journal features

Near Dark

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Kokubunji, 2022.05.10

This is the tale of a young Texan who falls in with a bunch of vampires. It veers between camp and drama as you might expect from vampire fare, and races around the region in the glory of peak Americana. The cast is particularly good, with Adrian Pasdar (who would twenty years later go on to star in Heroes) playing the lost Texan and the vampires including Lance Henriksen, the late Bill Paxton, and Jenette Goldstein (the immortalized foster mother in Terminator 2). I was frequently surprised at the speed at which days and nights blurred past, but if anything the unreality of it adds to the nightmare as our young hero struggles with the morale bankruptcy of his new life of vampirism. The young fem fatale who drew him into this world is conflicted in her attraction for the hesitant young man. The Texan's little sister is thrown into peril for good mix once his father decides to take her on the road to find him. Law enforcement eventually get drawn in, and all hell breaks loose.

It's good for a laugh. A dated laugh, but a laugh.

Recommended.

rand()m quote

Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something. The ingredients are there. You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life. Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning for you. If it does, then the particular balance of success or failure is of less account.

—John Gardner