What's Allies Of The Night (the 8th book of my Cirque Du Freak series) like if you re-read it as an adult?? A fan called LUKE decided to find out, and documented his take on the book here: https://medium.com/@lukewhenderson/rereading-cirque-du-freak-as-an-adult-pt-8-allies-of-the-night-a6b7add5b35e

***SPOILERS ***

I'm going to talk about events from the book here, so if you haven't read it, and don't want spoilers, my advice is to stop reading NOW.

Luke raises a very interesting point about the Vampets, and their similarity to fascists like the Nazis. This was definitely deliberate. Luke doesn't like it, because it casts the Vampaneze as out-and-out bad guys, and he felt I'd been much more nuanced in my presentation of them up to that point. He's absolutely correct, but at the same time I think he's misinterpreted what's going on with the vampets, and the reason why I went all-out bad with them.

The vampaneze are NOT automatic bad guys. They have different beliefs to the vampires, and I'd absolutely be more with the vampires than the vampaneze, but they're not inherently evil. But that changes when Steve comes into the mix. Because of Mr Tiny's prophecy, and their belief that their Lord will see them conquer the vampires, they follow Steve blindly, which allows him to corrupt them. The Vampets are HIS henchmen. HE ordered their recruitment, and directs their actions. The vast majority of the vampaneze disapprove of the Vampets, but Steve is their Lord, and his word is law, so they allow it to happen.

Although I didn't get into politics heavily in Cirque Du Freak, the state of the world WAS on my mind all the same, and I addressed it with the Vampets and the negative impact they have on the vampaneze. They're a warning not to put too much power into the hands of our leaders, as corrupt officials can then lead us disastrously astray, as happened with Germans in the 1930s. I don't think any groups of people are inherently bad -- we're all one big family, and we sway the same ways. But the systems we implement can allow individuals in positions of authority to move big groups in sinister ways, and what I was saying with the Vampets was that we should never have a system where our leaders are granted God-like powers, where they're placed above our laws and rules, because such systems will always, eventually, be abused, to the harm of the wider populace.