John Carpenter’s Night Terrors: Blood of the Taken Book 3 Review: Family, Fangs, and One Hell of a Goodbye

WEPAAAA! John Carpenter’s Night Terrors: Blood of the Taken Book 3: Dearly Departed walks into the room looking half-dead, sleep-deprived, emotionally compromised, and covered in enough bodily fluids to make the Health Department throw the whole building away. Beautiful. Sian Mandrake’s third and final volume does not treat the finish line like an excuse to turn the story into one giant vampire demolition derby. Blood gets spilled, bodies get mangled, and the supernatural gets plenty nasty, but the real horror comes from watching people who still love each other figure out whether anything human remains after monstrosity has already moved into the spare bedroom.

Ed and Liam are carrying enough trauma between them to qualify as their own emergency response unit. Their escape from Theo should feel like freedom, except Mandrake understands the mean little truth underneath this entire story: leaving the monster’s house does not mean the monster leaves your head. Theo hangs over the book like bad perfume in an elevator. You can walk away, change floors, go outside, call an Uber, whatever. Somehow you still smell it. Her influence follows Ed and Liam through the frozen New Hampshire landscape, and Mandrake keeps tightening the screws by making vampirism feel less like a superpower and more like addiction, grief, hunger, dependency, and family dysfunction got tossed into a blender with somebody’s internal organs.

Liam gets some of the strongest material in the volume because his war is happening on two fronts. The physical hunger is ugly enough, but the emotional self-disgust underneath it gives the violence weight. His conversations, memories, and mental encounters with Parker keep pulling him toward questions no amount of fang action can solve. Who are you after the worst thing that ever happened to you changes what you are? Can somebody love what remains? Do you even want them to? Mandrake lets those questions sit in the room instead of sprinting toward an inspirational answer, and yo, good. Vampires have been romanticized into oblivion over the years. Sometimes being undead should suck. Literally and otherwise.

Ed works as the emotional counterweight. His loyalty keeps the book from collapsing into pure despair, but he is not written like some spotless superhero buddy waiting around to deliver the magic friendship speech. Dude is exhausted. Confused. Scared. Occasionally pissed. He keeps reaching for Liam because their relationship has history and dents in it, and Mandrake gives their quieter exchanges enough awkwardness to feel lived-in. A few stretches in the middle circle similar emotional territory more than once, particularly when hunger, guilt, and survival are being debated again, and the momentum briefly loosens its grip. Still, those repeated conversations make sense for two people trapped in a nightmare neither one possesses the vocabulary to explain.

Theo is where the book gets properly vicious, madre de Dios, because Mandrake does not reduce her to a shrieking ancient vampire waiting for the heroes to return so the boss battle music can start. Theo is horrifying because her definition of affection is completely busted. She wants family. She wants devotion. She wants her children close. Sounds adorable until you realize her version of motherhood comes with coercion, possession, bloodletting, psychological manipulation, and enough red flags to cover Yankee Stadium. Her warped tenderness gives the finale its sharpest teeth because Theo believes in her own emotional logic. Villains become much more dangerous when they are not standing around thinking, “Man, I am evil as hell today.”

Mandrake’s artwork is where Dearly Departed starts showing off like it just walked into the barbershop with fresh kicks and knows everybody noticed. The linework got grime on it, fam. It’s scratchy, twitchy, a little diseased-looking, and absolutely perfect for a world where everybody seems one bad decision away from becoming somebody else’s lunch. Faces bend and stretch without losing the emotion underneath, bodies twist into shapes your chiropractor would immediately refuse to discuss, and even the rooms look like they got secrets. Then Mandrake starts letting those ghostly ribbons of vapor snake through the panels and suddenly they’re not just background effects anymore. They feel alive, creeping around the characters like another predator waiting for its turn. I also love that the horror never floats off into some sterile fantasy dimension. You still got busted furniture, junk everywhere, wrappers on the floor, old TVs, dirty walls, frozen roads, all that everyday ugliness keeping the supernatural grounded. One second you’re chilling in what looks like somebody’s raggedy living room in New Hampshire, next second the ceiling turns into this massive blood-orange nightmare and reality basically says, “Nah, I’m done for the day.” WEPAAAA. That switch hits.

