Andy Warhol’s Dracula
Kim Newman
Original edition: PS Publishing trd pbk, 66 pgs, £8.00
Binary 2: Andy Warhol’s Dracula and Michael Marshall Smith’s The Vaccinator, Millennium SF pbk, £4.99 (2 novellas)
Also published in Foursight, Gollancz hbk, ed. Peter Crowther (4 novellas)
Review by Gerald Houghton (1999 and 2000)
Drella was a concoction. From Cinderella and Dracula. And adopted by the Factory moths for their flame, Pop Art supremo Andy Warhol. That much is fact. The remainder of Andy Warhol’s Dracula, latest in Kim Newman’s alternate bloodsucking history chronicles, is largely fanciful and, given its author’s fecund imagination, really quite brilliant.
It’s the story of one Johnny Pop, a Brit vamp drawn to Hollywood’s bright lights but caught short at Immigration; the dawn’s chorusing and he’s getting peckish. So Johnny Pop carves out a niche for himself on the Disco-crazy dancefloors of 70s New York, whip-sharp strutting clothes half-inched from unfortunate victim Tony Manero: "a woman’s man with no time to talk." Welcome to his Saturday Night Fever dream.
Andy Warhol’s Dracula, like most of Newman’s ingeniously fanciful world, always has one eye on plot, the other to its warped chronology. Or maybe not so much plot: not a lot happens here, even when Johnny Pop starts hawking hits of dried blood - pieces of Drac - to hedonistic clubbers up for being undead for a night. There’s the Mob to pay off - Michael Corleone, the Prizzi family - but that’s a small price.
Sid and Nancy? Did you realise there was a third present on that murderous Chelsea night? Jonathan and Jennifer Hart invite Warhol to their parties. American Psycho Patrick Bateman stalks this world, and one Travis Bickle ferries Johnny Pop in his cab. Oh, and VU chanteuse Nico was a vampire, but that comes as no surprise. There’s more invention - Newman appropriates much of Abel Ferrara culter Ms. 45 Angel of Vengeance, for example - on one page of this brief (66 page) piece than in many a long literary career.
Newman’s smartest conceit is to leave Warhol a supporting player; an observer. The book makes him no more knowable, no more three dimensional than the artist was in real life. His dialogue is sparse and typically Warholian: "gee, misa-anthropy", "gee, fa-abulous", "gee, na-aughty". Like Robert Kennedy, we are told, he died in 1968 (after the attack by Valerie Solanas, author of the ‘SKAV Manifesto’ - the Society for Killing All Vampires.) Only, unlike Bobby, Warhol didn’t stay dead. Vampires, so the lore has it, are too busy living the eternal life to create good art that comments upon it. Everyone assumed Andy Warhol was a vampire, Newman just confirms it.