The chain of ‘if that, then this’ thinking is still running in my head, which is why there will be more AD in the near future.

It was also one of those ideas – I wish I had more of them – that start with a tiny question (it was originally a footnote in a thesis I wrote at university) and unfold to disclose an entire fictional world that demanded to be explored. Before me, there weren’t that many alternate worlds with vampires (though John M Ford and Brian Stableford had done that) and visions of worlds dominated by vampires tended to read like zombie apocalypse stories or offer simple slave hierarchies – I started exploring the idea of vampires as a significant minority, with their own internal dissent and faction-fighting as well as complicated relationships with the rest of us – which has been done several times since.Ī long-standing interest in Dracula, vampires, invasion narratives, Victorian detectives, alternate history, actual history, Jack the Ripper and a very British brand of polite totalitarianism evident in too many of our governments to mention. I set out to write a book that encompassed vampire fiction rather than diverged from it, though I suspect it has been as influential on subsequent works as previous works were on it. How does Anno Dracula differ from other novels about vampires? It also has a lot of historical or historical/fictional characters, so we can see what a Victorian world with vampires living openly might look like from the point of view of, say, Oscar Wilde, Dr Jekyll or number two vampire Lord Ruthven. The murders are investigated by, among others, a human secret agent and adventurer, Charles Beauregard, and a vampire who hates Dracula, Geneviève Dieudonné. A few years later, in 1888, Dr Seward – a surviving Stoker character, driven mad by all this – starts murdering vampire prostitutes in Whitechapel. It’s an alternate history/England invaded novel which assumes that the first half of Bram Stoker’s novel took place, but instead of being defeated by Dr Van Helsing the Count destroyed his enemies, spread his brand of vampirism widely through Victorian society, became the Prince Consort by marrying Queen Victoria and generally taking over the country. Check it out!Ĭan you tell us about your book Anno Dracula? Pretty damn impressive! To celebrate the re-printing of Anno Dracula I was lucky enough to interview the author himself, Kim Newman. Kim Newman is the brilliant man behind the innovative novel Anno Dracula, a book which not only earned high praise from Neil Gaiman himself but also won the Dracula Society’s Children of the Night Award, the Lord Ruthven Assembly’s Fiction Award, and the International Horror Guild Award for Best Novel, and was even short-listed for the Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel.

Kim newman dracula