This is a story of two Worlds: the one we know and another, existing only in the mind of an author whose life and imagination have been violently shaped by a surfeit of popular culture. Any resemblance to any other world, known or unknown, is purely deliberate.

Bram Stoker was a little disingenuous when he gave the world his charismatic, fire-eyed bloodsucker. He brought the beast perilously across the sea ... and hid him in the shadows. The Prince of Darkness - the Undead's Undead - had reason to think himself short-changed. Thank Satan, then, for Kim Newman. His marvellous Anno Dracula gave the Lord of Vampires something he must have craved - a shot at being cruel consort to the British Crown. Eventually beaten, though, he fled back into the darkest recesses of an inky night.

The time is 1918. Europe. A war rages between the Allies and the Kaiser's battalions, fronted by the Graf von Dracula himself. In France only the bravest defy gravity in rickety crates to fly desperate raids over the Western Front; knights who tip a grudging hat the way of the greatest aerial combatant of the era: Baron Manfred von Richtofen. For Condor Squadron the objective is the rambling Gothic fortress at Malinbois, home to the Baron's wing of undead fighters and keeper of a terrible secret. Even as the exiled Edgar Allan Poe is despatched to pen Richtofen's biography, gears that will affect the entire war are slowly grinding.

Tough on plot, tough on the causes of plot, Newman's novels (and this is no exception) often read like a string of phenomenal ideas hung out to dry on a very loose washing-line. If that counts against their cohesion, the brilliance of the execution is never in doubt. The world of Anno Dracula is complete in itself: there is the warm, unturned population, and there are vampire-kind. Both co-exist, the latter hardened to the sun, content to feed on human blood only occasionally. Some - those of premier bloodlines - can shape-shift and regenerate body parts lost in battle. Flyers are staffed by the undead on account of their superior night-vision. Under Dracula's edict it is forbidden to turn (make vampire) Jews. A strip-show in Paris sees clothes discarded in a trice, before fingers start memorably in on flesh. There is a silver drive on to persuade the wealthy to "give up coffee pots and candlesticks for bullets and bayonets." Newman must sit cackling over his typewriter with each twist of the knife.

Embroiled in the conflicts are a ragged army of individuals who can make a difference: enthusiastic young intelligence officer Edwin Winthrop; Charles Beaureguard, Dracula's ageing nemesis; and undead radical journalist Kate Reed. And Kafka, Dr Mabuse and Moreau, even Colonel Wynne-Candy, Biggles and Mata Hari show up in these over-stuffed pages. On and on with the invention. But what also makes an appearance is a poignancy not overly familiar from Newman's other work. There is real melancholy in 'turning', in the so-called Dark Kiss. Given the (apparent) benefits, reasons for staying, for growing old with grace, have to be strong. There are mutual needs in both warm and cold.

In the end, though, The Bloody Red Baron is just like all of Newman's books - too damn clever by half. He's incapable of doing just one thing at a time. As a result he tends to undercut himself, sacrificing the raw horrors of WWI - and his characters - to his own over-fertile imagination. This book is simultaneously heavily researched satire, Gothic horror, and tongue-in-cheek Boy's Own derring-do. One day (the inevitable sequel?) he will write a great book. For now, this is simply another exceedingly good one.