Anno Dracula by Kim Newman

This book is nothing if not entertaining. I've noticed before that many fantasy novels tend to have difficulties with plot, but this one certainly does not suffer from such issues, it's densely and dazzlingly plotted, every detail is worked out and vividly described. So it makes for really exciting and fun reading. However, the characters are very badly written, in fact, they're the sort of dead boring that no afterlife can restore to vitality. One would think that with such a dazzling arsenal of late-Victorian (and earlier too) characters to play with, Kim Newman would at least have managed some interesting interactions and development, but this did not materialise. The characters lack any consistency, internal life, or interesting traits. One of the main characters, Geneviève Dieudonné, is an Elder vampire who splits her time between spectacular battles and confrontations with various opponents and crying soppily over dying vampires and her lover's past. The other main character, Charles Beauregard, is a sort of super-spy member of the Diogenes Club who is supposed to have defeated numerous villains and thwarted numerous evils in the past, but just seems like a spineless amoeba who somehow becomes engaged to a (deeply boring) woman who bosses him around and doesn't actually get anything done. The only character I liked was Lord Ruthven, a cold, scheming, witty vampire who has become Prime Minister. The novel also has absolutely horrifying accounts of torture, mutilation, violence, and creepy vampire sex, which I just found excessive to a sickening degree. It sometimes felt like watching a slasher film (an activity I have no interest in), where you just get totally desensitized to blood spouting in all directions and severed limbs everywhere. What I really did like about Anno Dracula was the often fantastic juxtaposition of the comic and the grotesquely horrifying. There are lots of really inventive and funny details of vampire existence that Kim Newman exploits to great comic effect, twisting already existing historical and/or fictional situations to exaggerate or reverse them. Normal life goes on, except for the minor difference that most of the members of society are now undead. As a consequence, people are sedately going on with their society get-togethers, happily ignoring the medieval tortures taking place a few streets away. There's a great moment when Lord Ruthven, worried about the prospect of the newly-turned-vampire Tennyson remaining as the Poet Laureate indefinitely, contemplates with despair the prospect of 'Locksley Hall, Six Hundred Years Later' (I hate the 'Locksley Hall' poems, so I concur). I also really liked the fact that Newman takes up and develops the brutal slaughter of Lucy Westenra in the original novel as something deeply disturbing, which opens the floodgates to violence and horror. Many critics have focussed on that part, and I think that using that moment as a starting point was a very strong move for a rewriting of Stoker's novel. But on the other hand, I was furious about the portrayal of Oscar Wilde as a fat, pretentious, lazy degenerate, languidly uttering colourful paradoxes that he himself doesn't understand (Wilde was an extremely hard worker and thoroughly understood philosophy). Also, I spent the entire novel being bothered by the fact that it's mentioned early on that Sherlock Holmes is in a concentration camp, and I kept waiting for someone to go rescue him, but it never happened! This was very distressing. Having finished it, I have the feeling that the entire novel was leading up to the culminating grotesque scene at the court of Dracula in Buckingham Palace, which was very well-done, but the rest of the book just isn't as good as that one scene. (And of course, I must complain that my darling Raffles gets an all-too-brief cameo as the sort of servant/errand boy for a league of a bunch of evil people. Rude.)