By Roger Ma

Illustrations by Kurt Miller

In these paranoid times, survivalism and the undead have both become popular things, so pop culture and the internet are constantly abuzz with vampires, zombies, and preparing for the end of the world or other mass disasters.  It’s unsurprising that you can walk into any major bookstore and probably find a large section devoted to either horror novels, the “prepper” movement, or sometimes both.  Roger Ma is one of these guys who’s found a market in fusing the two, so he’s penned The Zombie Combat Manual and The Vampire Combat Manual and maintains websites for “clubs” that battle both forms of undead.  These Combat Manuals take the approach of writing “real” guides to battling the undead as if we lived in a world where the possibility of having to battle these things was real.

But speaking of “fusing” disparate genres, what happens when Ma decides to combine the undead and the prepper movement with the newest trend on the market: the adult coloring book?

From what I can gather, the notion of the “adult coloring book” goes to the discovery that coloring has therapeutic benefits.  I’m no psychological expert, but from what I can gather, coloring allows busy adults a chance to sit, “unplug” from the world, and flex their creative mental muscles.  It lets them play, something we’re not able to do much when we’re split between working our adult jobs and then passively plugging into television and the internet.  I can see the benefit in that: most of our “play” as adults comes from playing online games or binge watching a television show.  Those activities might be relaxing, but they don’t produce anything.  Coloring gives the user a finished product, which they can show to their friends and say with pride, “I made this.”

Having said that, I’m not sure that the specific fusion of Ma’s Combat Manual with the latest fad of adult coloring books came together as well as it could have.  Having glanced at Ma’s Zombie Combat Manual, I can see that he wrote it with a considerable amount of effort and convincingly applying real-world information to fictional undead warfare, making a believable manual which feels like it would be useful if an undead outbreak ever happened.  That level of detail is disappointingly absent in the coloring book version of his manual.

The two main flaws are this: one, the “factual” details provided on each page of the book are pretty limited, providing one to three sentences’ worth of information on various aspects of the undead.  It’s cute, but doesn’t read like the detailed technical manual which one might expect from the cover.  (Relatedly, some quizzes on various aspects of undead combat appear throughout the book, but no “correct” answers are provided.  I suppose they’re intended as thought exercises.)  Before coloring books became a cultural trend, they were commonly used by medical students who needed to memorize various parts of the human anatomy.  I realize that Ma had to whittle back the essence of his detailed Combat Manuals to make room for the drawings in this book, but the end result is pretty watered down from what it could have been.

That leads into my second point: the drawings are not particularly detailed.  They’re not bad–artist Kurt Miller has clearly been playing with a pencil longer than I have, and his anatomy looks like it should.  The problem I had with this style is that the drawings are anatomically correct but still simple drawings.  The trend with adult coloring books is to have very detailed, full-page pictures which should, ideally, result in the user coloring the entire page.  Here, the drawings are mostly smaller illustrations which often only take up a quarter of the page.

The Vampire Compbat Field Guide isn’t a bad product, but it is a product that’s likely going to appeal to a limited market of vampire junkies who are looking for an adult coloring book, or possibly adult coloring book fans who are looking for something a little different.  Readers who want a more “serious” manual on vampires might prefer Roger Ma’s Vampire Combat Manual.  Otherwise, save this as a treat for your horror fan at Halloween or Christmas.

Rating: Two and a half stakes out of five.