An Odyssey to the Castle of Vampires

A few months ago, I wrote a Top 5 of DWaM’s work, wanting to honor the amateur author who first got me into impossible crime fiction and made me believe (perhaps foolishly) that I could write it myself. At the end, I promised to return when DWaM released Vampire Castle, which I thought would never happen. As you can tell by the title of this review, I was wrong—and I’m quite pleased about that.

An Odyssey to the Castle of Vampires is by far DWaM’s longest work, no doubt inspired by Nikaidou Reito’s sadly un-translated The Terror of the Werewolf Castle. Both books are comprised of four long parts, stacking impossible crime upon impossible crime, and featuring a huge cast of characters born to die. They also have narratives that cross national borders and time periods, united by a central thread of puzzles. As far as I know, that’s where the similarities end, though it’s hard to compare the books having read only one of them.

The story centers on Dagon Hill, a hidden town of German immigrants where everyone follows a weird religion and drinks blood that makes them immortal. This is the story’s one supernatural element (kind of, I guess), but it has clear enough rules that it can fit into the mysteries—and speaking of mysteries, the book jumps right into them. First are some classic footprints puzzles, then an inexplicable suicide, then a man dismembered in mere minutes within a locked room, then an impossibly exploding car. And that’s just the first part.

The story is clearly influenced by all kinds of mystery tropes, most obviously impossible crime narratives. The inclusion of a central building steeped in creepy lore (the titular Castle of Vampires) brings to mind shin-honkaku fiction. Many of the footprint puzzles seem right out of Halter. Later on, we find ourselves in a classic And Then There Were None scenario, with characters forced to suspect each other and ponder the possibility of an outside force. However, DWaM continues to create entirely new situations, such as the exploding car which seems entirely unprecedented in the genre. It’s all topped off with DWaM’s trademark weird, cynical writing style, piling on terrifying mythology and overwhelming characters.

However, as DWaM says in the description on the download page, whatever you want the story to be, it won’t be. Which is a shame, because it makes it hard for me to earnestly recommend this to mystery fans compared to his novellas. I guess it’s useful to know right out the bat a book might disappoint you, but I’d generally prefer to not be disappointed?

I don’t want to sound too harsh, since I enjoyed so much of DWaM’s other books, but An Odyssey to the Castle of Vampires is much more vague and ambiguous than DWaM’s novellas. I’m not against ambiguity in fiction, and I’m not even against ambiguity in mysteries. It can be interesting if parts of the killer’s motive are left to the reader’s imagination, for example. However, mysteries are about finding the truth, so ambiguity should ideally be kept to a minimum. If you show me that truth, and then laugh in my face because I still don’t know the Truth with a capital T, I’m left wondering why I picked up the book in the first place.

Because of that, I think the book wasn’t entirely meant for me. I’ve seen a lot of people who enjoy throwing out theories on the deaths, having finished the book, and I’m glad they get so much enjoyment out of that. If you enjoy feeling like an active participant in the mysteries, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better book than this. However, I don’t have time for that. There are simply too many books to read. I prefer books to be self-contained, something I can close and put on the shelf, confident I’ve gotten everything the author expected me to get from it.

Of course, I enjoyed a lot of the book, from the lovely diagrams for both puzzles and solutions to the rising tensions between characters, and even some lovely alternate history about the Moon landings. If you like stories that revolve around back and forth deduction battles (like Umineko or Offerings to Nothingness), you’ll definitely like this, as a lot of the scenes are devoted to suggesting and eliminating solutions to each crime and determining who could be responsible. The prose is fun to immerse yourself in, and many of the scenes will haunt you beyond the page.

The third part in particular delves into some interesting meta narrative, which isn’t commonly seen in DWaM’s other work, but is used to great effect here. It makes sense, as a story dedicated to the many tropes of the mystery genre, especially after we’ve seen the same puzzles play out over many years. This also results in the most insane Sherlock and Watson dynamic in any book I’ve ever read.

There are some minor flaws I’m willing to excuse, considering the necessities of the book. Several of the characters aren’t very interesting, considering they’re only going to be future victims, but most of them at least stand out. Still, it’s very easy to get them confused, and I actually had to take notes to keep track of all the people who died and in what order. The story also tends to jump around a lot, with very little time for the characters to breathe. Most of the murders have huge time skips between them, but there’s little indication of time passing, which can lead to a disjointed reading experience. However, I wasn’t overly concerned about any of this, and for the first half of the book, you could have easily convinced me it would be my favorite of the year.

Unfortunately, that’s not how things played out. At this point, I want to give a minor spoiler warning. Since this is such a long book, it’s hard to explain what disappointed me about it without giving away details. Some would argue this book is best gone into knowing as little as possible, though I think if you’re going to read something this long you should know what to expect. If you’d rather remain unspoiled, then hop off now—or just read my NIGHT FILM review, since I had roughly similar feelings about both books.

Everything starts out nice when we move deeper into the third part and find ourselves in the solution chapter. This part of the book is incredible. DWaM turns the most bizarre, baffling clues into the basis of an explanation that strings together incredibly distant elements of the narrative. Everything comes together in a truly marvelous way. The villain’s plan is horrifying but almost beautiful when it’s laid out. The impossible dismemberment receives an insane but exhilarating explanation, and the exploding car is even better. The car might honestly be my favorite DWaM problem. Some of the other solutions stretch disbelief, but it’s easier to forgive in such a gargantuan effort, and others are so simple as to be brilliant.

Then one character says one line and single-handedly ruins everything. From there, it’s all downhill. The villain basically gets away with it (and sure, there was no proof on them anyway), which honestly I could have been okay with. The whole point is to shake up detective tropes, so why not shake up the biggest one of all?

But the story continues to bang on after this moment, trying to suggest alternative solutions to every crime. Which would be fine, if any of them were especially good—only one is remotely inspired. Not to mention these solutions don’t even try to fit together with each other, leave several things completely unexplained, and barely even convince the people suggesting them.

I was honestly baffled at this point. There’s something in the idea of a mystery story with two competing explanations that are left to the reader to decide between (and I’m guessing this exists already), but both of these explanations would have to be complete or at least satisfying. No matter who you believe here, you’re not going to be gratified.

From here on, the book totally lost me. There’s one more attempt at an impossible crime, with a solution too mediocre for a short story, and then…something happens? Your guess is as good as mine. And without even the whiff of a FIN, the book is gone, like the little prick of a vampire’s teeth.

A lot of plot threads are left dangling. One of the most major characters disappears from the plot. The sub-plot with the Moon and the Moon Swords™ goes nowhere. I feel like there’s a lot of missed potential, which is understandable in a book of this size, but at the same time it’s hard to understand what the point of anything was.

Maybe this story is too avant-garde for me. Maybe it’s one of those books you either love or hate. There’s also a huge chance that I’m just really, really stupid. I entertained not even posting this review, since I don’t want to come off as super negative about a book that a lot of people enjoyed. I did as well, up to a point. Honestly, if it had ended right before that one line, I could put this book at the top of my rankings, with the small addendum that it ended abruptly.

But as a self-published work that’s was seemingly the product of years of labor, I’m mostly just glad this book got finished at all. I’d still take this over the millions of bland thrillers taking up space on the mystery shelf, and I’d still recommend it since it feels like the kind of book you have to form your own opinion on. However, if you’ve never read a DWaM book before, I’d start with Hear the Devil Sing or The Four Fiends of Niflheim, or even save this one for last. At the very least, you’ll finish those with a sense of satisfaction and not a trace of confusion. But if you want to be confused, well…quit reading this review and pick up the book already.