For a story about vampires, Night of the Beasts isn’t that much focused on the blood-sucking beasts. And that’s not inherently a bad thing. Incidentally, the protagonist of the movie this relates to has been demoted to a side, almost background character. This is a story of the world told from the point of view of a more regular human. Which brings us to the question, do you need to see other Blood anime before reading this. In most cases of light novel spin-offs, that is a no-brainer with yes as an answer, but this is an exception. First, you only need to watch theBlood: The Last Vampire movie. Second – you don’t even need to do that, as Night of the Beasts actually serves as a nice introduction to the world, more in depth explanation of the world building, a sort of prologue to the movie events.

The movie starts with introduction to a life of a student revolutionary activist and this goes on for some time. Not that I mind. The supernatural part of the plot is presented as a mystery, for the protagonist to figure what even is going on, and this serves as a nice way to get the reader into the world building, as we explore along him.

For me, the most interesting part starts around the half of the novel, with the very best part being the following chapter 4. You could call it rant or a tangent. Certainly, if you dislike long dialogues that are approaching the territory of monologuing, you are going to hate this. For me, I have certainly enjoyed the characters debating in length the historical context and creation of the vampire myth, in a nice juxtaposition with eating a barbecue, a point that is made more clear later. Yes, this novel managed to arrange for eating a barbecue to be a deep content. What finally made me rise the score from the 6 that I was going to give this was the shift of the discussion from vampire mythology to examination of various ideologies and philosophies, and using them to make their point in relation to the supernatural plot. Descartes, Hobbes, Darwin, Marx and more. A great combination between real world and fiction, resulting in a section that feels both entertaining and educational, as the quality of the arguments present is really surprisingly high. Amazing writing in this part, really.

There is no art other then the cover, at least in the English release, so not much to talk about here except for the cover being a bit clickbaity - as mentioned, Saya isn't exactly the spotlight of the story.

So yeah, feel free to pick this up even if you’re completely unfamiliar with the Blood franchise. Actually, if you are familiar with it, don’t expect this to be a typical part of the franchise, as the tone is quite different from the usual horror action.