The Bloody Dozen: A Tale of the Shrouded College

Hope is the daughter who uses her army-trained sniper skills for drugs.  Greta is the mother who traded away her shot at astronaut glory only to lose her husband instead.  George is the grandfather who has spent a lifetime of killing for his country with little to show for it.  The members of this family don’t like each other very much these days, but the Shrouded College thinks they’ve got the right stuff to go into space on a mission for them.  Of course, the question is whether or not any amount of training will turn these three into a crew with the skills to break some vampires out of their prison – right next to the sun!

“The Shrouded College” is writer Charles Soule’s linked series of fantasy stories that deal with high-concept genre mash-ups.  The first was a magical action story that pitted a couple against someone who thought he could use the devil’s currency against him.  This is the vampire jailbreak story – IN SPACE – and the details surrounding it are more fun than the actual story.  We get to learn the secret history of vampires in this world, get to know a bit more about the College and their plans, see what is best described as “NASA Hogwarts,” and find out how you vampire-proof space suits.  All of this is skillfully and energetically illustrated by Soule’s “Letter 44” collaborator Alberto Albuquerque.

While “Hell to Pay” was dragged down by its not-very-likeable leads, the family unit at the center of this story doesn’t even have that going for them.  They’re too generically written for me to feel anything for them with their faults and squabbles coming off as formulaic as you’d expect.  That may be by Soule’s design, given the rather dark fates that await them, but there’s little nihilistic joy to be had in seeing that unfold.  The same can be said of the vampires we meet as nearly all of them are ideas of characters rather than actual individuals.  All of which continues to leave me lukuewarm on the writer’s larger plans for this series of stories, but I think I’ll wait and see if his “John Wick” vs. Russian zombies story is any good before throwing in the towel on it.