Vampire Mountain

Vampire Mountain is the fourth book in the Saga of Darren Shan by Darren Shan, published in 2001. The series follows a boy who has become a half-vampire.

The plot is a journey with a formal purpose. Darren and Larten Crepsley travel to the centre of the vampire world so that Darren can be initiated into the clan, and the road there has already been used by the vampaneze, a rival faction, which turns the trip into a matter of tracking as well as endurance. The cold is named as only the first obstacle.

The decision the book poses is about what Darren is willing to become: meeting the Vampire Princes could settle him closer to his human life or move him further away from it. Darren Shan writes from inside the boy's first-person viewpoint, and the series is built as a continuing sequence of short volumes rather than as self-contained novels, which is why the titles are numbered and collected in trilogies. The initiation is the deadline the book works towards, and the series treats it as an event with a cost attached rather than as a ceremony with a reward.