Black Vs. White And How To Break It Up

Vampire hunting - if there’s any profession which is more suited to ‘black vs. white’ thinking, I’ve yet to see it. (Well, monster hunting on the whole is as suited, I guess.) Yet, “Brian Helsing: The World’s Unlikeliest Vampire Hunter” shows that doesn’t have to be the case. Okay, a lot of the vampires in the novels are just evil, but the same doesn’t go for other beings he meets - and that’s where the story actually gets interesting.

Warning: this post discusses plot lines and content of the “Brian Helsing” series. If you haven’t read it so far (up to #7) and don’t want to encounter spoilers, you should read this post after reading the series.

A lot of stories, especially pulp or adventure yarns, do a pretty clear divide between who is a white hat and who is a black one (this ‘good vs. evil’ metaphor was brought to you by early TV and movie western). It makes for an easy conflict where each side knows whom to shoot and the audience doesn’t need to learn which side to cheer on. With horror stories, no matter whether the good guys win or not, it’s usually just as easy. Monsters are bad, humans are good.

And then there is Brian Helsing. Who, first of all, actually isn’t Brian Helsing. It’s not his name, his last name is Trelawney. He is the Helsing, the vampire and overall monster hunter. It’s a job description. Brian also isn’t a warrior and sure as hell doesn’t want to be the Helsing. But he has put on the ring and now he is the Helsing until the day he dies, when another one, number 14, will take over. It’s pretty much like Buffy, but with more than one watcher (there’s four masters teaching and assisting him plus a whole order to work with) and a slightly longer life expectancy for most of the bearers of the Helsing title (Helsing XII, his predecessor, was in his sixties when he died). And despite not wanting the job and being afraid of doing it, Brian sticks with his work, he grows and learns, becoming a more powerful Helsing with every book.

At the beginning of almost every mission (not his holiday-turned-mission in Egypt, of course), Brian is told the basics about the monster he’s sent after and usually given what the Master of Technology thinks will work best. If magic is an issue, Brian also gets a bit of magic coaching from the Master of Magic (and usually a host of bruises from the Master of Combat as well). If the monster has already been faced and a corpse has been retrieved, a trip to the bestiary with the Master of the Bestiary follows. Prepared thus, Brian is sent on his way and has to deal with things on his own.

As mentioned, though, Brian is no warrior. He used to be a used-car salesman until the day he did a test drive with a vampire and ended up driving her over to save his own life, after she’d mortally wounded Helsing XII. Brian isn’t hot on fighting and, despite being pretty socially inept, usually looks for an alternative way to just killing the monsters.

With the banshee in the first story, that goes without saying, since a ghost can’t be killed. Brian is supposed to calm her down and tell her there’s no reason to stay behind. After almost seeing his only friend Neil killed, however, he instead rants at her to get over having been rejected, since she obviously was a beautiful woman and could have had ten other guys better than the one she’s still moaning over. And about how that happens to everyone and you just accept it and move on - no ‘red pill’ popper, Brian. Believe it or not, it actually works. The banshee gives him a kiss and moves on into the afterlife.

In the second story, Brian is sent out to kill a group of water nymphs who are going to catch, drown, and eat several people in a winter surfing competition. But the first nymph he meets is actually a vegan and very nice and Brian simply doesn’t see how he could kill all the other nymphs without getting really brutal about it. So he drags them away from the competition and talks to them. They are sick of fish and see man-meat (no, not just that part) as the only viable other food source, but once he’s shown them the many types of food humans make, they happily switch to chicken, kebab, and many other human foods instead of feeding on humans. So, instead of killing them, he just gives them another option.

If, however, we as the readers think that’s always going to be the case, the next mission teaches us better. Despite the fact that werewolves are nice enough people when it’s not full moon, they cannot control themselves in the wolf shape and they cannot reliably be kept apart from humans. As much as it pains him, Brian’s only choice here in the end is to kill the whole pack. But even Helsing I, the very first and true bearer of the Helsing name, respects Brian’s tries to find other than final ways. He just also teaches Brian that sometimes (as with hell being unleashed in 10th century Jerusalem) killing them all is the only option. Yet, on the way to the hell gate, we also see Helsing I save a group of Saracen warriors, despite being a crusader himself.

