Anno Dracula by Kim Newman (1992): A Nightmare of Delight

Look, I'm just gonna jump in head-first and not fuck around: Anno Dracula, the fourth non-pseudonymous novel from British film writer Kim Newman, is one of the most accomplished and thoroughly enjoyable novels I've read, not just for Too Much Horror Fiction, but, like, ever. Would that I read it upon its original publication, when I was working in a big chain bookstore and reading at a pace like never before or since (blame the internets). For some reason, when reading its jacket, I just thought, Oh, sounds kinda cool, but wasn't overly convinced of its readability and anything about the British monarchy generally bores me beyond tears. Shame, because I'd loved loved loved Newman's book on the modern horror film, Nightmare Movies (1988). But last month I found a perfect edition of the original Avon paperback and bought it on a whim. Just think: if I'd read Anno Dracula back then, I'd have had well over 15 years to recommend it to people. Damn, what a missed opportunity. Out of print for ages, it's finally back in 2011!

With a breathtaking effortlessness, Newman brilliantly weaves together the twin nightmare mythologies of real-life monsters Vlad Tepes and Jack the Ripper into an alternate history whole unlike any horror novel I have ever read. All manner of historical figures waltz through the book, particularly fictional vampires (and other people too) from film and literature. Part of the fun of reading Anno Dracula is recognizing these characters, often wittily referenced and employed. Famous Victorian characters from Conan Doyle, Dickens, Wells, Stevenson, Le Fanu, and others appear (much as in Alan Moore's later The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen graphic novels). Lord Ruthven is made Prime Minister; Count Iorga, a much-mocked general; Drs. Moreau and Jekyll are consulted in the Ripper case; Kate Reed, a character cut from the original 1897 Dracula, is a young reporter; Oscar Wilde stops by; why, even Florence Stoker, Bram's wife, is part of the action. Too bad Bram was exiled after his friends failed to stop the king of the undead.

Newman's Vlad Tepes is also Stoker's literary creation Count Dracula, and it is this towering king vampire who wins out over Van Helsing, Jonathan Harker and the other men who'd banded together to stop him. This happens before the novel begins, but Dr. Jack Seward (he ran the madhouse and studied Renfield, remember) recounts the tragedy in his diaries early on: We were defeated utterly. The whole country lay before Count Dracula, ripe for the bleeding. Dracula, ever the military strategist, makes his way to Buckingham Palace and marries Queen Victoria, and then turns her into one of his unholy concubines. Van Helsing is recast as a traitor to the British Empire, his head placed upon a pike. Dracula, who had been King of the Vampires long before he was ruler of Great Britain... the undead had been an invisible kingdom for thousands of years; the Prince Consort had, at a stroke, wiped clean that slate, lording over warm and vampire alike.

And now it is the year and age of our Lord and our Savior, the mighty Prince Vlad Dracula, and every knee shall bend, every tongue shall... well, not confess, exactly, but you know what I mean. From here he turns the country into a new police state; the reign of Dracula is powered by the Carpathian Guard, brutal old-world vampires (you'll recognize some of their names; does Graf Orlok ring a bell?) he has brought to England for the purpose of spreading vampirism and stamping out any political insurrections. Criminals and traitors and others - living or undead - who try to defy the edicts of the "Prince Consort" are, of course, summarily impaled. Newman relishes those details, you can be sure. Unpleasant indeed, particularly for those who get not the pointed spike, but the, uh, rounded blunt spike. Hey-oh!

As the novel begins, vampire prostitutes are being murdered on the foggy midnight streets of Whitechapel by a killer at first dubbed the "Silver Knife," alluding to his weapon of choice, since only pure silver can truly kill these nosferatu newborns. In this bloodthirsty new world, many living want to become immortal undead - it's seen as a step up in society - while vampires can live quite well on small amounts of blood that humans - or "cattle" - willingly give up. Vampire whores offer sex in exchange for a, ahem, midnight snack. As one might expect, though, Christian anti-vampire groups have formed, and England faces turmoil and riot in these days of class struggles and uncertain future.

Anno Dracula also enlists elements of espionage and detective fiction. The Diogenes Club, a mysterious gentlemen's group referred to by Doyle in his stories, sends for the adventurer Charles Beauregard and requests his services in bringing the Silver Knife to justice. The head of this club? While not mentioned by name, he is the criminal mastermind Fu Manchu. One of Newman's long-running creations, Geneviève Dieudonné, is a vampire, older than Dracula himself, who is driven and brilliant but an outcast whose long life puts her at odds with the warm, or living, and vampire newborns around her. She and Beauregard, aided by real-life Inspector Abberline, join together after the infamous murderer, soon to be dubbed Jack the Ripper. Although widowed Beauregard is now engaged to a prim and proper social climber, he will find he and his beautiful vampire partner are alike in many ways.

