#so looks like mortal engines and sharp ends are gonna have to remain unread and lonely on my bookshelf for a while yet

[bakechochin]

Book Reviews - Anno Dracula 1899 and Other Stories

Anno Dracula 1899 and Other Stories – Kim Newman - Bloody hell, collections of short stories vex me; I like the feeling of accomplishment after finishing a story, and that feeling is undermined somewhat with the knowledge that yeah you’ve finished one story, but you’ve still got twelve more to get through before you can tick this book off your list -> However these are short stories written by Kim Newman, and I remember really liking the world in ‘Anno Dracula’ and the concepts within it, and so I was willing to give this collection a shot (although the real clincher was again the pretty cover – Newman you crafty bastard) - I’m having flashbacks to writing the review for ‘City of Saints and Madmen’ now because I haven’t a clue as to how to start this; I guess I’ll say what everyone already knows, that Newman is great at world building and he’s clearly really fucking well versed in his areas of expertise, which shine in these stories (but we’ll get back to that later; for now, let’s go over the stories in the collection) - ‘Famous Monsters’, whilst irritating me at first because it was the very first story in the collection and already they’d wasted the martian they’d so eagerly boasted about on the front cover far too soon, was otherwise quite an enjoyable and short read with its alternate history of film featuring disgusting martians - ‘A Drug on the Market’ was an easy enough read but I couldn’t help feeling was a bit of a waste of time – the idea of the Hyde formula becoming readily available to a city seems like a cool idea (I especially liked how Newman had built on the formula to make its effects more varied) but there could have been way more done with this concept than this story provides, and I thought that it ended a bit too abruptly and anticlimactically - The beginning of ‘Illimitable Power’ turned me away at first because it was namedropping all these no doubt very famous people in the film industry who I knew fuck all about, but fortunately for you Newman I’m quite fond of Poe and so was willing to give this one a shot -> I ended up really liking this story; I took it to be a pisstake on how the same films get made over and over again by making the story about film directors cursed to do just that (but then the story spirals further into hilarity), and also because I found the image of people haunted in their dreams by a disgruntled ghost Poe to be fucking hilarious - This was followed up by ‘Just Like Eddy’, another fucking great story; whilst the last Poe one was funny, this one was really fucking interesting, adapting the doppelganger concept of Poe’s own ‘William Wilson’ to apply to Poe’s own life, explaining Poe’s drunken dissolute behaviour as, in reality, being perpetuated by an alternate Poe (and seeing as I’m interested in Poe’s unorthodox life, it was really interesting to see how Newman explained it all within the framework of Poe having a doppelganger) - ‘Amerikanski Dead at the Moscow Morgue’ is indeed a Russia-set zombie apocalypse scenario, but other than that it wasn’t the most engaging story, and fucked if I can remember any of the characters – there are however a few neat ideas here and there to make zombies more interesting, there are a couple great gore segments, and I appreciated any time anyone mentioned Rasputin - To be honest there wasn’t really much to ‘The Chill Clutch of the Unseen’; there’s a bit at the end that says the story is a tribute to the works of Charles L Grant, and that’s all well and good but I read this without knowing who Grant was, and from that perspective I didn’t get too much out of the story save a fucking cool old and weary interpretation of the Invisible Man and a few cool monster descriptions - ‘One-Hit Wanda’ was boring and nothing got resolved but at least was gratifyingly short - ‘Is There Anybody There?’ was actually really fucking cool in concept, following a clash between old-timey séances and modern-day technology, and had a very satisfying ending (though at times the fact that this story was written in 2001 is made kind of obvious by the outdated tech lingo used) - ‘The Intervention’ was a legitimately unsettling story, helped in part by its ambiguity, but since the ambiguity continues throughout the story and there’s no revelation at the end, there’s no real payoff and the ending seemed unsatisfying - ‘The Pale Spirit People’ was initially cool in that it contrasted what we expect from Native American life/traditions with a narrator who quietly disregards and doesn’t truck with these traditions, but it kind of treads the same path as ‘Is There Anybody There?’ by splurging together mysticism with modern society -> Don’t get me wrong, I like this idea, and it’s executed here in just as enjoyable and funny a manner as in ‘Is There Anyone There?’, and I especially liked the descriptions of everyday life now through the eyes of a narrator who sees such things as obscene and supernatural, but I couldn’t help wish that these stories focused on actual supernatural elements as opposed to everyday parts of modern society masquerading as supernatural elements – it kind of reminded me of one scene in Abercrombie’s ‘Shattered Sea’ books, wherein a character’s ‘magical artefact’ turns out to in fact just be a fucking gun - ‘Coastal City’ was fucking great; it’s all over the place because it’s dealing with unorthodox and difficult-to-explain time abnormalities that scrambled my brain something fierce, but there’s more dumb overpowered comic book superheroes than you can shake a stick at and the world it presents is equal parts unsophisticated and fascinating - ‘Completist Heaven’ was conceptually pretty sweet and absolutely ridiculous, which pretty much sums up the whole story really; I realised at the beginning of the story that the setup of endless TV channels of horror film shlock was some serious self-insert fan-fiction, but as I was reading I didn’t really mind, and though 99% of the references were lost on me it was an easy enough read - Finally we have ‘Yokai Town: Anno Dracula 1899’, which was a story with three competing themes; the history of Japan, which I give no shits about, Japanese yokai and weird fucked up Japanese folklore, which I’m already an avid fan of, and continuing the Anno Dracula storyline, which kind of dropped me right in the shit since out of the four books currently published in that series I have read one, so whilst reading it I fully expected to be assaulted from two angles, both by my ignorance regarding Japanese history and my lack of understanding of where exactly we are and what exactly has happened up to this point in the Anno Dracula canon -> However whilst I was expecting this story to throw me in the deep end, as it turns out it held me by the hand and guided me through what was what in the Anno Dracula storyline, and now I’m quite tempted to give the series another shot (or at the very least read the soon-to-be-published story in the series that this book is a precursor to) -> What’s more, this story provided me with some of my favourite stuff in the anthology; Genevieve continues to be a great fucking character, I was very happy indeed to finally read a story that adapted some of my favourite yokai (and as mentioned above, if I was to trust any author to adapt and innovate folklore monsters, it’d be Newman), the yokai actually seem like realistic entities (even though yokai are all so fucking stupid), and I loved how Newman managed to contrive an example of the sparkly Twilight vampire in this story, which really made me laugh - There were a few stories that I skipped in this collection; ‘Red Jacks Wild’ was intended as a sequel/spiritual successor of a pre-existing story that I haven’t read and can’t be arsed to find, ‘The Snow Sculptures of Xanadu’ I think is about/inspired by/constantly referencing ‘Citizen Kane’ which I know fuck all about and do not wish to learn about, ‘Ubermensch!’ (no I’m not adding the umlaut because fuck you) was set in the aftermath of WW3 and was full of historical references I didn’t have a hope of understanding so I gave up on it three pages in, and ‘Sarah Minds the Dog’ and ‘Frankenstein on Ice’ were scripts, which I don’t find immersive and can’t be arsed to plod through -> I don’t have a reason why I didn’t read ‘Un Etrange Aventure de Richard Blane’, I just couldn’t be arsed - A general problem I have with these stories is that they often seem too real; though they include fantasy elements, they are definitively set in reality, and there are times where Newman’s knowledge of history and old timey movies and whatnot (and my lack of such knowledge) can make me feel like a right thicko whilst reading the stories and plodding through all the references - Newman’s reimaginings of classic monsters are always infinitely more interesting than the stories that the monsters are in, so in some stories there’s the Kraken problem of feeling like I have to force myself to read on simply to get to the cool shit - Also a good chunk of the stories take the form of an old jaded something-or-other regaling their life story in their old and jaded way, going on about how they wish life could have gone differently, which got a wee bit repetitive - One minor issue that I have is with the ordering of the stories; I don’t think that putting the two Poe stories right next to each other was a good idea, because although they were first published ten years apart from one another they tread the exact same steps and make the exact same references/allusions to the source material, and this is made especially obvious when you read one right after the other - 6.5/10

I have a load of other book reviews on my blog, check that shit out.