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Vampire Hunter D #26
Vampire Hunter D Volume 26: Bedeviled Stagecoach
In the Wild-West wilderness of the Frontier, government official has been tasked with escorting captured servants of the vampire Nobility. Unfortunately their path to the Capital crosses into the territory of the Noble that is their master! As the convoy rushes towards the safety of the civilized city, monsters lie in wait to attack -- but also, with dark and ambiguous reasons of his own, does the half-vampire hunter known only as "D". This will be a road trip that none of them will ever forget, if any of them survive, that is. The latest action-packed future-steampunk adventure from Kikuchi and Amano!
- Features six new illustrations by Final Fantasy designer Yoshitaka Amano.
- "Vampire Hunter D is the bipolar love-child of Mad Max, Hammer horror, and lone cowboy movies, and it WORKS." - Pajiba.com
- Features six new illustrations by Final Fantasy designer Yoshitaka Amano.
- "Vampire Hunter D is the bipolar love-child of Mad Max, Hammer horror, and lone cowboy movies, and it WORKS." - Pajiba.com
205 pages, Paperback
First published September 18, 2009
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
December 8, 2025
A solid middle-of-the-road Vampire Hunter D story that suffered from not having enough D.
September 6, 2022
This is the third Vampire Hunter D novel I’ve read. The first novel of the series was bad, but in a kind of charmingly goofy way. The twenty-seventh, Nightmare Village, is possibly the worst professionally published book I’ve ever read. Having read the first and one of the later novels, I thought I’d give it one more shot and read a novel from the series’ midpoint, but I got the names mixed up and bought the twenty-sixth novel, directly before Nightmare Village. It’s certainly better than Nightmare Village, which is not, sadly, the same as being good.
On a technical level, this novel is quite badly written. Or badly translated, which amounts to the same thing unless you can speak Japanese. I’m just going to copy a bit of the first paragraph, OK? Show, don’t tell, and all that. “The face of every single person starting at the stagecoach parked in the station lot showed the most horrible loathing. They didn’t even make such faces on seeing the most evil villain who was sure to hang. It resembled the look someone got when they saw a dead body. Indeed, they seemed even more horrified, as if they looked upon the living dead.”
Additionally, it’s constantly weird and sloppy. Referring back to the people staring at the stagecoach … there must be something pretty bad in the stagecoach to have caused that reaction, right? Nope. Empty. The man (Dorleac) who’s causing all this is sitting in a jail cell when the book opens. Apparently, a huge crowd has gathered to stare at an empty stagecoach, with indescribable loathing, in anticipation of a future time when the prisoner will be in it. I am morally certain that in an early draft, Dorleac started the novel in the stagecoach, and when Hideyuki Kikuchi decided he wanted a scene where he was brought out, he forgot to change the opening lines.
Incidentally, once Dorleac actually appears, he turns out to be hot, as a result of which: “As the people saw his face, the expressions of loathing faded from their own. It was as if, for the first time in a thousand years, a gust of fresh air pushed its way through a miasma. Anyone among the spectators would have just sighed and accepted the inevitability of the change. The face of the young captive was that beautiful.” I’ve never known quite what to say about Hideyuki Kikuchi’s obsession with male beauty, but if you read that description and thought, ‘Wow, I wonder if Dorleac is even prettier than D?’, never fear: later, Dorleac will lament, “… if only that Hunter, ten thousand times more beautiful than himself, hadn’t been there.”
At one point, the caravan is lured into a vampire-infested graveyard by one of their servants, some kind of flying monster. D, who has been hired to kill the vampires, is also in the graveyard. He kills the flying thing: “Having lured D into the graveyard along with the stagecoach, the spell-casting scout had outlived its usefulness.” But it *didn’t* lure D into the graveyard, he went there intentionally as part of a job. And D didn’t kill it because it “outlived its usefulness”; when was it ever useful to D? I’m aware that this might seem like nitpicking, but this sort of thing matters; I was reading along, got to that sentence, and thought “Wait, what?” An editor should spot and fix things like this. I mean, ideally the writer would spot and fix things like that, but if not, the editor should step in.
