Anno Dracula

 

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The piggyback novel is a literary phenomenon that I have always found fascinating. I know that there is argument that it’s a lazy means of writing, leeching off the original ideas of others rather than coming up with something on your own, but I do believe there is still imagination and creativity in taking a famous character, or setting, or historical event and asking “what if…?”

That means of thinking was behind my book of choice this week, Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula, a schlocky, gory romp that asks the question, ‘what if Dracula had survived?’

It’s the year 1888. Queen Victoria has remarried, taking Count Dracula as her new consort whose polluted bloodline now spreads throughout the country, as more civilians choose to turn into vampires. In the back alleys of Whitechapel, a killer known as ‘The Silver Knife’ stalks vampiric whores and expertly does away with them. An eternally young vampire named Genevieve Dieudonne and a warm military man from the shadowy Diogenes Club, Charles Beauregard, are drawn together as they both hunt down the murderer.

A bit like that film, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, that saw all these famous literary characters come together to fight a great evil, Anno Dracula is a delightfully grim and chunky soup of recognisable names and faces that make up the ‘gallery of rogues and scoundrels’ that is this book. Beginning as a classic thriller, with the killer quickly becoming the infamous ‘Jack the Ripper’, it very quickly gets fleshed out into a tale of political, social, economical, and physical corruption, as everyone within its pages tries to navigate their way in this new and awful society. Vampires and humans are living (somewhat) peacefully side by side, but the spread of the diseased bloodline of Dracula means that society is threatening to go backwards with vampires in high places determining to assert dominance and put the warm on a lower wrung of the social ladder. The quest to find Jack the Ripper then becomes a political battle with all these factions wanting to get there first and further their own goals with the glory.

Image credit: This Is Horror

The dirty, dingy, and gothic aesthetic of 19^th century London are heightened to create this super eerie and horrific setting where celebrated figures are imprisoned or impaled and around every corner there is a monster waiting to pounce. Newman’s world is delightfully dirty and rotten, injected with a bit of sexiness and sensuality because, vampires. There’s a strange compelling element within that just doesn’t make sense, but is undeniable nonetheless… like the appeal of mud wrestling.

Filled with action, gore, suspense, and more namedropping than a rollcall, Anno Dracula is a compelling and fun read, the literary equivalent of the schlocky slasher movie.

Author: Kim Newman, 1992

Published: Titan Books (London, 1992