Books: "Anno Dracula," Kim Newman
I read this on the bus journey from Los Angeles to San Francisco. It beguiled the tedium of the journey. I don't know if I would have been able to hold still long enough to finish it if I hadn't been stuck on a bus.
Briefly, I liked the setting and background a lot more than the plot and characterization. Nothing happened that surprised me much; the element that might have been an entertaining if melodramatic plot twist ([character from other thing] is also Jack the Ripper!) is revealed in the first few pages, and we spend the rest of the book watching this plot thread go nowhere interesting. There's a later twist where [bland character we don't care about] turns out to have been involved, but it didn't do much for me. The protagonists, a female vampire social worker and a wishy-washy male human double agent, try to catch Jack the Ripper, fail at protecting those within their care, and fall in love and have sex. There are a lot of minor lowlife characters who appear for like a page apiece and are more interesting than they are.
At the end, the nicer characters storm the lair of Jabba the Hutt Dracula, and manage to do heroic stuff, but it's not enough to keep me from feeling cheated that I read a long work of poorly-structured fanfiction where nobody's storyline wrapped up. I guess I've had the book built up and built up for me by people idly referring to how much they loved it or how influential it was or what a deep comment it made on Stoker's Dracula, and I obviously don't see what other people see in it. It comes off like half of a good novel. I understand there are sequels. I wonder if Newman intended Anno Dracula to be twice as long, and had to cut it in half and publish it as separate books.
The reason I'm posting about this instead of letting myself forget the book is that I liked the background very much indeed. AU where everything in Bram Stoker's novel happened up to the point where Dracula attacks Mina. Here he succeeded, she went vamp and evil, Dracula killed most of the other good guys, Van Helsing and Seward fled to the wilderness, Arthur Holmwood went vamp, and Dracula cut a swath through England. He killed tons of people, made a lot of new vampires, and acquired lackeys and henchmen and recruited other really old vampires from across Europe to come to England and perform a coup. They forced Queen Victoria to "agree" to marry Vlad Tepes. He's the Prince Consort, Victoria's grown children presumably being in exile, and he's the only one in charge in Buckingham Palace now. The country is packed with vampires, home-grown and imported. We see every possible kind of vampire, including a hopping Chinese vampire that even the other vampires find scary, and hear pretty much every famous vampire of fiction name-checked. (Newman evidently loves Hammer horror films best. We also get lots of obscure literary vamps. I was pleased that Mrs. Amworth the matter-of-fact middle-aged woman shows up as, basically, a vampire EMT.)
The vampire-human world is well realized. It works more neatly than any other work I've seen depict a city where vampires are out of the closet and coexist with humans. It goes to a predictable norm: humans are the sheep and the vampires are the rich elite. However, there are now so many vampires that they're starving in the streets just like the humans. Also, there are vampire hereditary diseases; Vlad Tepes' line of descent is "tainted," whatever that means, and the result is that some of his infectees at three and four removes are covered in weeping sores or able to turn partly and ineffectually into animals. One little girl can sort of turn one arm into a bat wing, but only the one arm. Poor people feed off each other: the most impoverished vampire prostitutes will perform sex acts in exchange for a little blood, while, from the human side, there are adults walking around in the bad neighborhoods with little kids on leashes, offering to let desperate vampires drink infant blood for a shilling a time. The streets are full of homeless vampires who can only wrap themselves up in blankets and huddle in doorways through the hours of sunlight.
It's amazing how little difference vampire rule makes to the poor people. Here comes the new boss, same as the old boss: the rulers are a combination of upper-class Percivals who are there because they're old and rich and have personal armies, and bastards who are in charge because they're intelligent and ruthless and give the public what it wants. Lord Ruthven is probably the most nuanced; he's a smug fop who has been pulled out of his wandering lifestyle to act as Dracula's right-hand man, and carry out Nazi-like purges of the other elite vampires who helped Dracula get where he is. I enjoyed the by-play between Ruthven and his own underling, Arthur Holmwood, who is trying very hard to prove he's on board with the vampire cause.
One of the nasty pieces of work is Count Vardalek, who is Vampire Ernst Röhm; he's a sort-of-pedophilic gay vampire. Vardalek is in the book to be a comic villain, so we can feel good about the heroine beating up a bad guy. Wouldn't you know it, although there are other quasi-bisexual or pansexual characters among the vampires, Vardalek the flaming queen is the only one we see in same-sex situations--which consist of his trying to buy one teenaged boy from his parents and murdering two others during creepy snake sex. Overall, Newman does a good job of making me see the vampires as morally ambiguous, but I could have done without his equating "gay" to "pedophilic" which is how this comes off.
There's a surprising amount of positively depicted (heterosexual) sex in this book. The vampire do-gooder, Genevieve Dieudonne, has a genuinely loving affair with a guy; other people have functional/friendly/enjoyable sexual encounters, including some sex work, in order to throw the nastier moments into sharp relief. That was nice. On the other hand, the male characters are always spouting on about how MOST women are weak/passive/dull/spineless, except that this woman right here is different and interesting. This is a load of crap, and also means the audience has been told to find the most potentially interesting villain in the book dull and spineless. She's like a female equivalent of Magnus from The Vampire Lestat: she twiddles her thumbs for half the book waiting for someone interesting to rescue her from middle-class dullness, and when that doesn't happen, she goes out and stabs a vampire in the neck and drinks his blood in order to turn herself into a vampire. It works. And then... nothing. That's literally all the character arc she gets. Perhaps she does something in the sequel, but I'm probably not going to bother to find out. There's a plucky female vampire newspaper reporter, who does nothing much. Vampire Mina exists but never becomes important to the plot. There are vampire whores who are physically monstrous but are also just sex workers trying to make a living and give the client what he pays for. They're underutilized.
Oh, well. This is a world where the new Gilbert & Sullivan opera as of 1888 is called The Vampyres of Venice: Or, the Maid, the Shade, and the Blade, and Ruddigore was a deliberate satire on vampires. A vampire poseur (as in, one who dresses like a Goth in our reality) is commonly known as a "murgatroyd" for that reason. I fell in love with the world of this book because of touches like that. I had my heart broken by almost everything else.
Also, when you finally see the dreaded Dracula for a moment at the end, he's truly awful and has power to frighten. He's a massive giant who sits around encrusted with blood and filth, with his dick out, and he keeps Queen Victoria on a leash like Jabba with Princess Leia. He constantly shapeshifts, taking a new monstrous form every time a new thought crosses his mind, and that's partly why he's nude--he can't keep his clothes on, because there's too much of him, because he is every single version of Dracula all crammed together.
Anybody read the other books in this series? Want to encourage me to keep going because it gets better, or head me off now before I invest more time?
Briefly, I liked the setting and background a lot more than the plot and characterization. Nothing happened that surprised me much; the element that might have been an entertaining if melodramatic plot twist ([character from other thing] is also Jack the Ripper!) is revealed in the first few pages, and we spend the rest of the book watching this plot thread go nowhere interesting. There's a later twist where [bland character we don't care about] turns out to have been involved, but it didn't do much for me. The protagonists, a female vampire social worker and a wishy-washy male human double agent, try to catch Jack the Ripper, fail at protecting those within their care, and fall in love and have sex. There are a lot of minor lowlife characters who appear for like a page apiece and are more interesting than they are.
At the end, the nicer characters storm the lair of Jabba the Hutt Dracula, and manage to do heroic stuff, but it's not enough to keep me from feeling cheated that I read a long work of poorly-structured fanfiction where nobody's storyline wrapped up. I guess I've had the book built up and built up for me by people idly referring to how much they loved it or how influential it was or what a deep comment it made on Stoker's Dracula, and I obviously don't see what other people see in it. It comes off like half of a good novel. I understand there are sequels. I wonder if Newman intended Anno Dracula to be twice as long, and had to cut it in half and publish it as separate books.
The reason I'm posting about this instead of letting myself forget the book is that I liked the background very much indeed. AU where everything in Bram Stoker's novel happened up to the point where Dracula attacks Mina. Here he succeeded, she went vamp and evil, Dracula killed most of the other good guys, Van Helsing and Seward fled to the wilderness, Arthur Holmwood went vamp, and Dracula cut a swath through England. He killed tons of people, made a lot of new vampires, and acquired lackeys and henchmen and recruited other really old vampires from across Europe to come to England and perform a coup. They forced Queen Victoria to "agree" to marry Vlad Tepes. He's the Prince Consort, Victoria's grown children presumably being in exile, and he's the only one in charge in Buckingham Palace now. The country is packed with vampires, home-grown and imported. We see every possible kind of vampire, including a hopping Chinese vampire that even the other vampires find scary, and hear pretty much every famous vampire of fiction name-checked. (Newman evidently loves Hammer horror films best. We also get lots of obscure literary vamps. I was pleased that Mrs. Amworth the matter-of-fact middle-aged woman shows up as, basically, a vampire EMT.)
