I Read Books: Johnny Alucard
This volume unveils the overall structure of the Anno Dracula books – The Fall and Rise of Dracula, in episodic form. Considering the first three volumes (with additional novellas) as episodes in the fall, then the five major parts of this one consist of the rise.
Dracula died, of course in 1959 (see Dracula Cha Cha Cha). This novel charts the rise of the last vampire he turned, during WW2 in Romania, who finds himself working on Francis Ford Coppola’s production of Dracula (based on the filming of Apocalypse Now). There he runs into Newman*’s vampire reporter Kate Reed and makes his way to America. He moves through other films of Dracula (Andy Warhol, Orson Welles) becoming a big producer, meanwhile plugging himself into the American Government. They’re supporting the Free Transylvania movement, a plan to create a vampire homeland in Romania, mostly as a way to destabilise the Communist Ceaușescu regime.
The fun though is Newman moving his characters through the late 70s and 80s, flirting with film vampires and increasingly non-vampires, satirising the film industry amongst other targets. There’s some good action scenes, a bit of double crossing and quite a lot of blood. It’s a little scattershot but at least if there’s something you’re not interested in, pretty soon we’ll shift sub-genres and do something else.
Read This: For a vampire-flavoured film history of the 80s.
Don’t Read This: If vampires making bad films and plotting seems stupid.
* A Stoker character cut from the final version of Dracula.
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