Anno Dracula - Kim Newman

Since I started this blog last August, this is the third vampire book I've read. I have to admit, this is quite unusual for me. Before these three, I can count the number of vampire books I've ever read on one hand. Spoiler alert, it's two: Salem's Lot by Stephen King (which I loved) and the OG Dracula (which I didn't). I'm just not really into vampires. They're all either pretentious or brooding and I'd rather a good ghost story any day. I've never even seen Buffy the Vampire Slayer all the way through. I do like fiction transplanted into actual historical storylines though, so I was willing to give this a go.

Imagine if Dracula hadn't been defeated. Imagine instead he was able to run riot in Britain, and conquer it for him and his vampiric offspring... this is the world of Anno Dracula. It's 1888, and Dracula has wooed and married Queen Victoria herself. Vampirism is increasing in popularity, and in some cases, becoming a necessity. Some things however, never change. In Whitechapel, Jack the Ripper is on the loose, murdering vampires and sparking unrest between the undead and the living. Ancient vampire Geneviève Dieudonné, and mysterious spy Charles Beauregard must track down the killer, before the whole of London descends into chaos.

It's very apparent very quickly, that this is a book for vampire nerds - of which, as we have discussed, I am not, so a lot of references went over my head. I had to quickly skim the wikipedia article for Dracula to remember the characters beyond the obvious bloodsucker and Mina Harker. Lord Ruthven, who has been cast as the Prime Minister here, I'd never even heard of. Turns out he was one of the first vamps in British literature, in John William Polidori's The Vampyre. You learn something new every day. This is also a book about Victorian history for Victorian history nerds. It's not exactly my specialist subject but I do have a vague grasp of the era so I fared better in this aspect. However, as much as I do enjoy fictionalised accounts of historic events, the constant name-dropping of both 19th Century fictional characters and real people wore pretty thin pretty quickly. Newman was just too keen to cram those Easter eggs in - at some points there were literal lists of names we should know, and the whole thing started to collapse a bit under its own weight. There's creativity in weaving your own story into existing timelines, but there's not actually very much here that belongs to Newman alone - he's relying too heavily on other people's foundations, and his own house feels pretty shaky.

There are multiple plot lines and POVs going on here, I didn't feel like any of them were more of a slog than the others and I enjoyed them all equally. Although, because of all these threads being woven together, you don't really get enough time with any of them, and plot points feel a bit rushed. Characters are ten a penny and come and go before you can even remember their names. This is the first in a loosely related series, so hopefully we will get to see more of Geneviève Dieudonné and Charles Beauregard, as these two working together to find the Ripper were the best parts. Newman could have done better to not reveal the identity of Jack The Ripper/The Silver Knife in literally the first chapter, as instead of this being a source of tension and something that could have lead to a grand reveal at the end, it just sort of fades into the background and gets lost among the other plotlines.

This is meant to be a fun, campy romp, but although I didn't dislike it, I did find it a slow read. It does manage to pull everything back in the last couple of chapters and things get wild. ONCE AGAIN for a book about actual Dracula, the big man himself doesn't even show up till the last like, seven pages. Just like The Historian. This time though, instead of a boring old nerd, Anno Dracula's Prince of Darkness is every inch the depraved, sadistic monster you want him to be (also completely naked for a reason I didn't quite buy). Had the whole book been more along these lines, this would have been a very different review.

Weirdly, this book is actually 100 pages or so shorter than it looks, at least in this edition. The actual story finishes quite early on, and the next chunk of the book is just masses of appendices that I didn't bother to read properly. There's a list of all the references made, which felt like a bit too much Newman patting himself on the back. There's also a fairly interesting afterword about Newman's obvious vampire obsession, and a completely pointless draft of a script for a film version. None of it improves the story, so it's up to you if you want to put the extra time in.

Ultimately, like The Historian, this is another old world, classical style vampire book that put me into a reading slump and felt like a slog to get through. Given that I found the original Stoker's Dracula impossibly slow as well and ended up skim reading it when I first read it years ago, I think it's time to admit that these kinds of vampire portrayals just aren't for me. If I'm going to read about vampires, I think I'll stick to new world, new takes, like Certain Dark Things and Salem's Lot.