All that’s nothing compared to this, though. The plot of the novel is that the prisoner Dorleac was a vampire’s human servant, and must be taken to the capital through dangerous territory. Usually a vampire’s servant would just be executed, but they plan to experiment on Dorleac, because he’s unique: he was found walking around in the daylight, and “there hasn’t been a servant of the Nobility who could walk around in broad daylight for decades.” Fine. I don’t know if the idea that humans who serve vampires for long periods of time, gain their weakness to sunlight, has always been in the series, or if it was invented for this book, but I’ll buy it. Except, what’s this? Nine pages later, in the same damn chapter? “The servants of the Nobility … could be more trouble to deal with than victims who had been bitten. They could walk around in the light of day or cross running water without any difficulty.” It’s obvious to me that Dorleac was originally going to be a vampire, Kikuchi’s changed his mind, and then … does he just literally not have an editor? Is this some weird Japanese publishing thing I don’t know about? I cannot believe that a professional editor read this book before it was published and didn’t tell him he needed to fix this. It’s the entire premise of the damn book!
So if you can look past bad writing and bad editing, what does the novel have going for it to make it be two stars instead of one? The first seventy pages or so were OK. They have nothing to do with D; rather, that part of the novel features a group of travelers escorting (or just traveling in the same stagecoach as) the prisoner through dangerous territory. The characters are stock, but parts of this section are pretty compelling. Is Dorleac a dangerous collaborator with magical powers? A pitiful victim who’s being sent to a terrible fate through no fault of his own? Who can say? Not the reader, and certainly not the other passengers. And when D appears, it’s mysterious: what does he want with the caravan? That’s the best possible way to use D as a character; he’s aloof and emotionless, which is supposed to make him cool, but actually makes him dull, so he’s best kept off to the side, as an unknowable force of nature for more interesting characters to bounce off of.
I was considering throwing this book a pity-three star rating, basically just for not being Nightmare Village, but also because some of the character drama was kind of fun, but the second part of the novel, where D must fight Cyborg Freddy Kruger, tanked that. He also fights a haunted stage coach, for some reason. Whatever. D is a boring hero, and Retrieval Unit LUI is a boring villain. D wasn’t great in the first novel either, but the first novel was based on Shane, so some of the character stuff from that movie sort of came through. He cared about people, and had relationships. But Hideyuki Kikuchi has since decided that that’s not badass enough, and that it would be cooler if he were totally aloof and didn’t have meaningful interactions with the rest of the cast. In fact, the rest of the cast can’t even look at D, because he’s so pretty that seeing him sends them into a trance. What a bad idea; I long for the days when Doris could just have a crush on the cool hot guy who was helping her out like a normal human being.
As for the supporting cast, their story-lines (to the extent they exist) aren’t paid off very well; there’s one, with the sheriff in charge of the caravan and a retired vampire hunter, that’s I’d go so far as to say was incoherent.
I promised myself that I was going to wrap up and not make fun of this novel anymore, but mentioning the retired hunter reminded me of a scene where he kills a flying monster: “The man was scribing a diagram with the tip of his blade … Claire could see a figure reel backward in a bloody mist … Numb from head to toe, Claire fell over onto the ground. Her eyes never left the man. He melted into the darkness.” I actually mostly enjoy the writing of the scene; it’s over the top, but that’s not bad for a book like this. But later, when the man and Claire talk, she can’t understand why someone so skilled would retire, so he tells her: “Right up until I swung my sword, you could make me out clearly in the dark, right? But as soon as I sheathed my sword, I melted into the darkness. That’s why I can’t work as a Hunter. You always have to get the better of the darkness—that’s a requirement for hunters.” If I read dialogue where a vampire hunter talks about how they have to get the better of the darkness, without the previous context, I would perhaps think he meant that they had to get the better of the Forces of Darkness, or I might think he was making a more figurative “those that fight monsters must not become them” type of statement; the idea that he can’t be a Hunter any more because he literally turns invisible when he does his cool move would not have occurred to me.
I’d probably better stop here, before I talk my way down to one star.
