Anno Dracula (52 page)

The idea lay about in my head gathering dust and the odd character (Charles Beauregard, for instance, came from a fragment called ‘Beauregard in the Fog’ I wrote at university: he was intended as a dashing if troubled Victorian hero along the lines of Rudolph
Rassendyll in
The Prisoner of Zenda
or Gerald Harper in the old TV series
Adam Adamant Lives!
), until 1991 when Stephen Jones asked me to write something for an anthology project he was working on,
The Mammoth Book of Vampires
. I felt a mammoth book of vampires should have some showing from the king of the un-dead, so Steve’s request prompted me finally to set down the parameters for
Anno Dracula
. The result was ‘Red Reign’, which first appeared in Steve’s book (published by Robinson in the UK and Carroll & Graf in the US) and is the bare skeleton of
Anno Dracula
. For Steve’s later
The Mammoth Book of Dracula
, I wrote ‘Coppola’s Dracula’, which will appear as part of the fourth book in the series,
Johnny Alucard
. Meanwhile I’d already been drawn to vampires in my work under the name of Jack Yeovil for GW Books’ tie-ins to their Warhammer fantasy universe. As Jack, I developed not only a system of vampirism that, crossbred with Bram Stoker’s, survives in the
Anno Dracula
novels, but also the creature who became their most popular character. For the record, the Genevieve of the Jack Yeovil novels and stories is not the same character as the Geneviève of
Anno Dracula
, but she is her transcontinual cousin. That Genevieve (who lacks an accent because the primitive word-processing software of the day tended to throw up type-setting glitches which made them inadvisable) was introduced in
Drachenfels
and has her own complicated biography.

For me, book ideas are like coral reefs, built up as bits and pieces stick together over years. With
Anno Dracula
, I had the background and the two lead characters, plus the notion (inspired by Philip José Farmer) of a large cast list which would include not only real Victorians (Oscar Wilde, Gilbert and Sullivan, Swinburne) but famous characters from the fiction of the period (Raffles, various Holmesian hangers-on, Dr Moreau, Dr Jekyll). In
The Night Mayor
, my first novel, I had explored
the idea of a consensus genre world, whereby all the faces and figures from 1940s film noirs hung out in the same city; it was an obvious step to make the London of
Anno Dracula
a similar site, where the criss-crossing stories of all the great late Victorian horror, crime and social melodramas were being played out at the same time (yes, it all goes back to the likes of
Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man
). This adds to a certain spot-the-reference feel some readers have found annoying but which others really enjoy: I admit to getting a tiny thrill when I can borrow a character from E.M. Forster or resurrect someone as forgotten as Dr Nikola. This also allows me to make the novel as much a playground as a minefield, and go beyond historical accuracy to evoke all those gaslit, fogbound London romances.

One of the things my plot needed was a plethora of vampires, since Dracula would have turned a great many Britishers into his get, starting with a couple of Stoker’s characters (Arthur Holmwood, Mina Harker) and extending to a lot of real people from Queen Victoria to a horde of walk-on prostitutes and policemen. I decided that if Dracula were to replace Prince Albert as Victoria’s consort, then all the other vampires of literature would come out of hiding and flock to his court in the hope of advancement. After Dracula, the best-known vampire in literature was Dr Polidori’s Lord Ruthven (this was before
Twilight
,
True Blood
,
Buffy
and other franchises which will have to take their lumps in later books), so he came forward to take the job of Dracula’s Prime Minister and stick around for the rest of the series (in
The Bloody Red Baron
, the second
Anno Dracula
novel, I see Ruthven as John Major to the Count’s Margaret Thatcher). For my other major vampire characters, I drew on less-known names, borrowing from Alexander Dumas (in
The Pale-Faced Lady
), Eric, Count Stenbock (in ‘The True Story of a Vampire’, which I found in
James Dickie’s anthology
The Undead
), George A. Romero (in
Martin
) and the ever-dependable Anonymous (in ‘The Mysterious Stranger’) for the worthies Kostaki, Vardalek, Martin Cuda and von Klatka. I decided to let LeFanu’s Carmilla stay dead, but at least gave her a mention, and thought it obligatory to have some fun at the expense of the real-life Elizabeth Bathory (my version owes more to Delphine Seyrig in
Le Rouge aux levres
than history) and Anne Rice’s fashion-plate bloodsuckers. I enjoyed cramming in as many previous vampires as possible, to the extent of writing a speech which finds Ruthven nastily listing all his peers and being rude about them. In follow-up novels, I have enjoyed working a little more with Les Daniels’ Don Sebastian de Villanueva and Barbara Steele’s Princess Asa Vajda, though I’m wary of doing too much with other people’s characters when their original creators might not yet be finished with them.

