I don’t know what the hullabaloo is about Sergei Lukyanenko’s series about the Others: Night Watch, Day Watch, Twilight Watch, etc. It’s about the LIght and the Dark in stalemates, each monitored by police forces from the opposing team, which sounds like it could be an interesting premise. 

However, what some people see as sharp, edgy urban fantasy I see as pointless action at the expense of character development. What some readers interpret as a fantastic revamping of fantasy I think of as retreaded fantasy cliches executed with little originality or flair and, even more damningly, very little sense of humor. What some read as a fast pace I read as a simplistic plot line with no subtlety or twists.

Additionally, the clunky translation by Andrew Bromfield states the obvious and uses too many exclamation points [“Things were looking really bad now!”]. Thus books [I’ve sampled Night Watch and Day Watch so far] seem immature and overwritten. 

Besides, in Night Watch, on top of not giving a key vampire a name, but just calling her “the vampire girl” dismissively throughout an entire chunk of the novel, Lukyanenko also succeeded in making vampires particularly dull, a crime that I can never forgive. Though, in the preface, the vampires truly seemed evil, seductive and magical, they flattened out in ensuing pages. His prefaces always start off exciting, but then the rest of each book falls flat. Bait and switch, BAIT AND SWITCH. 🙁