A STAKE running through the vampire's HEART in the center — what a clever idea! Fun to see the collection of things that vampires ...
read moreA STAKE running through the vampire's HEART in the center — what a clever idea! Fun to see the collection of things that vampires hate. I wasn't aware that a SILVER BULLET was appropriate for more than werewolves, but some Googling shows that apparently SILVER BULLETs are good for all sorts of monsters. Off to invest in silver!
Such a fun concept for the run-up to Halloween. It'd be great to have it on Halloween, but given the simplicity, it really does belong as an early-week puzzle. I sure would have liked some type of CROSS incorporated — WOODEN CROSS perhaps? — as that's much more iconic to me than either SILVER BULLET or HOLY BIBLE, but I'm not a monster movie aficionado. (I get scared by Harry Potter.)
With four long themers and the STAKE through the HEART, this is a tough layout. I usually don't care much about themers interlocking, but I found the STAKE intersecting DIRECT SUNLIGHT and GARLIC NECKLACE pretty cool. It also helps with the spacing, very necessary today given that none of the themers can go in rows 3 and 13 like usual — if you move THE HOLY BIBLE up one row, you create a nightmare of black squares in the upper right. So the interlock here is not just nice today, but almost essential.
Given such constraints, Kurt does pretty well to keep his gluey bits down to a minimum. It's unfortunate that A LIE, TO ALL, and A DAB all fall in the "partials" category though, making them stand out for me. A cheater (extra black square) up in the north, perhaps where the S of INCAS is, might have allowed Kurt to eliminate TO ALL. But that would have forced him to change the south for symmetry reasons, and that might force him to lose the very nice KGB SPY and/or CAR LOT. Always with the trade-offs.
Nice idea with a great finish in the STAKE through the HEART. I find the theme to be POW! material, but I'd need to have a tighter set of themers and maybe a slightly less gluey solve in order for it to make the cut.