Night of the Living Rerun (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Book 4)

Rating:
Summary: A tale of the Slayer that would work better without Buffy
Review: The thing that makes Buffy the Vampire Slayer such a great television shows is that it is able to combine action, comedy and drama in such a seemless manner. Once you get past the idea that all that martial arts stuff is needed to drive a steak through the heart of a vamp, the action routines are the best on television. The comedy is character driven to such an extent that a priceless funny moment can be a double-take or a raised eyebrow as much as a quick quip or arcane pop-culture reference. But the heart of the series is the dramatic undertones, always implicit in the fact that Slayers die young and reaching its operatic heights with Buffy's tragic relationship with Angel. All of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer books, whether original stories or adapted from various episodes, automatically lose the action elements. Break down the fight sequence from the second part of "Becoming" and it is going to lose something on the printed page. So losing one part of the Buffy triad is an automatic given. The problem with "Night of the Living Rerun" is that the story overloads the comedy and comes up way short of the drama. Arthur Byron Cover is not alone in this regard as this my standard complaint with the vast majority of Buffy novels.

Forget about the cute title, the heart of this story is a compelling tale: the story of Samantha Kane, the Slayer during the title of the Salem Witch Trials. How does this fit into the Buffy mythos? This happened to be when the Master was accidentally trapped in the other dimension. Buffy keeps dreaming about the past, and when the same thing starts happening to Giles and Xander the set up is for a symbolic replay of the past. The Buffy novels keep resisting the idea of having tales of the earlier Slayers without including Buffy and the gang, but this particular story idea would have worked much better either as a bookend to the final demise of the Master or as some sort of parallel story. Adding these extra layers took away from a fascinating story idea. Given the final episode of Season Four and the promise that we will learn more about the First Slayer and Buffy ancestors, hopefully we will get to the point where the Slayer mythos can sustain its own fiction without this particular cast of characters, but so far all we are getting hints and brief glimpses. There have been intriguing graphic novels that have "retold" the Batman and Superman stories in different times and places, and I have to believe that the idea of the Slayer would work just as well (but not like in the movie where they all end up looking like Buffy).
"Night of the Living Reun" is not one of the first Buffy e-Books you should download.