I first stumbled across Kim Newman when he was writing for the Warhammer fantasy role-playing game line under the pseudonym Jack Yeovil.
Although Newman paints a vivid portrait of London’s Victorian society with its class, gender and racial issues, the characters in the story were dull and humourless and as such I had no vested interest in them and couldn’t have cared less whether they lived or died. The story starts well but quickly starts to drag so that I had force myself to persevere to the end of the book and the characterisation didn’t help with holding my interest either. On the other hand, I found Anno Dracula lacked pace. Newman’s depiction of a gas lit, dark and foggy London is also vivid and brilliantly sketched, creating a wonderful sense of menace. On the plus side, the story is well written and the book is not just a gothic horror cum murder mystery but a homage to both the gothic horror and Victorian fiction genres as Newman cleverly weaves into the narrative all the familiar characters from that era, so that we have the likes of Sherlock Holmes and C. Charles Beauregard, an agent of the Diogenes Club, and Geneviève Dieudonné, an elder and very powerful vampire, are the protagonists who are thrown together while investigating the murders of vampire prostitutes in London by Jack the Ripper. Anno Dracula is set in an alternative Victorian London where Dracula has become the consort of Queen Victoria and as such vampires are members of society.
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