“Anno Dracula” by Kim Newman

 

560 pages, Titan Books, ISBN-13: 978-0857680839

I’ll be frank: this edition of Anno Dracula by Kim Newman is not the edition that I read; whenever I write one of these here reviews I try and find the very copy I read because – well, because, but for the life of me I can’t remember which type of book I read. I somehow think that it was part of an omnibus collected with other tales, but I’m not going to dive into all of the boxes of books I have accumulated over the years to discover the fact. But I found this reissued edition at 2^nd & Charles and snatched it up, so this is what I’m reviewing.

Anyway. Anno Dracula is a retelling of the Bram Stoker tale in which Vlad Țepeș – Dracula – won: Abraham Van Helsing, Jonathan Harker and Quincey Morris were killed, Mina Harker was turned and the Count was free to roam the streets of London. Dracula ultimately marries and turns Queen Victoria, becomes the Prince Consort, creates thousands of vampire underlings and ushers in a period of vampiric domination where dissenters are jailed (or impaled) without trial and many of the country’s leading scientists and intellectuals choose to stay “warm” (including Sherlock Holmes) and imprisoned in concentration camps in the rural counties. Arthur Holmwood chooses to become a vampire and is being groomed as a protégé by the new Prime Minister, Lord Ruthven, while Dr. Seward runs a free clinic in Whitechapel.

Into this story comes Geneviève Dieudonné, an elder French vampire and a reimagining of the character that appeared in Newman’s trilogy of novels written under the pseudonym Jack Yeovil for the Warhammer Fantasy universe (the omnibus edition of which, The Vampire Geneviève, I reviewed on July 30^th, 2018). Geneviève has come down in the world, reduced to attending sick vampires in Seward’s clinic, which is when vampire prostitutes begin getting slaughtered by a killer dubbed by the vampires “Silver Knife” – but who calls himself “Jack the Ripper”. The Diogenes Club tasks Charles Beauregard to hunt down the killer, which he does after allying with Geneviève. But others are also after the killer, including Inspector Lestrade, Captain Kostaki (an officer in Dracula’s Carpathian Guard), Dr. Henry Jekyll and even Lord Godalming.

So, yeah, there’s a lot going on here, with several classic literary characters rubbing shoulders with real-life personages, all of whom have been reimagined by Newman. The driving force of the story is between those humans who have kept their mortality – stayed “warm” in Newman’s phraseology, and what a great metaphor that is – and those humans who have traded this mortality for status and advancement and “turned” into vampires. As the Ripper tracked his politically-charged destruction of vampire prostitutes, I found myself confronted with the several differing viewpoints of the main characters, to say nothing of the supporting cast. It is rare indeed for an author to take what is ostensibly a retelling of a horror classic and turn it into something more, but Newman does it, a credit to his skills as a writer.

For Anno Dracula is much more than a complicated game of Spot the Character; it is a complex, detailed and ingeniously crafted world in which real-to-life issues, like the Victorian sodomy raids and child prostitution, are given a vampiric twist. But it also includes vivid action sequences, intricate political intrigue and a well-thought-out investigation in which the Ripper’s identity is revealed to the reader early on (turning the book into a howtocatchem rather than a whodunit) but allowing a powerful, disturbing insight into the killer’s motivations. Anno Dracula is a fast-paced, delightful entertainment, a marvel of storytelling, and while I usually disdain a modern-day retelling of a literary classic, it just goes to show that such a thing can work if the writing is top-notch and the writer’s in top form.

The Titan edition of Anno Dracula also puts me in mind of one of those special edition DVDs, what with all of its added material. Besides the original story as it was published in 1992, we have annotations as to where certain characters originated from, a new afterword from Kim Newman, an alternate ending to the original novel, extracts from an unfilmed movie adaptation, an article and a short story by Newman. Seeing what a sucker I am for special features on all of my DVDs (yes, I still own DVDs), I was thrilled by all of these extras and delighted in reading them and seeing this nightmarish world expanded upon. Anno Dracula, first published in 1992, is but the first in a series that Newman has expanded upon; seeing as I enjoyed the first so much I no doubt will have to check out all of the others, too.