Like vampire or Gothic erotica? Well, even if you don't, I was quite impressed with this: Dr. Seward, in a Vertigo-esque bit, "keeps" a vampire prostitute named Mary Jean Kelly, bitten by the doomed Miss Lucy Westenra. You'll recall she was Dracula's first victim, or "get," those many years ago. Mary Jean was Lucy's get, a little girl lost who slaked Lucy's thirst and was repaid with immortality. Seward and Kelly engage in bloody erotic fantasies fueled by memories of his unrequited love, Lucy:

Sometimes, Lucy's advances to Kelly are tender, seductive, mysterious, heated caresses before the Dark Kiss. At others, they are a brutal rape, with needle-teeth shredding flesh and muscle. We illustrate with our bodies Kelly's stories.

Other wonderful scenes abound: Beauregard's misadventures in the city, Jack's heartless murders, explosive riots in the streets, the hopping Chinese vampire who stalks Geneviève, trickery and ruthlessness, general bloodletting and blood-drinking of various sorts. It is definitely part gruesome horror story; Newman regales us with this almost eternal England night.

For virtually all of the novel, Count Dracula is referred to but never seen, but when he finally is revealed, in all his revolting glory, ensconced in a filthy throne room in the Palace, Newman outdoes everything that's come before. Beauregard and Geneviève have been summoned to appear before him and his Queen, and they are aghast at how they find him in his rank and hellish quarters (highlight if you want to read the spoiler): bestial and bloated, enormous and naked but for a bedraggled black cape, his beard matted with the gravy of his last feeding, yellow fangs the size of thumbs, shadows of all his other shape-shifted selves in his crimson corpulent face, the great Count Dracula is obscenity personified. Chained to him at his feet is the newborn Queen, while nearby his famous Brides writhe in feral lust and red thirst. This is no regal steel-haired gentleman clad in elegant black bidding his guests welcome and to leave some of their happiness; this is a bursting tick gorging on humanity itself. The novel's ultimate confrontation is at hand.

Audacious and unique, written in an unobtrusive manner that doesn't scream "Hey, get this name, get that reference, wink-wink," Anno Dracula is an unparalleled work of popular fiction, filled with inventive touches, expertly twining several sub-genres into an utterly satisfying and engaging whole. Historical fact and historical fiction bound together with nary a seam to be found. My review only touches on a few of many pleasures to be found between the covers; Mr. Newman has written an essential, unmissable horror read that is a nightmare of delight for fans and horror newcomers alike.

Bloodright by Peter Tremayne (1977): I Love the Nightlife

Dracula and vampires in general went through some re-mythologizing in the 1970s and early 1980s. Stephen King, Anne Rice, Suzy McKee Charnas, Fred Saberhagen, Michael Talbot, Les Daniels, Tanith Lee, and George R.R. Martin were all writing well-regarded vampire novels, Bram Stoker virtually forgotten. In movies you had Frank Langella and Klaus Kinski (my favorite Dracula of the era? George Hamilton). This title I was totally unfamiliar with. Here, on the cover of Peter Tremayne's Bloodright (titled Dracula Unborn in his native England) you can see him in the traditional opera-cape getup that dates back to Lugosi's theatrical performances on the 1920s, along with the Dracul family crest medallion on his chest. Very old-school.

But check out the actual dude: with his thick wavy hair and chiseled features, he could have stepped from the pages of Playgirl or a daytime soap! I guess he's Dracula's son, going by the tagline. I love the swooning oh-so-'70s woman in her nightgown and its strap just so; on the spine of the book you can see she's clutching her diary. Was she professing her secret desires for Dracula, or simply writing her own vampire tale? If not, she's got one to tell now.

'Salem's Lot by Stephen King (1975): Because The Night Belongs to Us

To this day, Stephen King's second novel, 'Salem's Lot, is one of only two or three works of horror fiction that, upon first read, instilled in me a palpable sense of fear and trembling not simply for the characters but for myself as well. Over a quarter of a century later I can still feel the chilling vice that clamped around my scalp, recall how my stomach flared hot and sick and how the goose-flesh quickened along my arms, neck and shoulders, as if someone were behind me. I was up way too late on a school night, alone in my teenage room and I was afraid to look outside. But why would I want to look outside that late at night? In that I know I am not alone.

