One Thousand Monsters–Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula heroine takes center stage

Review by C.J. Bunce

As horror novelists are concerned, nobody is better at the craft. As alternate history novels go, nobody is more creative. Anno Dracula: One Thousand Monsters is horror master Kim Newman′s fifth of six original full-length novels, part of what has become 30 years of storytelling in an alternate world where Count Dracula rose to conquer England, marry Queen Victoria, and establish a world where the living and undead live together almost in harmony. Anno Dracula mixes historic people with characters from pop culture, along with tangent characters from literature, TV, and movies. In this installment from 2017 (which I recently realized I hadn’t yet reviewed here!), Newman’s four century-old vampire heroine Dr. Geneviève Dieudonné sails to Japan in December 1899 with a group of vampires exiled from Europe by Count Dracula. Their destination is Yōkai Town, a sequestered area in Tokyo full of every kind of monster you’ve seen in years of manga horror–Yōkai is of course all of those monsters, ghosts, demons, shapeshifters, and all things supernatural from Japanese folklore. In so doing they may just establish a new anchorhead–and establish a new ruler–for Dracula’s sprawling empire in what may be the best entry in Newman’s vampire world yet. And it may even be a prequel to Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

As with the other novels in the series, the story is filled with real-world figures and characters plucked from fiction across the centuries. Along with Newman’s own creations, Dr. Dieudonné (revisited from a Newman Warhammer novel) and Princess Casamassima aka Christina Light (borrowed from Henry James’ novels), is the introduction of literally hundreds of new characters for the series. So many colorful monsters pepper every page that there very well could be a thousand identifiable monsters stuffed in. One of Newman’s talents is weaving in everyone and every relevant and curious element of an era in a way that is both immersive and spectacular. The reader’s only challenge is to try and keep up while marveling at his elegant prose, his understanding of language and dialect, and incorporation of an astonishing range of elements from each new culture and setting.

If you love Easter eggs, Newman can locate the obscure and rehabilitate any character of the past and find a good place for its return. Standout and surprise appearances in this story include the unlikely, like a supernatural version of none other than that one-eyed, spinach-chugging hero Popeye the Sailor Man. But Newman really shows his cards by seemlessly incorporating Juliet Landau’s character Drusilla from Buffy the Vampire Slayer into the story. Always a bit addled but able to foresee events just over the horizon, Drusilla brings some joy to the story and she gets one of the best lines of the novel. Of all the characters from Buffy that Newman could have borrowed, this was such a lovely choice.

But it’s the personal story told alternately by Geneviève as a report back to home that is striking here. Along with a journey she chronicles for her friend Charles Beauregard back at the Diogenes Club in London, she finds herself and her vampire comrades among every ghoulish creation imaginable in Yōkai Town, where vampires turn out to be not so welcome among the other supernatural beings. She tells of how the events of the real world first collided with a world of living vampires: Where were you when Dracula seized the throne of England? Newman is shockingly prescient in the details of a rise and establishment of a dark ruler that flipped society on end, beginning with taking the Suez Canal at the top of his to-do list, removing all women from power, and eliminating everyone that didn’t toe the line in a plot to draw a dark curtain over the entire world. Geneviève’s story of being removed from her university position is stunning, vivid, and real. Her oath as a doctor defines her, just as she acknowledges three lives she has taken across the centuries and how they haunt her centuries later. The most fleshed out in the series by Newman, she’s a character who readers will feel like they know her even more than from the past stories.

In backstory we meet characters like the creepy and manipulative Marquis de Coulteray (borrowed from a Gaston Leroux novel), whose aspirations are dashed as he bungles every move, only to bring down Geneviève with him. A third thread of the novel elevates bit-part character Captain Kostaki, a knight of Dracula’s Carpathian Guard (borrowed from Alexandre Dumas’s The Pale Lady), as he accompanies Geneviève. His character is subject to a glamour of sorts, and finds himself part of a long-game plot. Toshiro Mifune’s ronin Kuwabatake Sanjuro in Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo is reinvisioned as one of the rare turned Japanese vampires (referred to as “Mr. Bats”). You’ll really get into the heads of these and many more characters, especially so many from Japanese folklore. If you’re a fan of manga or anime, take note: Characters from Hayao Miyazaki fantasies and your favorite Japanese series are tucked into the corners waiting to be discovered.

Newman, known as the world expert in vampires and horror as a writer, broadcaster, and reviewer, covers vampire stories from around the world as he peppers his narrative with Victorian style, history, and popular fiction. This tale is full of blood and gore and violence as literature in the same vein as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s original Dracula. As I’ve remarked about the series before, the scenes sometimes come off the page as the stuff of vivid nightmares, and again Newman saves the most twisted for the third act–the kind of imagery that probably is best left for books. Could anyone possibly do this series justice in a screen adaptation?

Although you do not need to read the books in their publication or continuity order, you won’t want to miss the first novel in the series Anno Dracula, reviewed here at borg, the James Bond send-up Dracula Cha Cha Cha (reviewed here), more Genevieve Dieudonné stories in Genevieve Undead, the WWI story Bloody Red Baron, the son of Dracula tale Johnny Alucard (reviewed here), the One Thousand Monsters follow-up/turn-of-the-next-millennium Japan story Anno Dracula 1999: Daikaiju (reviewed here), and Newman’s otherworld Harry Potter-esque The Haunting of Drearcliff Grange School. The exploits of Christina Light can be found in the comic series Anno Dracula 1895: Seven Days in Mayhem, and more horror mash-up fun can be found in Newman’s alternate Hollywood horror noir story from last year Something More Than Night (reviewed here).