Bizenghast 4 is an interesting installment in the series of Diana with a shocking event. I am pretty immersed in the trials and eager to see where things go. Diana has paid a high price thus far for her actions (far higher than I would have guessed she'd have to pay). The artwork continues to be beautiful. ( )

Dinah, Vincent, Edaniel and Edrear continue to release the spirits in the mausoleum. One spirit turns out to have been a girl Dinah went to school with. She was bullied before killing herself. All she wants is to be loved and she is making herself into the perfect woman with parts form other girls. Now she wants Dinah's eyes to complete her transformation.

Another spirit causes them to appear on a boat at sea in the middle of a hurricane. They need to see the boat safely into the harbour to save the passengers. A random chapter has Dinah and Vincent watching Edrear deal with ghosts and a car crash incident reminds Dinah of the night her parents died and she survived. Vincent has his own quest, he is trying to find out more about the history of the town by doing research in the local library. His search leads him to be shown a secret room and uncovers more about the mysterious Addie Clark.

There seems to be following them in the shadows and this installment ends on a major cliff hanger involving Vincent. I am very much looking forward to the fifth installment due out in July. Dinah is really growing on me as a character, she is relying on herself much more to solve puzzles and is much more confident. ( )

This review contains spoilers, so stop reading now if you'd rather avoid those. Also, I'm assuming that you're familiar with the series. If you're not, it won't make sense.

The art remains excellent, but the writing was rougher than the previous volumes. For example, the first two chapters of the book introduce a plot in which Dinah is captured by a dead soul looking to excise her eyes for re-use. The plot is resolved when the dead soul turns out to be "Brenda", a girl from Dinah's school, whom Dinah knew and liked in life. To escape, Dinah basically has to remind Brenda what a nice girl she actually was before her death, which is accomplished by restoring her broken glasses. The resolution felt fairly contrived as a result - there was little to no ground work in place to prepare the reader for the end result. Brenda's history is explained in a flashback; it would have been much more compelling had she been introduced as a minor character in earlier volumes and her history and death worked into the background that way, so that when we came to her end in the mausoleum the narrative could have focused on the action of the moment rather than interrupting itself to explain who this chick is and why we should care about her. As it stands, the necessity of introducing backstory at the last minute combines especially poorly with the fact that the sub-plot's ending depends on Brenda suddenly realizing how nasty she's been in her afterlife so far. The sudden-change-of-heart-by-a-villain ending is terrifically difficult to pull off well, and in this case, sadly, it didn't work out.

The other major flaw in the volume was Vincent's death. This has clearly been long planned; his death provides the occasion for Dinah's use of the stolen Lazarus Apple that she acquired all the way back in volume 2, the first time Vincent was in mortal danger. With a long lead-in like that, it is disappointing that the climactic episode occupied only a single chapter in this six chapter volume. There was barely enough time to sketch out the basic setting before the entire episode was over. I remain uncertain exactly what the point of Vincent's interaction with Edrear in the final moments was. Edrear tells Vincent that it's possible to be both brave and scared; Vincent quotes this to Dinah as he dies. On the face of it, it looks like a kind of reconciliation between the two rivals for Dinah's affections. Yet Edrear is also responsible for the circumstances of Vincent's death, in that he severed the metal pin which then impaled Vincent. One could plausibly read this as a deliberate act on Edrear's part intended to result in Vincent's death; after all, Edrear could just as easily have severed the rope, not the metal pin anchoring it, which would have given Vincent a nasty welt but not killed him. I am basically uncertain about how to understand the events of the chapter.

That uncertainty, in itself, is fine. Introducing ambiguity into a story is usually a good idea, in fact. The problem I have with this is that I don't think the chapter was *intended* to be ambiguous. I think the ambiguity is accidental, not deliberate. I could speculate that Ms. LeGrow had a difficult time writing the death of a longstanding character, both technically and emotionally. But that's pure speculation.

The two problems (with Brenda and Vincent) that I've discussed here are both problems with pacing. Basically, I think she was trying to do too much in one volume. The result feels much like "second novel syndrome" -- that is, the author has reached a mid-point in the overall story, and is having a hard time managing it. The series will likely smooth out again as the final resolution of the entire plot approaches. I plan to read the rest of the volumes; one sub-par volume in an otherwise good series is not enough to kill it. ( )