Anno Dracula: The Bloody Red Baron

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Continuing on with my delve into a very interesting subgenre of literature, after well over a month (perhaps even two), I have finally closed the cover on the second instalment in Kim Newman’s gothic dystopia where Dracula lives. This time, he has fled from England and is behind the Kaiser in a gruesome and horrific retelling of WWI.

After fleeing from England, Graf von Dracula is commander-in-chief of the armies of Germany and Austria-Hungary. War is hell, especially one between the living and the undead. Caught up in the bloody conflict is Charles Beauregard, an old enemy of Dracula’s, and his protégé Edwin Winthrop teaming up with vampiric journalist Kate Reed to find out more about Dracula’s newest secret weapon, the Bloody Red Baron.

While I found Anno Dracula quite a fun and interesting dystopian piggyback novel, its second, more gruesome and horrific chapter in this rewritten version of history just had me bored. The same name-dropping appears with recognisable characters such as Edgar Allen Poe having their own part to play in the story’s events, but ultimately, I just couldn’t find anything interesting about anything that was going on on either side.

Swapping between chapters devoted both to the Central Powers and the Allied Powers, the book explores the personal and political aspects of the Great War, including the idea of weaponizing genetically modified super-soldiers. Bucky Barnes and Steve Rogers may have seen some horrors, but nothing compared to this! But while the ideas explored in this book were fascinating, there just wasn’t the same sense of head-down-straight-forward narrative that was in the first one. Everything in The Bloody Red Baron seems up in the air (pardon the pun) and I just didn’t find any of the characters particularly interesting, which made it harder to get through.

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Thankfully the book is a lot shorter than its predecessor and I actually found the novella at the end of it, Vampire Romance, much more entertaining. This short story sees Genevieve Dieudonne team up with Edwin Winthrop to find the murderous leader of a cult of killers. Their hunt leads them to a gathering of elder vampires in a secluded manor and takes a dangerous turn when the elders start getting picked off one by one.

This was a fun little whodunnit that I thoroughly enjoyed reading. Part gothic thriller, part bildungsroman, with a fun and quirky twist at the end.

At the end of it all, when the smoke had cleared, I just didn’t find Anno Dracula: The Bloody Red Baron as entertaining as its predecessor. But if you are a fan of schlocky dystopian alternate realities, then why not give it a go and see what you think?

Author: Kim Newman, 2012

Published: Titan Books, London, 2012