30 Days of Night: Immortal Remains – review

Authors: Steve Niles and Jeff Mariotte

First published: 2007

Contains spoilers

This is the second prose novel set in the ’30 Days’ universe and the events within take place sometime after those described in the first novel, Rumours of the Undead, and after those events described in the short graphic “The Journal of John Ikos”.

The book brings in several familiar characters but is primarily centred on the vampire Dane, who we first encountered in Dark Days. Dane is a firm believer in the philosophy that vampires must remain hidden for their survival and when he hears of several blatant home invasions in the town of Savannah, Georgia, in which a victim would be brutally killed and drained and any other resident would then be abducted, he identifies the unmistakable hand of a vampire and goes to investigate before the humans realise what they are up against.

The novel follows that investigation and the subsequent events that follow in its wake. Other familiar faces that return include Eben and Stella Olemaun and Andy Grey, who was the central character in the previous prose novel.

There is a goodly chunk of action sequences throughout the book but what the book does do is provide a vast amount of background to Dane himself, and subsequently Marlowe, the vampire who arranged the attack on Barrow in the original 30 Days of Night, as he turned Dane. We also get a brief appearance by Operation Red-Blooded, the human anti-vampire black ops unit, enough to realise that they seem as dangerous and psychotic as many of the vampires and enough to wet our appetite about more being centred around them.

The book introduces some interesting lore snippets, much of which is so plot specific that I don’t want to reveal it. We do, however, get the hint that, in certain situations, a vampire biting another vampire can cause a jump in the powers of the recipient of the bite – but no indication of the exact rules and detail of the phenomena. Whilst the story does wrap up nicely we are left with a couple of over-arching cliffhangers, which will presumably be addressed in a future volume.

A very nice addition to the lore of the series, I have to admit that I couldn’t put the book down. 7.5 out of 10 and a thank you to NickW, who bought me the volume.