is imminent.

There are months that go by when I don't read a single novel or work of fiction in any form, if only because I find my attention captured by a nonfiction book that makes all the fiction I could have picked up during that time look like ... well, fiction.  That was the case back in April of 2005, when I spent most of the month reading and re-reading Richard Rhodes's Why They Kill: The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist.  This was, and is, one of those rare books that provides you with a perspective-shattering point of view on a previously well-worn subject: Why are some people violent and remorseless monsters and not others?

Whenever I review anything that has a legacy behind it, I try to put the legacy aside and look at the thing in itself.  It’s only fair, after all—there are many people reading this who have never heard of Vampire Hunter D, who know nothing of the massive fanbase it has on all sides of the Pacific, and wouldn’t know Yoshitaka Amano or Hideyuki Kikuchi from anyone they’d brushed shoulders with on the subway.  For their sake, and for my own, I approached D as a friendly stranger, someone unfamiliar with the territory but curious enough to learn it.  I hope I don’t sound ungrateful when I say the first of Kikuchi’s D books left me wondering, to a degree, what all the screaming has been about.