Dracula Cha Cha Cha
Simon & Schuster hbk, 291 pgs, £16.99 (now a Pocket Books paperback)
Review by Gerald Houghton (2000)
In the kingdom of smug self-satisfaction, Kim Newman is king. His private vampire mythos sometimes reads like a litany of attentiveness; a love letter to his own perspicacity. At their best these are elegant pop culture trawls that reward the careful reader with a glimpse behind the fey Edwardian suits. But equally, in the wrong frame of mind, it’s not difficult to be ground down by the relentless invention. Too much of a good thing is still too much.
1959. Rome has emerged as the first great glamorous European capital in the wake of global conflict. Its streets throng with Vespas and designer sunglasses, cafés spill with celebrities to see and be seen; la dolce vita. And such celebrations mean only one thing: vampires. Edgar Allen Poe is writing sword and sandal for Cinecitta, and celebrated "English avant-garde painter" Anthony Aloysius St. John Hancock holds court at The Kit Kat Klub. ("My genius is immortal, mush.") And in his palace just outside of the city, Count Dracula prepares for his third marriage, a dynastic match designed to re-establish an Eastern European power base.
But even as the great and the good flock for the impending nuptials, dark dealings are afoot. The Crimson Executioner haunts the night with cartoonish tights and silver scythe, viciously dispatching bloodsucking elders. And suave vampiric British secret agent Hamish Bond has swept into town, his masters’ interests peaked by this gathering of the clans. Subsequent events will leave Newman’s supernatural saga irrevocably changed.
The book is inevitably pockmarked with Fellini, but runs the cultural gamut from Antonioni, Pasolini, Borges and Buñuel on the one hand, to the Beats, schlock-miester Dario Argento and Patricia Highsmith on the other. Impossibly elegant young things are milked by the vampire elite at parties, chugging Vimto to replenish supplies, while Anthony Powell’s A Dance To The Music of Time is celebrated as a witty alternate history that imagines vampires never existed. This is a world where Gore Vidal and Simone Signoret rub shoulders with Cat People’s Irena and Nabokov’s Clare Quilty, where you’re as likely to run into Lemmy Caution as John Kennedy, and where we find out the real reason for Cliff’s eternal bachelorhood.
Dracula himself is a spectre at the feast, remaining resolutely off-screen throughout; his place in this particular mythology potent enough through rumour alone. Newman does rather assume we’ve grown-up with his creations – Kate Reed, Genevieve Dieudonné, ageing spymaster Charles Beauregard who would rather face death than be turned - taking little regard for anyone new to the series. That said, though, Dracula Cha Cha Cha is accessible, fair fizzes with detail and, as ever, is far better written than it ever needed be. Frothy, intoxicating and only occasionally irritating.