There is horror and then there is horror. Horror can be cerebral, or emotional, horror can be funny or outraging, horror can be grotesque or violent. Emily Carroll’s horror is not the same as Yoshimurakana‘s. And for different people, horror will serve different needs. Chiri Yuino’s Scarlet, Volume 1 sits on a fence in the middle of several kinds of horror, but commits to none of them.
Finé and Iris are bound by a promise made in blood. Iris, a werewolf will protect Finé and let her drink her blood, until Finé breaks the curse of the drug that she is under and becomes human once again. Then Finé will pay her debt with her life and let Iris eat her. Until then they travel together trying to stop the scourge of this drug that turns humans into blood-drinking monsters.
Whether this is a fairytale reworked to be gritty, or an allegory of drug addiction or just a mutation horror story, I still am not entirely sure. Nor am I sure that the creator was sure. In any case the story moves briskly from not being able to help a young girl to losing her sister (accurately named Misery) to a far more powerful evil.
Yuri has two equally unattractive varieties: Iris and Finé are lovers as much as they are anything else. As I said in my review of the Japanese volume, “They are shockingly likeable. Iris is a cheerful drunken werewolf, Finé is the requisite emo bloodsucking creature with a sword. All is well with the world. Unless you are a elixir-mutated demon.”There is a kind of affection between them, certainly, in that they care for each other the way one does with a medication.
And, when they come to confront the demon sharing the drug around, they encounter an orgy of soon-to-be-inhuman women. None of it is aesthetically pleasing but I assumed it was not meant to be. If you’re a fan of blood and mutating bodies, this might appeal to you. I found the breast-squeezing painful to look at, and we do spend a lot of time looking at Iris’ breasts.
The story will come to a climax and an end in Volume 2, which is slated for an October release.
“Scarlet isn’t a vampire story
Although it’s plenty bloody and gore-y
A fairy tale it is not
Revenge against evil is the plot
Against a Goth-Loli demon in all of her lace glory”
Also borrowed from my review of V1 in Japanese.
Ratings:
Art – 7
Story – 7
Characters – 7
Service – 6
Yuri – 6 In their own hungry way, Iris and Finé care for one another.
Overall – 8
Scarlet is slightly better than the sum of its parts, and not really a vampire story, but not really a drug story or a monster story, either.
Thanks very much to Seven Seas for the review copy!
Since we are discussing lesbian vampires, Sabrina Cotugno (who does the webcomic “The Glass Scientists” featuring Jekyll and Hyde) did a really complex page today, March 23, 2020. And then she commented:
“Let’s go to the mall, everybody!
“This is probably the most complicated page there will ever be in the entire comic. Not that intense things won’t happen later in the story, but this is the only page that has this much going on, visually. The point of this reveal is that Hyde has been looking forward to Blackfog since the very beginning of the story, and it actually turns out to be just as awesome as he’d hoped, and that’s a big ask for one panel, lol.
“There’s a mix of literary references and general steampunk-looking-guys here. I’ll leave most of them up to you to parse out, but I want to point out one reference that several readers tipped me off on: the flying vampires at the top are the Karnstein coven, headed by Carmilla, from the novella of the same name. Carmilla is an early work of vampire fiction, predating Dracula by several years, and it is gay as hell. It’s also a pretty easy read and public domain (like Jekyll and Hyde!), so if you’ve ever wanted a story about “Oh no! My hot mysterious roommate is a shapeshifting lesbian vampire!” you can read it on Project Gutenberg or listen to it on Librivox.”
The Project Gutenberg URL for Carmilla is https://www.gutenberg.org/files/10007/10007-h/10007-h.htm
Thanks for the link! I read and reviewed Carmilla back when I started my “Summer Reading” project in 2012. It was…definitely a thing. LOL My opinion of vampires hasn’t gone up, but they are always popular. ^_^
The Carmilla webseries was a fun mix of Lovecraft and Le Fanu, too. ^_^
I thought it was a very enjoyable romp. I was looking for a light supernatural story with yuri and it met my expectations to a T. However, I am a bit worried what I’ll find in volume 2 as a) many people say it’s a mess b) it might not have a happy ending and I always want a happy ending in my yuri stories.