30 Days of Night – Steve Niles, Ben Templesmith

           30 Days of Night introduces a vampire tale in a graphic medium. The plot is simple. The small Alaskan town of Barrow experiences a polar winter every year lasting thirty days, and a vampire baddy named Marlow decides to cash in on the opportunity and orchestrates a month long feeding frenzy for twenty of his kind. A few individuals survive the initial frenzy and hide, but soon their food stores run low and it is apparent they won’t survive to see the sun at the rate things are going. The town sheriff, Eben sacrifices himself, and injects blood from an infected citizen to turn himself into a vampire and uses his new strength to destroy the vampires. And then he decides to watch the sunrise with his wife and end his existence before he entirely loses his humanity.

            The graphic novel is under a hundred pages long. Even with an incredibly simple plot, I think the story suffers for its brevity. The title of the work is 30 Days of Night. Thirty days of the vampire apocalypse in total darkness, cut off from the outside world, starving and freezing, might as well be an eternity. The narrative doesn’t do justice to the situation. The entire month is glossed through with a vampire killing montage. The entire day to day struggle of the survivors is lost, with all of their fear, despair, and grief. The novel spends more time on the set up than it does on the event, and even the resolution. I felt an emotional disconnect from the story and characters. The only panel that got to me was the last one, when Eben and his wife watch their last sunrise.

            That said, the vampires in 30 Days of Night have a unique feel to them, partially contributed through their characteristics, and partially due to the art style. These vampires are intelligent, but have clearly lost their humanity. They lack the seductive grace and refinement of the modern vampire and instead exhibit bestial savagery, and overwhelming hunger. The muted colors and sketchy style of the art, though confusing at times, gives a gritty, hardboiled feel to the beasts. They are primitive, not in intelligence, they clearly have higher reasoning powers, but in their mentality. Most of the vampires are completely driven by their most base desire to feed above all else. The artistic focus on teeth and wide, gaping mouths drives the endless hunger of the monsters home, and their glossy black eyes robs them of humanity. These vampires are not tormented by their fallen state, or haunted by memories of the past. They are clearly new beings, completely disjoined with whoever they were in life.

            In some ways, the 30 Days of Night vampires reminded me more of the Wendigo from Algonquian myth; a terrible spirit of hunger and cannibalism, that feeds and feeds but is never satiated. I enjoyed these vampires because the theme of insatiable hunger is one I enjoy in horror. It drives the monsters with limitless motivation, robs the prey of any hope of respite, and dehumanizes the survivors at the same time, degenerating them into so much meat, blood and bone. That level of dehumanization is frightening in many ways, because it forces people to look at the reality of their mortality. We are meat. All of the intelligence, emotion, dreams, and soul of our existence is no assurance that we will ever be more than meat when we die.

            Ironic that the immortal vampires of 30 Days of Night can embody the fear of ultimate human mortality.