But I wonder, is that feeling even possible today? Is it because I was a not-so-experienced horror fiction reader at the time I read 'Salem's Lot? That I had yet to experience Lovecraft and Straub and Machen and Blackwood and Jackson and Leiber? Or was it that King so effortlessly wrote about simple fears of wrongness and malevolence in a common world that is perhaps inured to such things that I couldn't help but respond as if I myself were in danger? Honestly I don't even read horror (or watch horror films) to be scared anymore. Sometimes I wish I could recapture that feeling.

King has said this novel was his attempt at bringing Dracula - one of the few other books to physically frighten me, in the middle of 8th grade study hall - to the modern age, at imagining how this Old World villain would fit into a New World environment. Would the master vampire, in all his darkest wisdom, choose to arrive in New York City or Boston, or would he perhaps choose a quiet, near-forgotten rural town far from any outsider's concern? King felt the latter would provide the best cover and placed upon 'Salem's Lot the curse of the undead through cultivated Mr. Straker (I cannot see anyone else but James Mason in my head) who prepares the way (where have I heard that before?) for the dread Kurt Barlow, vampire king.

Their locus is the black and shuttered Marsten House, which overlooks (where have I heard that before?) the Lot; the distasteful and perhaps satanic owner of said house Mr. Barlow had illicit communications with decades before the novel begins. The town has its secrets, King informs us, but it keeps secrets even from itself:

They know that Hubie Marsten killed his wife, but they don't know what he made her do first, or how it was with them in that sun-sticky kitchen in the moments before he blew her head in, with the smell of honeysuckle hanging in the hot air like the gagging sweetness of an uncovered charnel pit. They don't know that she begged him to do it.

No sexy vamps or victims here

This was the first novel of King's in which he employed a rich panoply of everyday men and women, giving them believable backgrounds, interior lives, conflicting desires, and fears that finally make themselves manifest just past midnight. While no one would mistake King's depictions of such for those of an Updike, a Cheever, a Carver, his characters don't have the preciousness of those who populate more, ahem, lit'ry fiction. Ben Mears, the protagonist, is the first in a long line of King stand-ins, young writers obsessed with childhood fears who struggle to move past them. Mears grew up in the Lot, left it, and now after the accidental death of his wife and the nightmare of what happened to him inside the abandoned Marsten House have drawn him back again, he wonders aloud if it could be anything like Hill House in that famous book by Shirley Jackson. Oh it is, it is that and more. And worse.

First edition Signet paperback August 1976 - without King's name on cover
Art by James Plumeri

Although I've owned the hardcover of the book since high school, I found this '70s Signet paperback recently (at very top); I'd forgotten how simple it was. I like that you can barely see King's name on the cover (didn't even appear on the first Signet paperback printing), so obviously this edition was published before he was a name-brand author. The androgynous, angelic face looks like it's carved from stone, or maybe forged in iron; it reminds me of the Jacob Marley doorknocker from "A Christmas Carol." And blood so subtle, just a drop, just a drop to hint at the immortal terrors within, those terrors that millions know and have never forgotten, but they are terrors that sound strangely like a child laughing, laughing right outside your upstairs bedroom window, long after the sun has gone down on the final night of your life... or on the first night of your new one.

"And all around them, 

the bestiality of the night rises on tenebrous wings. 

The vampire's time has come."

Lair of the White Worm by Bram Stoker (1911): She's Lost Control

It's no wonder a Victorian author created the most famous horror villain of all time. With their society carefully constructed to hide every impolite aspect of life - and, let's face it, all life is pretty rude, insisting on its own way all the time - Victorian ladies and gentlemen had to suppress every natural instinct there is. Urges, ideas, fantasies, nightmares festered beneath corset and cummerbund alike, and burst forth in a glut of blood and other bodily fluids in Dracula. While Bram Stoker's 1897 novel became world famous, his other writings sank into obscurity, but Lair of the White Worm, his final work, seethes with the same sort of repressed fury at the indignity of life itself.

Tut-tut, I say, tut-tut!

Three cultivated men of the upper classes have to deal with a hateful estate owner, Edgar Caswell, who seems to literally mesmerize the pretty innocent young women of the town. The men are also busy being outraged by a mysterious, sinuous aristocratic, Lady Arabella March, who slinks about haughtily. Don't even get them started on the estate owner's black African servant. So there's this whole thing about ancient Roman pagans on British soil, and snake worship, and worms not being worms but serpents or dragons from time immemorial. Lady March is undeniable, cool, sensuous, and incalculable, with "diabolical cunning," and so an affront to Victorian decency - of course a modern heroine.