On a technical level, this novel is quite badly written. Or badly translated, which amounts to the same thing unless you can speak Japanese. I’m just going to copy a bit of the first paragraph, OK? Show, don’t tell, and all that. “The face of every single person starting at the stagecoach parked in the station lot showed the most horrible loathing. They didn’t even make such faces on seeing the most evil villain who was sure to hang. It resembled the look someone got when they saw a dead body. Indeed, they seemed even more horrified, as if they looked upon the living dead.”
Additionally, it’s constantly weird and sloppy. Referring back to the people staring at the stagecoach … there must be something pretty bad in the stagecoach to have caused that reaction, right? Nope. Empty. The man (Dorleac) who’s causing all this is sitting in a jail cell when the book opens. Apparently, a huge crowd has gathered to stare at an empty stagecoach, with indescribable loathing, in anticipation of a future time when the prisoner will be in it. I am morally certain that in an early draft, Dorleac started the novel in the stagecoach, and when Hideyuki Kikuchi decided he wanted a scene where he was brought out, he forgot to change the opening lines.
Incidentally, once Dorleac actually appears, he turns out to be hot, as a result of which: “As the people saw his face, the expressions of loathing faded from their own. It was as if, for the first time in a thousand years, a gust of fresh air pushed its way through a miasma. Anyone among the spectators would have just sighed and accepted the inevitability of the change. The face of the young captive was that beautiful.” I’ve never known quite what to say about Hideyuki Kikuchi’s obsession with male beauty, but if you read that description and thought, ‘Wow, I wonder if Dorleac is even prettier than D?’, never fear: later, Dorleac will lament, “… if only that Hunter, ten thousand times more beautiful than himself, hadn’t been there.”
At one point, the caravan is lured into a vampire-infested graveyard by one of their servants, some kind of flying monster. D, who has been hired to kill the vampires, is also in the graveyard. He kills the flying thing: “Having lured D into the graveyard along with the stagecoach, the spell-casting scout had outlived its usefulness.” But it *didn’t* lure D into the graveyard, he went there intentionally as part of a job. And D didn’t kill it because it “outlived its usefulness”; when was it ever useful to D? I’m aware that this might seem like nitpicking, but this sort of thing matters; I was reading along, got to that sentence, and thought “Wait, what?” An editor should spot and fix things like this. I mean, ideally the writer would spot and fix things like that, but if not, the editor should step in.
All that’s nothing compared to this, though. The plot of the novel is that the prisoner Dorleac was a vampire’s human servant, and must be taken to the capital through dangerous territory. Usually a vampire’s servant would just be executed, but they plan to experiment on Dorleac, because he’s unique: he was found walking around in the daylight, and “there hasn’t been a servant of the Nobility who could walk around in broad daylight for decades.” Fine. I don’t know if the idea that humans who serve vampires for long periods of time, gain their weakness to sunlight, has always been in the series, or if it was invented for this book, but I’ll buy it. Except, what’s this? Nine pages later, in the same damn chapter? “The servants of the Nobility … could be more trouble to deal with than victims who had been bitten. They could walk around in the light of day or cross running water without any difficulty.” It’s obvious to me that Dorleac was originally going to be a vampire, Kikuchi’s changed his mind, and then … does he just literally not have an editor? Is this some weird Japanese publishing thing I don’t know about? I cannot believe that a professional editor read this book before it was published and didn’t tell him he needed to fix this. It’s the entire premise of the damn book!
So if you can look past bad writing and bad editing, what does the novel have going for it to make it be two stars instead of one? The first seventy pages or so were OK. They have nothing to do with D; rather, that part of the novel features a group of travelers escorting (or just traveling in the same stagecoach as) the prisoner through dangerous territory. The characters are stock, but parts of this section are pretty compelling. Is Dorleac a dangerous collaborator with magical powers? A pitiful victim who’s being sent to a terrible fate through no fault of his own? Who can say? Not the reader, and certainly not the other passengers. And when D appears, it’s mysterious: what does he want with the caravan? That’s the best possible way to use D as a character; he’s aloof and emotionless, which is supposed to make him cool, but actually makes him dull, so he’s best kept off to the side, as an unknowable force of nature for more interesting characters to bounce off of.
