There are good books. Even while you know certain works aren’t objectively full of literary merit—they read a little like self-insert fanfiction from the early days of AO3—you can’t stop reading and enjoying them. The Blood Altar is one of those under a dark moon. The narrative, which was developed in collaboration with the Korean boy band Enhyphen, recasts the members as extraordinarily attractive vampire males attending a prestigious boarding school. Just for kicks, a normal (kind of) young woman named Sooha is placed among them. Naturally, Sooha attracts the attention of all the lads, including the rival werewolves from a different school. (Since it makes sense, the werewolves are modeled after the boy band members.) However, Sooha’s negative vampire experiences provide a somewhat fabricated roadblock for the developing reverse harem relationship. It’s ridiculous, exaggerated, and unstoppable.
You don’t need to be familiar with the group in order to understand this, even though Enhyphen is involved with the series. Since every vampire has a unique appearance and attitude that probably aims to highlight some part of the member that inspired them, I suppose there will be Easter eggs for the die-hard fans. That also applies to werewolves, even if by volume two we don’t know them nearly as well as we do vampires. Heli is the group’s composed leader and the main boy. With telepathy as his supernatural ability, Heli (modeled after Enhyphen’s Heeseung) is the one who meets Sooha when she first gets to Riverfield and takes her under his wing. To say that Heli is worried when she confesses her dislike of vampires would be understating the situation. Heli is drawn to her in ways he cannot describe. It’s not that he doesn’t get it; her account of being shunned in her community because someone thought she was a vampire is made worse by the fact that the only person who believed her was a youngster named Chris who was slain by a vampire. If the discrimination she experienced growing up contributed to her perception of vampires as deadly creatures, Chris’s passing did little to change her mind about the possibility that vampires could actually be fairly human. Even though Heli isn’t one to divulge his true identity to others, it still bothers him that the girl he’s starting to develop feelings for finds him so repugnant.
In other words, Heli and the other boys put in a lot of effort over the course of a book and a half to prevent Sooha from learning the truth. They inform her about their many special abilities, and it seems that they do so both because they want her to accept them for who they are and because it would be difficult to keep some of them a secret (Shion’s ability to manipulate gravity in particular). Heli can move forward with developing a connection with Sooha while also easing her into the idea that he is harmless and cautious not to abuse, or even just overuse, the skill. This is made possible by Heli’s telepathy, which offers an easy way to intimacy. The most obvious theme in these two volumes is how much the lads want acceptance—especially from Sooha—and to know that they are not destined to live on the periphery of society forever because of their vampire heritage.
It becomes increasingly obvious why this is so important to them as we discover more about their past. The gang was raised in what they kindly refer to as an orphanage, but volume two reveals it was really more of a jail designed to keep the vampire kids hidden from the outside world. It doesn’t seem like this was done for their benefit; rather, it seems like they were imprisoned there to prevent anyone from learning about them. The fact that they are at Riverfield does not imply that the headmaster is no longer in charge of them. It indicates that they managed to get away from him and his “orphanage” at some point, though it’s unclear exactly how. They play a daily game of hiding their vampire identities, and despite their best efforts, they are unable to resist the temptation of being known and accepted by someone. The second part of volume two’s tensions rise significantly when Sooha finds out the truth, but not because they choose to tell her.
Chris is the last missing piece of the jigsaw that designer Hybe still has us trying to fit in. Sooha’s life has been molded by the loss of Chris, her sole childhood friend who was the only one to think that Sooha wasn’t a vampire but rather just unique. She sees someone who appears to be a teenage Chris on the outskirts of her life when she gets to Riverfield, but that shouldn’t be possible because she saw him after a vampire killed him and he was resting in his coffin with a prophylactic stake through his heart. So how could the young boy have wandered about as an adult? And if it is him, why isn’t he making a more concerted effort to make contact? He seems to be there as of volume two to help Sooha deal with the realization that vampires aren’t all the same, so we can make some educated guesses (and I think we’d be right; the mystery isn’t this series’ strong strength). It also begs the question—which Heli and his adopted brothers are ignorant of—of whether vampires are created or born. It’s not especially inventive or even deep mythology, but it’s enough to keep things interesting.
Dark Moon: There is something terribly conceited about the Blood Altar. There’s nothing really novel or intriguing in the plot, and Sooha’s amazing array of suitors (albeit, once more, Heli and werewolf Khan appear to be the primary romantic interests) smack of self-insert fanfiction. The lads are easily distinguished from one another, and the artwork is great. Its use of purples and blues to create mood is appealing, even though Chris, the teenage character, makes some bad outfit choices. In spite of these problems, this is the kind of light reading that goes well with a tray of brownies—it’s almost compulsively readable. This is a good series to take up if you’re into professionally edited fanfiction or if you’re just in the mood for lovely vampires.