You can see how the book was co-opted by the Gothic romance fad in the 1960s (at top, Paperback Library 1966): retitled, one light on in the castle, subtle hint of predatory lesbianism, and a gorgeously rendered "garden of evil." The 1970s Zebra edition is more prosaic and features "Dracula" in much larger print that title or author, and a woman in a really unflattering nightgown and feathered hair. Oddly, the Zebra version rewrites some of the prose, switching from passive to active voice in a handful of passages, even the very first sentence! Pulpy, overdone, sexist, classist, and racist to the extreme, Lair of the White Worm presents the night-side of a morality intent on insisting, with utmost hypocrisy, it's the very purest ray of light in a world gone to the savages. Kind of a fun read, though.

Blood of the Impaler by Jeffrey Sackett (1989): Legacy of Brutality

Intended to be a sort of sequel to Bram Stoker's original Dracula, Jeffrey Sackett's Blood of the Impaler is much like its title: stilted, awkward, obvious, and tone-deaf, in dialogue, characterization, plotting, and horror. What became of Sackett I don't know but he apparently wrote four or five historical horror novels that came and went without a trace and are now all out of print. I had never run across one of his books that I can recall back when he was publishing them. Even if I had seen this book, its lack of any critical or author blurbs would've turned me off, I mean, I'm that much of a book nerd. A Google search did turn up this interview with him from, oh my god, 1990.

Malcolm Harker, a twenty-something bartender in Queens, NY, is the great-grandson of Jonathan and Mina Harker. Of course you remember them. He learns his family has Dracula's blood literally in its veins, caused by Dracula forcing Mina to drink his blood in the original Dracula. Which really happened. Except Malcolm thinks it was just a book and those crazy movies. But his grandfather Quincey, son of Jonathan and Mina, has all the letters and documents that Stoker based his classic book on. And only being really super-religious can prevent Dracula's blood - the blood of the Impaler - from taking the Harkers over. But Malcolm feels terrible during the day and loves the nightlife, so after reading said documents, he thinks there might be something to all this nonsense. He decides to hie it on over to England with his friends, bartender-womanizer Jerry and best gal Holly, to track down Lucy Westenra's remains. Fans of the novel will remember her as Mina's best friend and Dracula's victim, a young Englishwoman who would feed on children. Of course they find her remains with a stake through her heart and her head severed. So - get this - Malcolm bleeds on her to bring her back to undead "life" in her crypt, and quizzes her on her master Dracula. Seriously. They learn if they find Dracula's ashes and distribute them outside his native land they can prevent him from ever returning to seek vengeance on the Harkers.

Sackett, a professor of ancient history and languages, knows his Draculean lore, both the real Vlad the Impaler and Stoker's fictional character. He fills in some gaps in Dracula, invents some reasons for this or that vampire factoid, and inserts scenes of Vlad the Impaler's life throughout. Malcolm starts having terrifying visions, historical visions, of Vlad doing what he did best, which of course start to freak him out. Eventually Jerry meets the woman of his nightmares and Holly meets the only woman who can keep her from Malcolm. Sackett makes the all-important shift from Vlad the Impaler to Count Dracula rather clumsily and much too quickly - one page he's sealed his pact with the Devil to become nosferatu and the very next, he's welcoming Jonathan Harker into his castle. Would've liked to have seen some of the in-between, oh, four centuries.

I have to say, I almost gave up on this one: much of the tale plods along and the dialogue is achingly bad; one mark of an amateur writer is how many times characters refer to one another by their names ("Jerry, listen to me: we have to go to England." "Malcolm, you're crazy." "You may be right, Jer, but please!" "All right, Malc, let's go"). Resolving to speed through the final chapters, I then happily found that the novel wraps up everything satisfactorily. It ties together the disparate plot points with elements from Stoker's novel - such as how Dracula survives to the modern day - which causes a crazy final confrontation between the vampire lord and the Harkers that's bloody and gruesome and unholy. But I'm still not crazy about that cover; the artist could've come up with some specific and relevant to the novel's inventive storyline. And those dopey unsubtle fangs. And who's she supposed to be? Lucy Westenra? Holly? One of Dracula's wives? More please. If there's one thing I've learned about vampire stories, it's never, ever stint on the vampire ladies.