The Dark Place

I enjoyed the film adaptation of Sergei Lukyanenko’s decade-old Russian fantasy novel Night Watch (Дневной дозор) last evening. Some great visual effects and a pretty good English-language dub (for people who don’t like to read subtitles), although the storyline’s a little disjointed. An intriguing take on the typical vampires-in-modern-times kind of story, as it’s set in Moscow.

But I really got a kick out of this excerpt from the original book’s review by Ron Charles of The Washington Post:

In each of the novel’s three sections, Anton struggles through a torturous crisis of faith that leads up to a climactic confrontation with the forces of Evil, only to realize in the final paragraphs that his boss, a Great Magician of the Light, has planned the whole thing as a decoy to distract everyone (including us) from some secret plan off-stage. The trick ending of the first section was fairly clever; the trick ending of the second section was a little annoying; and by the end of the third, I wanted to shove somebody’s magic wand up the Dark Place.