I was considering throwing this book a pity-three star rating, basically just for not being Nightmare Village, but also because some of the character drama was kind of fun, but the second part of the novel, where D must fight Cyborg Freddy Kruger, tanked that. He also fights a haunted stage coach, for some reason. Whatever. D is a boring hero, and Retrieval Unit LUI is a boring villain. D wasn’t great in the first novel either, but the first novel was based on Shane, so some of the character stuff from that movie sort of came through. He cared about people, and had relationships. But Hideyuki Kikuchi has since decided that that’s not badass enough, and that it would be cooler if he were totally aloof and didn’t have meaningful interactions with the rest of the cast. In fact, the rest of the cast can’t even look at D, because he’s so pretty that seeing him sends them into a trance. What a bad idea; I long for the days when Doris could just have a crush on the cool hot guy who was helping her out like a normal human being.
As for the supporting cast, their story-lines (to the extent they exist) aren’t paid off very well; there’s one, with the sheriff in charge of the caravan and a retired vampire hunter, that’s I’d go so far as to say was incoherent.
I promised myself that I was going to wrap up and not make fun of this novel anymore, but mentioning the retired hunter reminded me of a scene where he kills a flying monster: “The man was scribing a diagram with the tip of his blade … Claire could see a figure reel backward in a bloody mist … Numb from head to toe, Claire fell over onto the ground. Her eyes never left the man. He melted into the darkness.” I actually mostly enjoy the writing of the scene; it’s over the top, but that’s not bad for a book like this. But later, when the man and Claire talk, she can’t understand why someone so skilled would retire, so he tells her: “Right up until I swung my sword, you could make me out clearly in the dark, right? But as soon as I sheathed my sword, I melted into the darkness. That’s why I can’t work as a Hunter. You always have to get the better of the darkness—that’s a requirement for hunters.” If I read dialogue where a vampire hunter talks about how they have to get the better of the darkness, without the previous context, I would perhaps think he meant that they had to get the better of the Forces of Darkness, or I might think he was making a more figurative “those that fight monsters must not become them” type of statement; the idea that he can’t be a Hunter any more because he literally turns invisible when he does his cool move would not have occurred to me.
I’d probably better stop here, before I talk my way down to one star.
October 23, 2022
Not sure how the translations keep getting worse considering the same person has been doing it for 20 years, but here we are. Knocking a whole star off for the translation being particularly rough this time around.
The other star comes off because the villains are mixed but mostly uninteresting, and the while the focus on dreams and reality-bending powers by one of the villains is neat, the translation makes following what's happening in a shifting dreamscape even more difficult.
D doesn't show up until 40% of the way through the book, a common occurrence in later volumes, and it's not too bad this time considering the human cast is large and a little more varied than usual. But the way D casually saunters into the story and drops two Nobles in the span of a page is jarring and feels like something, again, was lost in the translation.
So of course D joins the group for his own reasons as they continue to transport a human via a large stagecoach to a final destination airfield to be debriefed at the Capital. Dorleac has been a "captive" of local Noble Sinistre for a decade, you see, and he's managed to escape. Of course, the humans don't trust him and assume he's a servant of the Nobility.
Considering most of the book unfolds while the characters are traveling via this large stagecoach is actually pretty interesting and a cool setpiece. Most of the remaining action takes place in a graveyard and the waystations that make up the stagecoach's stops along the way to its final destination.
As usual, the journey is not all it seems, and we end up having to fight some unexpected denizens of the Frontier en route to the final, surprisingly rushed climax.
All in all probably one of the lesser D titles, though it has its moments, and the art by Amano is, as usual, outstanding.
The other star comes off because the villains are mixed but mostly uninteresting, and the while the focus on dreams and reality-bending powers by one of the villains is neat, the translation makes following what's happening in a shifting dreamscape even more difficult.
D doesn't show up until 40% of the way through the book, a common occurrence in later volumes, and it's not too bad this time considering the human cast is large and a little more varied than usual. But the way D casually saunters into the story and drops two Nobles in the span of a page is jarring and feels like something, again, was lost in the translation.