The vampire-human world is well realized. It works more neatly than any other work I've seen depict a city where vampires are out of the closet and coexist with humans. It goes to a predictable norm: humans are the sheep and the vampires are the rich elite. However, there are now so many vampires that they're starving in the streets just like the humans. Also, there are vampire hereditary diseases; Vlad Tepes' line of descent is "tainted," whatever that means, and the result is that some of his infectees at three and four removes are covered in weeping sores or able to turn partly and ineffectually into animals. One little girl can sort of turn one arm into a bat wing, but only the one arm. Poor people feed off each other: the most impoverished vampire prostitutes will perform sex acts in exchange for a little blood, while, from the human side, there are adults walking around in the bad neighborhoods with little kids on leashes, offering to let desperate vampires drink infant blood for a shilling a time. The streets are full of homeless vampires who can only wrap themselves up in blankets and huddle in doorways through the hours of sunlight.
It's amazing how little difference vampire rule makes to the poor people. Here comes the new boss, same as the old boss: the rulers are a combination of upper-class Percivals who are there because they're old and rich and have personal armies, and bastards who are in charge because they're intelligent and ruthless and give the public what it wants. Lord Ruthven is probably the most nuanced; he's a smug fop who has been pulled out of his wandering lifestyle to act as Dracula's right-hand man, and carry out Nazi-like purges of the other elite vampires who helped Dracula get where he is. I enjoyed the by-play between Ruthven and his own underling, Arthur Holmwood, who is trying very hard to prove he's on board with the vampire cause.
One of the nasty pieces of work is Count Vardalek, who is Vampire Ernst Röhm; he's a sort-of-pedophilic gay vampire. Vardalek is in the book to be a comic villain, so we can feel good about the heroine beating up a bad guy. Wouldn't you know it, although there are other quasi-bisexual or pansexual characters among the vampires, Vardalek the flaming queen is the only one we see in same-sex situations--which consist of his trying to buy one teenaged boy from his parents and murdering two others during creepy snake sex. Overall, Newman does a good job of making me see the vampires as morally ambiguous, but I could have done without his equating "gay" to "pedophilic" which is how this comes off.
There's a surprising amount of positively depicted (heterosexual) sex in this book. The vampire do-gooder, Genevieve Dieudonne, has a genuinely loving affair with a guy; other people have functional/friendly/enjoyable sexual encounters, including some sex work, in order to throw the nastier moments into sharp relief. That was nice. On the other hand, the male characters are always spouting on about how MOST women are weak/passive/dull/spineless, except that this woman right here is different and interesting. This is a load of crap, and also means the audience has been told to find the most potentially interesting villain in the book dull and spineless. She's like a female equivalent of Magnus from The Vampire Lestat: she twiddles her thumbs for half the book waiting for someone interesting to rescue her from middle-class dullness, and when that doesn't happen, she goes out and stabs a vampire in the neck and drinks his blood in order to turn herself into a vampire. It works. And then... nothing. That's literally all the character arc she gets. Perhaps she does something in the sequel, but I'm probably not going to bother to find out. There's a plucky female vampire newspaper reporter, who does nothing much. Vampire Mina exists but never becomes important to the plot. There are vampire whores who are physically monstrous but are also just sex workers trying to make a living and give the client what he pays for. They're underutilized.
Oh, well. This is a world where the new Gilbert & Sullivan opera as of 1888 is called The Vampyres of Venice: Or, the Maid, the Shade, and the Blade, and Ruddigore was a deliberate satire on vampires. A vampire poseur (as in, one who dresses like a Goth in our reality) is commonly known as a "murgatroyd" for that reason. I fell in love with the world of this book because of touches like that. I had my heart broken by almost everything else.
Also, when you finally see the dreaded Dracula for a moment at the end, he's truly awful and has power to frighten. He's a massive giant who sits around encrusted with blood and filth, with his dick out, and he keeps Queen Victoria on a leash like Jabba with Princess Leia. He constantly shapeshifts, taking a new monstrous form every time a new thought crosses his mind, and that's partly why he's nude--he can't keep his clothes on, because there's too much of him, because he is every single version of Dracula all crammed together.
Anybody read the other books in this series? Want to encourage me to keep going because it gets better, or head me off now before I invest more time?