Kim Newman
Anno Dracula
Simon & Schuster hbk, 359 pgs
Review by Gerald Houghton (1992)
Given the whole of the country for the taking, it is somewhat inconceivable that Count Dracula would have greeted his arrival from foreign climes by preying upon the occasional solicitor's wife. This given, the late-Victorian Britain of critic and novelist Kim Newman is one reigned by the less than beloved Queen Victoria, at her side a decadent and brutal vampiric Prince Consort. The resulting population neatly co-exists along the lines of the 'warm' and their vampire neighbours with an uneasy calm, but the nature of the time would have it that the maze-like Whitechapel is haunted by the ferocious butcher who swiftly supersedes his own nickname Silver Blade, as the vampire-prostitute slayer, Jack the Ripper.
As is his wont, Newman is playing fast and loose with fact and fiction, rewiring Bram Stoker's seminal source novel as he sees fit. Thus the Whitechapel killings are recast as the dirty work of the vengeful Jack Seward, once Stoker's asylum keeper but now doctor to underprivileged of East London. Keeping the killer's identity is not his purpose and Seward is revealed from the word off, leaving Newman's purpose one far wider in scope than a simple whodunit. This London is populated from the highest to the very lowest by a rather unique blend of multi-ethnicity, echoing partially Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's own fine take on Ripperdom, From Hell, drawing central intrigues from the hidden agendas of political factions together with the elements of mysticism. Both encompass a thread of comment running throughout, placing the Ripper killings as really little more than a product of the chronic social conditions forced upon the people.
Within the novel the vampire mythos itself is reinvented, vampirism redefined more as a science than as supernatural in basis. Creatures of Newman eschew the Nosferatu-fostered myth that sunlight is fatal, and similarly the garlic and crucifix mentality serves little purpose beyond icons of a past age for the superstitious elder vampires. Death is by silver weaponry or inflicted through gross physical injury - hence the vigorous employment of Vlad's staking technique, or the Ripper's ferocity.
What ultimately elevates Anno Dracula is the marked degree of maturity in Newman's writing. Previous books - The Night Mayor, Bad Dreams - show a surfeit of ingenuity, more often than not at the expense of genuine emotion, but here he succeeds in balancing both to effect. The customary left-field invention is there - the Elephant Man plays court to Royalty, Dr. Jekyll is an acknowledged expert in vampire physiology - but the heart is served by Charles Beauregard, adventurer in the employ of the sinister Diogenes Club, and the unconventional centuries-old teenager Genevieve Dieudonne, now charity worker helping to alleviate East End poverty. Their subtle, sexy romance, coupled with genuine pathos - particularly affecting is the self-inflicted death of a vampire child - gives a sincere depth that enriches the novel. This despite a finale - the inevitable confrontation with the Prince of Darkness himself - that is a little too hurried and baroque to sit comfortably with the remainder. That aside, and as much for its obvious love and respect of the source material as its gleeful measures of wit, ingenuity, and splatterpunk sadism, Anno Dracula is rightly deserving of a place amongst the highest of vampire literati.