- Title:
- Minion
- Author:
- L.A. Banks
- Release:
- June 4, 2003
- Format:
- Hardcover
- Series:
- Vampire Huntress Legend Series
I was introduced to this series on Christmas 2009. I began reading the special edition of Minion in May 2010. I bought this copy in 2020 and began reading it in November or December 2022. This was long overdue.
For years now, I’ve read comments from people asking if Minion gets better, or referring to it as janky. I wasn’t sure what they meant, as it always seemed pretty solid to me. The version I was reading was the Special Huntress Edition.
The SHE adds a couple of scenes and changes some lore a bit. But it wasn’t written with book 2, The Awakening in mind. The important reason is that Minion and The Awakening were originally one book that got split. So book 2 has a bunch of scenes and dialogue that reference things that the special edition cut.
The main cast is a band that secretly doubles as demon slayers. In Minion, they fire their limo driver to protect him. In the SHE, the entire first chapter was cut so he goes from being their driver to being fired off-page. This is brought up in The Awakening, but it always left me confused as there’s never a scene where he’s fired. After the group slays some vampires after a concert in the first chapter, Dan, the limo driver, says “Let’s go get some ribs.” which the team is very much NOT in the mood for.
In book 2, one of the team brings that up. He chastises Dan after he has his first encounter with some vamps by saying “And you wanted to get ribs after we just got done slaying vampires.” No matter how you look at it, it makes Ride look like a dick. But the SHE made this worse by cutting the context. How could Dan have known they’d just got done goring vamps?!?
Too many scenes were changed just for the sake of changing them, without putting thought into it. While the first chapter of Minion is nothing but an exposition dump, it adds valuable context to scenes that are brought up in the Awakening, that are cut from the Special Edition, and only serve to cause confusion.
I find I prefer this edition of Minion. While the special edition apparently speeds up combat scenes, I really didn’t notice much. There are not many of them and only one of them seemed slightly different overall. Kinda like seeing a lookalike for somebody you know. They’re similar, but there’s just something off about them.
As for the special scenes, I can think of three off of the top of my head and they’re NEVER addressed again throughout the entire series. The scene where Marlene and Shabazz meet Damali in a club during an open mic night, one where Fallon Nuit meets Damali on the astral plane, and one where Damali visits her friend Inez. Since they couldn’t change the lore in book 2, they also couldn’t leave any impact, aside from some scattered lore, some of which is later contradicted.
Despite how clunky it is with the exposition, I prefer this version of the book. It doesn’t create contradictory lore, plot holes, or meaningless scenes that hardly offer anything to the plot. And, for whatever it’s worth, the German, Italian, and U.K. editions all use this version of Minion as well.