Anno Dracula by Kim Newman
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
The Gist
A dear friend of mine sent me Anno Dracula as a birthday present. He hasn’t read it himself, but said that a story about vampires and murder, set in Victorian London would be totally up my alley. And he wasn’t wrong, which makes this review a little difficult to write.
It is true. I’m a sucker for murder mystery, Victorian London stories and throw in some Gothic elements (i.e. a vampire or two) and I’m all yours. So, why did this story fall short? I shall explain below.
The Details
I was so excited to start this book that at first and thought the trouble I had getting into the story was my inability to focus.
Over and again I kept trying to get into the story until I realized it wasn’t me, it was the narrative style.
The story throws the reader right into the middle of the action, so to speak. Right from the get-go there are more characters than I could count. They popped up without much care given to establishing their personality or importance.
I had to check online, thinking that perhaps Anno Dracula is part of a different series that one needs to be familiar with in order to understand what’s going on.
There was one character in particular that really interested me. I wanted to know more about her, but I can’t even remember her name. That’s how convoluted the story felt looking at the characters.
When it comes to the narration, it was just all over the place. As a fan of the Gothic genre, I have read my share of Gothic classics and can identify rather quickly when a reference is dropped in a story.
Anno Dracula was full of classic literature references. I mean to the brim; bursting at the seams full of them. There wasn’t one paragraph that didn’t nudge the reader with an elbow, pointing out its clever use of name dropping, sometimes even without the name.
It distracted from the story, tremendously. I figured, if one was to take out all the references and semi-name dropping, the book would have been a very decent story and about 200 pages shorter.
It’s frustrating, because I could see the potential. The author has talent. There were ever so slight glimpses of original storytelling that had me hooked…for about three sentences until the referencing started again.
The Verdict
Overall, Anno Dracula had so much potential to be a fun, atmospheric original vampire story. But those references just got too much in the way.
Sadly, this wasn’t for me.