The color work comes in like another weapon. Quiet scenes sit inside these nasty winter blues, swampy greens, corpse-skin grays and those grimy yellow tones that make everything feel like the room smells a little funny. Then hunger kicks in. Memory gets warped. The supernatural starts acting stupid. Boom. Mandrake starts throwing reds, purples, toxic oranges and radioactive-looking hues across the page like somebody spilled nightmare Kool-Aid all over the book. It gives every hallucination and mental collapse its own pulse without needing a caption telling you, “Hey reader, things just got weird.” Please. We got eyes. You feel the shift before you even process what changed. The palette starts screaming before the characters do, and that’s the good stuff right there. The art isn’t decorating the horror. It’s participating in it.

Mandrake starts getting real disrespectful with the panel borders in the best possible way. One minute you’re moving through a clean conversation grid, nice and civilized, everybody staying in their little boxes like they paid rent. Next page? Forget all that. The borders crack open, smoke starts crawling wherever it wants, memories bleed into the present, characters spill across the composition, and sound effects become part of the scenery instead of sitting politely in the corner. WEPAAAA, now we cooking! Mandrake knows when sequential storytelling needs discipline, but also knows exactly when to kick the furniture over and let the page go completely bugged-out. A few transitions deliberately leave your internal GPS spinning for a second, especially when Liam and Ed are mentally coming apart themselves. I can see readers who demand crystal-clear geography hitting the brakes occasionally, but I dug the instability. The page feels as unsettled as the people trapped inside it. Big difference between confusing storytelling and storytelling designed to make you feel confused. Mandrake lands on the right side of that line.

Janice Chiang, meanwhile, deserves a straight-up salute because yo, this book can TALK. Dialogue everywhere. Captions. Arguments. Whispering. Gurgling. Somebody always got something to say while somebody else is probably bleeding on the carpet. Chiang keeps all of it moving without turning Mandrake’s artwork into Attack of the Giant Word Balloons. Your eye knows where to go, conversations remain readable even when the layouts start getting funky, and captions never get lost inside the visual insanity. The sound effects are even better because they feel baked into the grime of the artwork. Coughs, hisses, crunches, slurps, retching, and all kinds of vampire digestive-system foolishness start becoming part of the horror itself. You don’t just read some of those noises, fam. You practically hear them wet. Nasty work. My stomach wanted representation and filed a grievance with Storm King.

By the time Dearly Departed reaches the finish, Mandrake understands the smartest thing a finale can do: do not clean up the blood just because the story is ending. Nobody walks away emotionally vacuum-sealed. Relationships remain complicated, damage leaves scars, and the decisions made across these books actually carry weight into the closing stretch. The finale gets bigger without suddenly forgetting the intimate, screwed-up relationships that made Blood of the Taken worth following in the first place, so the escalation feels earned instead of somebody yelling, “Quick, it’s the last chapter, explode everything!” By those final pages, I felt like I had reached the end of a journey, not simply run out of comic. New readers, do yourself a favor and start with Book One because this finale is cashing emotional checks written way earlier in the story. Everybody who has already been riding with Liam, Ed, Theo and this beautifully dysfunctional brood? Strap in. Mandrake sends them out with blood under the fingernails, trauma in the luggage, and enough genuine heart underneath all the gore to make the goodbye hit harder than expected. Messy, mean, heartfelt vampire madness. Just how it should be.

CRUSADERS SCORE:
4.5/5

Written & Illustrated by: Sian Mandrake
Lettering: Janice Chiang
Edited by: Sandy King
Cover Art: Sian Mandrake
Series Created by: John Carpenter and Sandy King
Publisher: Storm King Comics