The Vampire's Assistant

The Vampire's Assistant is the second book of the Cirque du Freak sequence by Darren Shan, published in 2000. It continues directly from the first volume, in which the narrator becomes a half-vampire.

The plot's central difficulty is appetite. Darren has been transformed and must resist drinking human blood, and the novel places that struggle inside a travelling freak show, where the performers are already outside ordinary society and where his condition is less of a secret than it would be elsewhere. That setting lets the book examine his problem socially as well as physically. Mr Crepsley, the vampire who made him, travels with him.

Shan wrote the series as a sequence of short first-person volumes, and this is the second of the twelve books in the original run. The Cirque du Freak books are written as short first-person instalments, and this second volume is where the series settles into its shape: a travelling freak show, a boy with a secret and a mentor whose rules are the only thing keeping him safe, since Crepsley's world has its own hierarchy and its own etiquette.