HOME | ABOUT | FICTION | INTERVIEWS | FEATURES | REVIEWS | NEWS | BUY THE PRINT MAGAZINE | BACK ISSUES | LINKS | CONTACT US

Kim Newman
Anno Dracula
Simon & Schuster hardback, 359 pages
Review by Gerald Houghton (1992)

The late Victorian Britain of critic and novelist Kim Newman is reigned over by the less than beloved Queen Victoria, with a decadent and brutal vampiric Prince Consort at her side. The resulting population, the 'warm', co-exists with an uneasy calm alongside their vampire neighbours. And in keeping with the nature of the time the maze-like Whitechapel is haunted by the ferocious butcher and vampire prostitute slayer, Jack the Ripper.

As is his wont, Newman is playing fast and loose with fact and fiction, here very much in the manner of Philip Jose Farmer, 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 the underprivileged of East London. Keeping the killer's identity secret is not part of Newman's plan and Seward is revealed from start, revealing Newman's novel to be far wider in scope than a simple whodunit. 

This London is populated from the highest to the very lowest by a rather unique multi-ethnic blend, 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 elements of mysticism. Both works place the Ripper killings as really little more than a product of the chronic social conditions forced upon the people.

Within Anno Dracula the vampire mythos itself is reinvented, the basis of vampirism redefined more as scientific than supernatural. Newman's creatures eschew the Nosferatu-fostered myth that sunlight is fatal, and similarly garlic and crucifixes are merely the 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 like The Night Mayor and Bad Dreams show plenty 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 Geneviève Dieudonné, a 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 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 rest of the book. 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. •

© 2011 THE EDGE and individual contributors. All rights reserved. All contributors reserve the right to be identified as the authors of all works credited to them on this site. Nothing should be reproduced without permission. THE EDGE magazine was founded in 1990, before anything else of that name or similar. The opinions of individual writers are not necessarily those of the editor.