Part of Series
1918. Dracula returns ... Expelled from Great Britain, Graf von Dracula is commander-in-chief of the Armies of Germany and Austria-Hungary, but Lord Ruthven, his former disciple, remains Prime Minister of Great Britain. Such is Dracula's desire for power and domination that it leads to WWI. Caught up in the conflict that follows are Charles Beauregard, hero of Anno Dracula, Edwin Winthrop, a young intelligence officer, Kate Reed, a radical vampire journalist, the resurrected Edgar Allan Poe, and the infamous Baron von Richthofen - feared flying monster. Over the Western Front the living and the dead become embroiled in a war of ancient magic and modern science, of oppression and freedom. And as the Baron increases his score, the workings of nations and the struggles of individuals intersect, climaxing with a battle that takes place in the air and in the hearts of men.
Author
Note: This author also writes under the pseudonym of Jack Yeovil. An expert on horror and sci-fi cinema (his books of film criticism include Nightmare Movies and Millennium Movies), Kim Newman's novels draw promiscuously on the tropes of horror, sci-fi and fantasy. He is complexly and irreverently referential; the Dracula sequence—Anno Dracula, The Bloody Red Baron and Dracula,Cha Cha Cha—not only portrays an alternate world in which the Count conquers Victorian Britain for a while, is the mastermind behind Germany's air aces in World War One and survives into a jetset 1950s of paparazzi and La Dolce Vita, but does so with endless throwaway references that range from Kipling to James Bond, from Edgar Allen Poe to Patricia Highsmith. In horror novels such as Bad Dreams and Jago, reality turns out to be endlessly subverted by the powerfully malign. His pseudonymous novels, as Jack Yeovil, play elegant games with genre cliche—perhaps the best of these is the sword-and-sorcery novel Drachenfels which takes the prescribed formulae of the games company to whose bible it was written and make them over entirely into a Kim Newman novel. Life's Lottery, his most mainstream novel, consists of multiple choice fragments which enable readers to choose the hero's fate and take him into horror, crime and sf storylines or into mundane reality.
