A mad mix of history, fiction, and popular culture that doesn’t quite come together.
Author:
Kim Newman
What They Say
Kim Newman returns to one of the bestselling vampire tales of the modern era in this brand-new novel in his acclaimed Anno Dracula series.
After defeating Van Helsing and rising to power in Great Britain and Germany, Count Dracula is finally dead. But with Dracula a relic of the past, the world needs a fresh monster.
In Transylvania, the vampire Kate Reed is on the set of Francis Ford Coppola’s troubled movie production of Dracula. When Kate meets a young vampire called Ion Popescu, she is compelled to help him escape and begin a new life in America, where he reinvents himself as Johnny Pop. He makes his name—and his fortune—selling a new, dangerously addirctive drug that convers vampire powers on its users, and becomes a hit on the decadent New York art scene.
As he stalks the streets of Manhattan and Hollywood, haunting the lives of the rich and famous, from Sid and Nancy to Andy Warhol, Orson Welles to Francis Ford Coppola, sinking his fangs ever deeper into the zeitgeist of 1980s America, it seems the past might not be dead at all…
The Review:
Johnny Alucard is the fourth book in Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula series. The series presents a world where Dracula defeated Van Helsing and his band of vampire hunters and went on to marry Queen Victoria of England, simultaneously bringing vampires out in the open and establishing his reign as the King of Cats. All of the Anno Dracula books are a mix of historical fiction, horror, and metafiction, and one of the reasons why it is so enjoyable is seeing the way Newman interlaces historical and fictional characters in this alternate history.
This latest volume takes place between 1976 and 1991. Dracula is dead and the world is reeling from the power vacuum he has left behind. Many try to occupy his position (Newman references the old British folktale of the King of Cats several times in the novel), but none possess the monster’s genius or ruthlessness to be anything more than pale pretenders. Ion Popescu was one of Dracula’s last children-in-darkness, and this novel chronicles his rise to power from poor Romanian peasant to Dracula.
The story begins with Kate Reed (a reoccurring character in the series) acting as advisor on Francis Ford Coppola’s film adaptation of Bram Stoker’s book. She encounters Ion, who is poor, starving, and near death, and helps him. He soon becomes a favorite of Coppola and uses this connection to the film crew to escape to the United States—leaving Kate behind to take the charge of murder for a government official. In America, Ion changes his name to Johnny Pop and quickly immerses himself in the New York night scene, becoming friends with Andy Warhol, haunting Studio 54, and setting up a drug empire using vampire blood. He is nearly killed by vampire hunters and flees to Hollywood where he becomes a powerful producer under the nom de guerre “Johnny Alucard.” During his rise to power, he keeps tabs on the two vampire women directly involved in Dracula’s death: Kate Reed and Geneviève Dieudonné.
Newman’s novel shifts between four intersecting plot threads: Kate’s, Geneviève’s, Penelope Churchward’s, and Johnny Alucard’s, and the splitting of the narrative in this way made the book a slow, disjointed read. At times it read more like a collection of related short stories or novellas instead of a novel, and that hindered my enjoyment of it to an extent. Compounding that is the dizzying number of characters drawn from history, prose, poetry, folklore, movies, television, and cartoons that are thrown into the mix. Geneviève comes into contact with Lieutenant Columbo, Kate works with Francis Ford Coppola, Johnny Alucard rents tapes from a young Quentin Tarantino, and so on. Perhaps the most extreme example is when Johnny (still Pop, not Alucard) is attacked in New York by Shaggy and Scooby, Popeye Doyle, Travis Bickle, Blade (from the 1970s comic, Tomb of Dracula, not the more recent comics or the Wesley Snipes’ movies), Hellboy, The Punisher, and a couple of characters I wasn’t able to identify. It’s a ridiculous scene that’s made fun because of its ridiculousness, and it gives an idea of how freely Newman throws in these characters.
Frankly, it’s amazing how well Newman juggles all of these different elements. There’s a social realism aspect in the manner in which he’s incorporated vampires into the everyday human world; there’s the meticulous historical research he includes that bolsters that sense of reality; and there’s the exhaustive, nearly encyclopedic inclusion of characters both historical and fictional. From a writer’s perspective, this is a damn impressive book even if it doesn’t quite satisfy on a purely reader level.
The issue ultimately is not the slow pace or the splitting of the narrative, it’s the fact that this is basically a setup novel. It ends with Johnny coming into full power and that’s it. The monster died in the last book but is now resurrected. On the one hand it speaks to the power of Dracula as a symbol—and this, I think, is the real theme of the book—but on the other, it prolongs a series that, while enjoyable, had a satisfying ending. Johnny Alucard sets the stage for the next play, but it resolves nothing, and that makes it dissatisfying. After spending 440 pages I want more closure than was given here.
If I hadn’t already had time and affection invested in this series and characters, I probably wouldn’t have enjoyed it as much as I did. There were definitely parts of the novel that I enjoyed, such as the way Newman plays with the Buffy the Vampire Slayer character type, and the thrill I feel when I recognize an obscure character he includes in the story, but it feels like a long, slow ride to a rest station, and not the destination.
In Summary:
Anno Dracula: Johnny Alucard is a large setup novel for the next act in Newman’s series. Dracula is dead, but his spirit lives on in the body of his final child-in-darkness. The book chronicles his rise to power as well as the lives of two characters from the previous novels: Kate Reed and Geneviève Dieudonné. There are times when the novel feels more like a series of novellas or short stories set during the same time period, making the narrative a bit disjointed, and the inclusion of characters from history and fiction—while impressively done—is somewhat exhausting. I enjoyed reading it, but I’ve also read the other books in the series, so I feel a sense of attachment and affection for this world and its characters, but that enjoyment was tempered by the fact that the story did not conclude. It’s a 440 page long setup for what’s to come, and that is what makes it ultimately unsatisfying.
Content Grade: C+
Published By: Titan Books
Release Date: September 17, 2013
MSRP: $24.99