In Japan, Brian learns that he, as the Helsing, is judge, jury, and executioner rolled into one and it’s ultimately his decision who is guilty and who has to die. So it’s not the kappa he is killing in the end, it’s the sorcerer who enslaved it and used it as a tool. The kappa itself is free to return to its home, far from humans, and live its life.

This whole ‘I decide who’s the guilty party’ theme returns in the next novel, where Brian is sent out to kill Black Annis, the most wicked witch of Scotland, who is supposed to steal and eat children to stay young. It turns out that Annis, despite being an outrageously powerful witch, actually isn’t evil. After having materialized her powers as a young girl and having been beaten cruelly by the nuns who raised her (to ‘beat the magic out of her’), she has spent her considerable life (1,000 years and counting) finding and rescuing children who were mistreated or unwanted, giving them a good and loving home and raising them. It’s the nuns who prove to be a problem which needs to be taken care of for good (but not by violence).

The curse of being the Helsing also follows Brian to his vacation with Aimi, one of the oni-hunters from the fourth novel. His plans for the vacation in Egypt were to sleep, drink, have sex (if possible), and just relax. Fate’s plans for the vacation were a djin, a kraken, several golems, mummies, and a powerful, centuries-old sorcerer looking for one of the artefacts Brian will need to keep Cthulu from rising from its sleep. Which shows fate is not going to give Brian any time off, no matter what the order thinks about it. And he has to do all that while making sure the last descendant of Helsing I by blood and his husband are not going to die while adventuring. His takeout of one of the golems shows how much his control over the ring has grown: he slows down time for a long while, which would probably have killed him when he learned about it in the previous novel - just as creating enough heat to turn a djin (a being of sand and wind) into glass should have made his head explode.

A big change in tone and in the bestiary as we’ve known it so far comes with the next novel and Brian’s trip to the vampire circus. For the first time, it’s not the occasional vampire, who mostly doesn’t pose much of a threat, or Cassandra, who is there to remind Brian very much of how weak he still is. It’s a whole circus full of vampires and the occasional other supernatural creature, such as a merman. With this novel, two things change in the world of “Brian Helsing.” First of all, Brian is for the first time forced to dig deep into the darkest parts of his soul, finding his ruthlessness and his cruelty, because otherwise he won’t be able to defeat a Pure Blood (third generation vampires, extremely powerful, Cassandra is one of them) or something even stronger (like a second generation Prime, made by the first vampire Drakul himself). He doesn’t like what he finds there, but he learns to use it, nevertheless. The second thing is vampires. There are a lot of them in the circus, but about half of them, including Bob whom Brian spends some time with, make sure not to kill or, barring that, only to live off those who deserve death (such as dangerous criminals or death-row inmates). And after facing down three Pure Bloods (plus a fourth before he gets the training) and a Prime, Brian lets those walk away before killing the rest of the circus crew - proving again that the world he lives in is not black and white and that Brian isn’t just a vampire hunter. He is judge, jury, and executioner and thus he decides whom to kill and whom to let live.

The important lesson to take away from the series isn’t just ‘how to do the unlikely hero right’ (although it does so well). It’s also how to do something which should be all black and white and do it with nuances, with many, many shades of grey (certainly more than 50). Brian isn’t just killing everything not human. He kills humans who deserve it (like the sorcerers in Japan and Egypt), but he also lets non-humans who are no threat live (like the water nymphs, the kappa, Black Annis, or the vampires who still respect humans as a species instead of only considering them a meal). And he doesn’t just feel righteous about killing. He feels guilty as hell in some cases, horrible enough to get physically sick. But he still does it, because he is the defender of the innocent, no matter of what species.

‘Black vs. white’ is an old tradition and there are a lot of stories which work very well that way. But you’ll get more interesting stories if you consider breaking it up. Even in genres which lend themselves to the ‘black vs. white’ approach, it can be very interesting not to use it.