“…”it recounts the efforts of Earth’s vampire aristocracy to repel an alien invasion, revealing at least some of the back-story to what appears to be Kikuchi’s magnum opus, a millennia-spanning conflict between Dracula and Cthulhu, glimpsed in mere fragments across a time abyss that only appears vast to mere mortals.”

“It surely did the franchise no harm that its unifying surtitle, written in a syllabary unintelligible to American lawyers as the word eirian, leapt out from bookshelves at passers-by who might have assumed it was a tie to the film Alien (1979). Yoshitaka Amano’s cover artwork might also be complicit in this subtle fakery, depicting the schooboy hero as an occasional lookalike of the actress Sigourney Weaver…”

Over at the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, I contribute a monstrously huge entry on the work of Hideyuki Kikuchi, creator of Wicked City, A Wind Named Amnesia, Vampire Hunter D, and many more.