I Read Books: Anno Dracula 1899: One Thousand Monsters

Anno Dracula: 1000 Monsters

One thing the Anno Dracula books – an alternate history series in which Dracula won, married Queen Victoria, took over Britain and all the vampires from fiction (also non-fiction, also many non-vampires) emerged to join or oppose him – haven’t done is address the question, what’s going on in Asia in the meantime? Or more importantly, what might happen if all the monsters of Japanese myth, legend, fiction and (Newman being a film critic) cinema came out as well?

The monsters (weird and extraordinary versions of vampires) have been put into a ghetto, as Japan has no vampires according to the Emperor. This neatly solves the problem of the vampire exiles from Dracula’s Britain. As revolution breeds he allows some of his enemies to escape on a ship, and after being turned away from many ports end up in Tokyo. This provides our two viewpoint characters, Geneviéve Dieudonné, familiar from other Anno Dracula stories, and Kostaki, a member of Dracula’s Carpathian Guard who has fallen out of favour.

Gene finds herself not quite at the centre of the various plots, as the doctor and translator for the vampires who have made themselves the leaders of the exiles. Kostaki meanwhile gets caught up in a lot of weirdness; he’s given up drinking blood or anything (many of the Japanese vampires have requirements such as having to drink tea, but only if they’ve stolen it, and they get stranger from there) and as a Templar finds that there is a Freemasonry chapter here. In fact there are two different Dracula-related plans unfolding, as well as at least two Japanese factions in conflict.

The story delves into some even weirder and mystical stuff than usual, partly because this is Japanese-flavoured Anno Dracula, slightly less familiar to me than Western vampire fiction, and partly because it builds to an apocalyptic battle. On the one hand that’s not unprecedented in the series (The Bloody Red Baron, set during WW1, has it’s climax as Dracula unleashes the 1918 German offensive) on the other it’s even twistier and stranger than the trick that reframes the novel in TBRB.

Read This: A strange and paranoid, almost claustrophobic vampire thriller
Don’t Read This: References to characters and works annoy you, and even more when you know you’re supposed to know them but you don’t