An interesting idea that ultimately chickens out of really going somewhere interesting. The premise is that a garrison of German soldiers stationed in a lonely castle in Transylvania start getting murdered by some sort of supernatural being.

What would have made the story really interesting would have been playing with the idea of who should one, as a reader, identify with in this scenario: the monster or the Germans. But unfortunately Wilson doesn’t have the courage of where the idea should have really taken him, in making the German commander the protagonist and ‘hero’. It would have been even more interesting to make the commander of the SS detachment that comes in to sort out the problem the protagonist. Unfortunately, we get a more normal hero, in a semi-supernatural vampire killer, and it all gets fairly predictable thereafter. But imagine the genuine discomfort of a book where you don’t know who is the real monster (which would have required not chickening out the other way and making the vampire sympathetic). Now that would have been a really interesting book. This book, however, is competent but nothing more.