The final element which dropped into place was the actual plot. I needed a spine for the story, which would enable me to explore the world I had created and wanted something which would take the readers on a tour of my London that would include the slums and the palaces. The story of Jack the Ripper would have been hard to keep out of
Anno Dracula
, but the idea that the unknown serial killer was a vampire (a theme Robert Bloch made his own in ‘Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper’ and which has been rehashed several times since) not only struck me as old hat but also not quite right for a story in which vampires were out in the open rather than cowering in the fog. So, with the world turned upside-down, Jack the Ripper should be a vampire-
killer
; Stoker had obligingly called one of Van Helsing’s disciples Jack, made him a doctor and indicated that his experiences in the novel were pretty much pushing him over the edge. Therefore, Stoker’s Dr Seward became my Jack the Ripper,
driven mad by the staking of Lucy Westenra, with whom he was in love, and stalking vampire whores in Whitechapel. To make his situation more complex, I made Mary Kelly, the Ripper’s last victim, the get of the vampire Lucy and also her near-lookalike. The Ripper story is nowadays almost as big a favourite with the conspiracy theorists as the Kennedy assassination, and so it became quite natural to depict the effects of a series of sex crimes on a volatile society. With a killer on the loose, my other characters had all sorts of reasons – self-serving or noble – to find out who he was, to hinder or help his crimes or to make propagandist use of him. I was trying, without being too solemn, to mix things I felt about the 1980s, when the British Government made ‘Victorian Values’ a slogan, with the real and imagined 1880s, when blood was flowing in the fog and there was widespread social unrest. The Ripper murders also gave the novel a structure: the real dates of the killings – I couldn’t resist adding the Ripper’s most famous fictional victim, Wedekind’s Lulu, to his historical list – became pegs for the plot, and other actual events like a Bernard Shaw speech, the bogus letters from the Ripper to the press or an inquest also fit into the fantasy.

The Ripper theme imposed a specific date on the action, the Autumn of 1888. It is often assumed that the events of the Stoker novel take place in 1893 (the dates he gives fit that year), however there is a chink in the argument. Published in 1897,
Dracula
ends with a present-day chapter locating the bulk of the story seven years in the past; it is implied that the book itself is part of the story, a non-fiction compilation memoir compiled by Mina Harker at the behest of Van Helsing and presumably agented for publication by Bram Stoker the way Holmesians assume Arthur Conan Doyle agented Dr Watson’s memoirs. Numerous small details –like the use of the phrase ‘new
woman’, coined in 1892, or even the comparative sophistication of Dr Seward’s phonograph – jar with the notion that the book takes place before 1890, however. If Stoker had wanted to specify a year, he undoubtedly would have – it was not yet a convention to pin fictions down to a calendar date, even in the nineteeth century equivalent of a techno-thriller. I plumped – as did Jimmy Sangster, Terence Fisher and Hammer Films for their 1958
Dracula
(
Horror of Dracula
to heathen Americans) – for an 1885 setting for the main action of
Dracula
, and opted to shift on to an alternate timetrack half-way through Stoker’s Chapter 21 (on page 249 of Leonard Wolf ’s annotated edition). Stoker’s
Dracula
is already an alternate world story, set in a timeline where social and mechanical progress advanced slightly faster than in our own, and where certain givens of London geography are altered (his London boasts a Kingstead Cemetery in the region of Hampstead Heath, presumably corresponding to our own Highgate Cemetery). In reworking history, I took as a starting point Stoker’s imagined world rather than our own, even to the extent of finally presenting to the public Kate Reed, a character conceived by Stoker for
Dracula
but omitted from the novel (and who has become more important in the sequels). There are a few other anachronisms (some deliberate) because I wanted to overlay the actual 1980s on the imaginary 1880s.

In going back over the manuscript for this new edition, I have resisted any urge to make major changes. I’ve appended extracts from ‘Red Reign’ and an
Anno Dracula
screenplay (written for producers Stuart Pollak and Andre Jacquemetton) which offer variant or additional scenes, including some alternate endings. I have spotted a few mistakes that somehow got through the original editing process, and discreetly fixed them – so this is closer to being a definitive text than any previous publication.

R
EAD ON TO FIND
I
NSIGHTS
,

ARTICLES AND MUCH MORE
.

Alternate ending to
Anno Dracula
first printed in
The Mammoth Book of Vampires

Extracts from
Anno Dracula: The Movie

‘Drac the Ripper’: an article by Kim Newman

‘Dead Travel Fast’: a short story by Kim Newman

A
LTERNATE
S
CENES
F
ROM

T
HE
O
RIGINAL
N
OVEL

Alternate ending to
Anno Dracula
first printed in
The Mammoth Book of Vampires.

As explained earlier a novella-length sketch for
Anno Dracula
appeared in Stephen Jones’s
The Mammoth Book of Vampires
. The novel supersedes and swallows the novella, and I don’t see any point in reprinting the whole thing – almost everything from the shorter version is in the book. However, the finale played out a little differently in my first run at it. This is Section 18 of ‘Red Reign’ (the title was Steve’s), which corresponds to
Chapter 57
(‘The Home Life of Our Own Dear Queen’).

T
he Queen’s carriage had called for her at Toynbee Hall, and a fidgety coachman named Netley was delicately negotiating the way through the cramped streets of Whitechapel. Netley had already picked up Beauregard, from the Diogenes Club. The huge black horse and its discreetly imposing burden would feel less
confined once they were on the wider thoroughfares of the city. Now, the carriage was like a panther in Hampton Court Maze, prowling rather than moving as elegantly and speedily as it was meant to. In the night, hostile eyes were aimed at the black coach, and at the coat of arms it bore.

Genevieve noticed Beauregard was somewhat subdued. She had seen him several times since the night of November 9th. Since 13 Miller’s Court. She had even been admitted into the hallowed chambers of the Diogenes Club, to give evidence to a private hearing at which Beauregard was called upon to give an account of the death of Dr Seward. She understood the secret ways of government, and realised this tribunal had as much to do with deciding which truths should be concealed as which should be presented to the public at large. The chairman, a venerable and warm diplomat who had weathered many changes of government, took everything in, but gave out no verdict, simply absorbing the information, as each grain of truth shaped the policies of a club that was often more than a club. There were few vampires in the Diogenes Club, and Genevieve wondered whether it might not be a hiding place for the pillars of the
ancien régime
, or a nest of insurrectionists.