#Titanuary #BookReview ‘Anno Dracula’ by Kim Newman

About the book…

It is 1888 and Queen Victoria has remarried, taking as her new consort Vlad Tepes, the Wallachian Prince infamously known as Count Dracula. Peppered with familiar characters from Victorian history and fiction, the novel follows vampire Geneviève Dieudonné and Charles Beauregard of the Diogenes Club as they strive to solve the mystery of the Ripper murders.

Anno Dracula is a rich and panoramic tale, combining horror, politics, mystery and romance to create a unique and compelling alternate history. Acclaimed novelist Kim Newman explores the darkest depths of a reinvented Victorian London.

This brand-new edition of the bestselling novel contains unique bonus material, including a new afterword from Kim Newman, annotations, articles and alternate endings to the original novel

Republished to celebrate ‘‘Anno Dracula’‘s almost 20th anniversary, can we just pause for a moment to delight in the facsimile paperback cover which has given me shivers of delight?

And …….we’re back in the room!

All the books have these wonderful covers, one of my personal favourites is the ‘The Man from The Diogenes Club’  which resembles a show poster.

Having watched BBC’s Dracula over Christmas, I felt it was high time to inject a little fresh blood into my reading for the New Year, only to find that none of the Kim Newman books I had carted around since my uni days were still in my book collection.
None of them!

So starting again at the very beginning, I bought ‘Anno Dracula’ and what a sheer delight it was to dive, head first again, into an alternative Victorian timeline where our sovereign has shacked up with a handsome foreigner…

Having given her the Dark Kiss, the Victorians are now living in a new age-A.D now means After Dracula!

The ‘warm bodied’, or humans, are becoming increasingly scarce as the living dead feed off the citizens of London. They are caught between two factions of vampires, those who are for, and those who are against Vlad Tepes as Prince Regent.

Gleefully using the field of Victorian literature as his playing field, there are mashups of fact, and fiction galore. The victims of Jack The Ripper, now newborn vampires, take on a whole new meanin. Lestrade of Sherlock Holmes fame, is not only investigating these crimes, he himself has been turned.

He approaches a vampire older than even Drac, the enigmatic Genevieve Dieudonne,to investigate these crimes, as London finds itself not merely enveloped in a frenzy of fear and rising rebellions.

A glorious steampunk romp which sets the stage for a decades spanning series, this is deeply funny, darkly horrific and totally engaging. As well as playing with well worn tropes from classic literature, more modern vamps literally appear in the background! It’s a wonderfully realised alternate history that I devoured-fresh blood has been transfused into the veins of vampire fiction, and this reissued classic is so worth a revisit.

About the author…

This author also writes under the pseudonym of Jack Yeovil.
An expert on horror and sci-fi cinema (his books of film criticism include ‘Nightmare Movies’ and Millennium Movies), Kim Newman’s novels draw promiscuously on the tropes of horror, sci-fi and fantasy. He is complexly and irreverently referential; the Dracula sequence–Anno Dracula, The Bloody Red Baron and’ Dracula,Cha Cha Cha‘–not only portrays an alternate world in which the Count conquers Victorian Britain for a while, is the mastermind behind Germany’s air aces in World War One and survives into a jetset 1950s of paparazzi and La Dolce Vita, but does so with endless throwaway references that range from Kipling to James Bond, from Edgar Allen Poe to Patricia Highsmith.
In horror novels such as Bad Dreams and Jago, reality turns out to be endlessly subverted by the powerfully malign. His pseudonymous novels, as Jack Yeovil, play elegant games with genre cliche–perhaps the best of these is the sword-and-sorcery novel Drachenfels which takes the prescribed formulae of the games company to whose bible it was written and make them over entirely into a Kim Newman novel.
Life’s Lottery, his most mainstream novel, consists of multiple choice fragments which enable readers to choose the hero’s fate and take him into horror, crime and sf storylines or into mundane reality.

Links-http://www.johnnyalucard.com/

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