Pinocchio Vampire Slayer: Pinocchio and the Great Puppet Theater

This second volume in the series sees a vengeance-obsessed Pinocchio joined in his quest to rid the world of vampires and their mysterious, off-stage master by a troupe of similarly magically animated puppets. The vampires are themselves obsessed with Pinocchio and possibly in possession of information that Pinocchio himself lacks about the origin of the magical wood used to make the puppet. While vulnerable to Pinocchio and his fellow puppets' wooden weapons, the vampires have the advantage of numbers and the ability to easily convert Pinocchio's human friends into monsters like themselves. As allies fall or are converted, Pinocchio oversteps and is faced with the consequences of a marvelous but inconvenient transformation. Higgins's art does a nice job of capturing the story and creating strong characters. Although inflicting the current fad for adding vampires and other undead to the settings of classic works of literature may annoy some, the original Pinocchio was itself both fantastic and filled with nightmare fuel; this is one of the few examples of this new genre that is arguably justifiable. (Nov.)