Night of the Living Rerun

FROM THE ARCHIVES (Buffy Book Reviews)

NIGHT OF THE LIVING RERUN

Arthur Byron Cover (1998)

RATING: 3/5 Stakes

SETTING: First Season

CAST APPEARANCES: Buffy, Giles, Xander, Willow, Joyce, Cordelia, The Master

MAJOR ORIGINAL CHARACTERS: Samantha Kane (Puritan-era Slayer); Judge Danforth, Heather Putnam, Sheriff Corwin, and Cotton Mather (worshippers of the Despised One); The Despised One (demon); Sarah Dinsdale (witch); Reverend John Goodman; Daryl MacGovern and Eric Frank (reporters); Rick and Lora Church (occult investigators)

BACK-OF-THE-BOOK SUMMARY “As if real life wasn’t already overflowing with vampire-staking, now Buffy has begun to dream about slaying! Night after night, it’s the same thing. She’s back with the Puritans, a Slayer on the trail of a witch. What can it mean? Buffy gets a clue when Xander and Giles start acting like they have ancient alter egos. Now the stage is set for a symbolic replay of the night the Master was accidentally trapped in the other dimension. Only this time, the Master wants a happy ending--for himself. Buffy and her friends must prevent the Master from rewriting the script and escaping his supernatural prison before Sunnydale becomes history!”

REVIEW

My, where to begin? This thin book has it all: Prince Ashton Eisenberg’s Prophecy of Dual Duels; V.V. Vivaldi’s cursed statue “The Moonman”; Puritan-era Slayers, Watchers, and demons; spiritual possession, and most importantly, an attempt to free The Master from his mystical imprisonment. Through ample use of flashbacks embodied in the dreams of Scooby Gang members, we see the Puritan-era Slayer Samantha Kane’s attempt to track a witch named Sarah Dinsdale. Dinsdale, however, flees to the site of a ritual where four citizens of Salem are attempting to free a monstrous demon named The Despised One. Kane and the newly-summoned Despised One are sealed in a cave-in while locked in mortal combat, and both perish, while Dinsdale and the four evil citizens of Salem flee.

Meanwhile, in modern-day Sunnydale, four newcomers arrive seeking information. Eric Frank, host of a cable show on conspiracies, and Daryl MacGovern, a rumpled but intrepid newspaper reporter (a thinly-veiled homage to Kolchak, the Night Stalker, played by Darren McGavin) start snooping around Sunnydale High trying to find out why so many weird occurrences have been going on. At the same time, occult investigators Rick and Lora Church (a.k.a., "Nick and Nora") arrive to tell Giles that they have been contacted by a ghost from the spiritual realm to warn him of danger. As part of a rather complex plot by The Master, the four newcomers’ physical bodies are possessed by the spirits of the Salem citizens who had attempted to released The Despised One; only now, through the use of a statute made of moon rocks, they’ll free The Master, unless Buffy stops them in time (etc. etc. . . .).

Night of the Living Rerun thus has so much crammed into it that it can be hard to follow the first time through. The characters are fairly well-written (except for The Master, who uses words like “skedaddle”), but, like most Buffy books, there’s little of the show’s characteristic humor. The final showdown when Buffy tries to stop the ritual is almost laughably anticlimactic, but a strong epilogue helps the book end well. Overall, the novel has a certain kind of charm that’s hard to explain and elements of an original plot, but is not sufficiently entertaining to merit a high recommendation.