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O'Shaughnessy's biggest achievement here is creating a believable story with elements of fantasy that expresses an understanding of moral ambiguity. At first, Shan refuses to take blood from humans even though he would not need to kill them in order to do so, but he slowly comes to the realization that he must do so in order to survive and ultimately help protect them from more vicious things that walk the night. At one point, Shan encounters a vegetarian - someone who would seem to have the moral high ground over him until it becomes clear that there are other aspects of his personality that aren't as nice. Nearly every person that Shan encounters presents some other kind of moral riddle that exposes the reader to a profound amount of moral complexity.

The problem is that the story itself really isn't all that interesting. Certain groups have praised this book as being really good for middle school kids, but I don't remember having much problem with adult novels by the likes of Anne Rice and Bram Stoker when I was that age. And the maturity level of Darren and his friends prior to the whole vampire thing seems much more closely aligned with kids in fourth or fifth grade. Anyone older than that is going to be bored by the tone of the narrative. For the most part, the plot is nothing that hasn't been seen in this genre before and O'Shaughnessy seems to be writing down to his audience a bit. The story doesn't really start getting interesting until the end of the second book, by which time most older readers would have already lost interest. For a novel with a lot going on in it, there really isn't much of interest through the 450-some pages of the first three books.

The Movie

Given his love of horror films and cinematic darkness, The Vampire's Assistant would have been the perfect project for Tim Burton circa 1987 or so , but Burton and Hollywood have come a long way since the late ‘80s and instead we get Paul Weitz - someone who has had more experience with interpersonal drama than fantastic visuals and eerie moods. Weitz also was one of two people credited with adapting the books for the screen, which allows him to focus the film on his own strengths as a director.

Right away, it becomes apparent that the milieu of the book has been changed. Instead of the interesting and ambiguous feel of a residential UK, the film is set pretty solidly in the US. We have a considerably older high school-aged Darren Shan somewhat competently played by 17-year old Chris Massoglia. This changes things considerably. The books have a much younger kid only beginning to enter adolescence and contend with all the emotional difficulties of that while simultaneously dealing with all the problems that go along with being a vampire. With the book's adolescence-as-vampirism thing stripped from the story, it comes across as much more of a traditional vampire story compete with al the standard heroes and villains populating a dark world of shadows just beyond the normal plane of human consciousness. Yawn. There isn't even really much exploration of moral ambiguity, which was such a pleasure to see in the books and probably the only genuinely novel thing about them.

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