Critics were delighted with Newman’s richly imagined alternative history, in which humans coexist uneasily with a vampire elite, whose immortality they envy and whose powers they fear. Later that same year, an expanded version was published, as Anno-Dracula, by Simon & Schuster in the United Kingdom and, the following year, by Carroll & Graf in the United States (the errant hyphen was discarded in subsequent editions), and the novel went on to be nominated for the World Fantasy Award and to win the International Horror Guild Award. The author’s basic concept - that the events narrated in Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel actually occurred, save that Dracula, rather than being bested by Van Helsing and crew, triumphed over his adversaries, married Queen Victoria, and became ruler of England and the Empire - was developed by Newman, in collaboration with his friend Neil Gaiman, during the mid-1980s, its first crystallization in print being the novella “Red Reign” in Stephen Jones’s 1992 anthology The Mammoth Book of Vampires.
BRITISH AUTHOR KIM NEWMAN’S “Anno Dracula” series - the smartest recasting of the vampire mythos, and one of the tastiest pop-cultural confections, of the past three decades - has had a complicated evolution.
0 kommentar(er)