So of course D joins the group for his own reasons as they continue to transport a human via a large stagecoach to a final destination airfield to be debriefed at the Capital. Dorleac has been a "captive" of local Noble Sinistre for a decade, you see, and he's managed to escape. Of course, the humans don't trust him and assume he's a servant of the Nobility.
Considering most of the book unfolds while the characters are traveling via this large stagecoach is actually pretty interesting and a cool setpiece. Most of the remaining action takes place in a graveyard and the waystations that make up the stagecoach's stops along the way to its final destination.
As usual, the journey is not all it seems, and we end up having to fight some unexpected denizens of the Frontier en route to the final, surprisingly rushed climax.
All in all probably one of the lesser D titles, though it has its moments, and the art by Amano is, as usual, outstanding.
February 3, 2022
Completed several weeks ago for the best and worst. D doesn't show his pretty face till deep in. No loss seeing that character interactions flow so well, of all the Hideyuki books I took in, its the best crafted. To think a lot of meat on a stagecoach. Feels you won't miss D...until certain...occurrences.
Plastered on the title, when he shows up a mix of his physical prowess and mental skills. How he revived I feel did the narrative no favors, fails falling short enough to ruin him as a package.
Regards to the occurences, makes that saying 'all good things come to an end' and here 'later' doesn't make OK. Collapses about last two chapters. I wondered why sheriff Louise, an outstanding character, did the naughty with that guy, who even questions it. If you spotted a payoff - tell me. Culminates aboard the aircraft - what transpired no less than contrived and falls into the author's tendency for vague writing.
Not an all out action tale, more in lines of a slowburn - willing to accept quality 80% though? Take it on.
PS - invite you to google my short, VAMPIRE HUNTER D - BEYOND THE DISCERNIBLE EYE.
Plastered on the title, when he shows up a mix of his physical prowess and mental skills. How he revived I feel did the narrative no favors, fails falling short enough to ruin him as a package.
Regards to the occurences, makes that saying 'all good things come to an end' and here 'later' doesn't make OK. Collapses about last two chapters. I wondered why sheriff Louise, an outstanding character, did the naughty with that guy, who even questions it. If you spotted a payoff - tell me. Culminates aboard the aircraft - what transpired no less than contrived and falls into the author's tendency for vague writing.
Not an all out action tale, more in lines of a slowburn - willing to accept quality 80% though? Take it on.
PS - invite you to google my short, VAMPIRE HUNTER D - BEYOND THE DISCERNIBLE EYE.
April 24, 2025
Absolutely loved this one. Like the previous book, D doesn't show up for the first 1/3 of the book. This allowed more time to get to know every character exclusive to this novel and understand everyone's situation. Still, when D shows up he doesn't outshine anyone. After 26 books, we know who D is. And since almost each book since volume 9 has given only crumbs of backstory and development to him, I don't mind reading more pages telling us about who's story were really hearing.
I loved how this one felt like a bit of a throwback to Demon Deathchase and The Stuff of Dreams all at once, but still had a clear identity of its own with so much of the story taking place in a giant stagecoach.
My only gripe is that I didn't want it to end! I really wish there had been just one more chapter, if not an entire second volume for this story. We were so close to finally seeing events take place at The Capitol. And I really would have loved to learn more about Dorleac and the Duke's relation, especially given the ending.
Overall, I'd place it with 'Tyrant's Stars' or 'Pilgrimage of the Sacred and Profane' as one of my favorites in the whole series thus far.
I loved how this one felt like a bit of a throwback to Demon Deathchase and The Stuff of Dreams all at once, but still had a clear identity of its own with so much of the story taking place in a giant stagecoach.
My only gripe is that I didn't want it to end! I really wish there had been just one more chapter, if not an entire second volume for this story. We were so close to finally seeing events take place at The Capitol. And I really would have loved to learn more about Dorleac and the Duke's relation, especially given the ending.
Overall, I'd place it with 'Tyrant's Stars' or 'Pilgrimage of the Sacred and Profane' as one of my favorites in the whole series thus far.
February 20, 2018
This one just dragged on with a disappointing quick ending. The whole thing was meh in regards to the villains and the powers of the people along with how D was able to beat and defy them.
October 21, 2020
This will trip your brain up.
November 6, 2023
not to my taste
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews