Day Watch (2000)

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From Publishers Weekly The morally ambiguous second volume in Lukyanenko's trilogy (after 2006's Night Watch , a major literary and cinematic success in Russia) portrays the epic supernatural struggle between good and evil from the point-of-view of the witch Alisa Donnikova. Lukyanenko imagines a parallel reality, where human history has been shaped by a centuries-old conflict between the Dark Ones and the Light Ones, magical beings whose existence is kept carefully hidden from humanity. After Alisa, a Dark One, loses her powers in a minor confrontation with some Light Ones, she heads to the Crimea to recuperate at a girls' camp, where she feeds on children's nightmares. There she falls in love with Igor, who turns out to be a Light magician. The plot centers on the ramifications of their romance and the theft of Fafnir's Talon, a powerful artifact whose provenance is linked to the legendary Ring of the Nibelungs. Though the artifact conceit is less well developed than that of the truth-telling instrument in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series, the fast-paced story augurs well for the last installment. (Mar.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Review " Night Watch is an epic of extraordinary power." -- Quentin Tarantino " Star Wars meets the Vampires in Moscow . . . it bursts with a sick, carnivorous glee in its fiendish games." -- New York Times "A pixilated-vampire-superhero, rock-and-roll, Matrix -style thriller that’s up there with the genre’s most exhilarating and ridiculous." -- New York