Anno Dracula: 1895: Seven Days in Mayhem by Kim Newman and Paul McCaffrey

Anno Dracula is a novel and an alternate history - perhaps also a brand at this point. Kim Newman's novel of that title came out in 1992, plunging the reader into a late-Victorian alternate world in which Dracula not only established himself in England, but defeated Van Helsing's boys, married Queen Victoria, and brought vampires into the public eye.

The whole series is of the kind of alternate history - most familiar in comics from Alan Moore's work, especially League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - in which nearly every character is already someone, was the hero or side character of some other story or maybe, occasionally, a real person from history. Newman wrote two further novels in the '90s - The Bloody Red Baron, set during The Great War, and Dracula Cha Cha Cha (originally titled Judgement of Tears, less arch but more bland), set in the late 1950s. A series of short stories set in the '70s and '80s were collected as Johnny Alucard, and that brought us up to about a decade ago.

At that point, Newman seems to have returned to the beginning of his timeline, maybe because he'd gotten too close to the present day. There was this comics series, a new novel, One Thousand Monsters, set in Japan in 1899, and I think a few more short stories.

I read the original Anno Dracula long ago - around publication - but I'm not sure if that book and this one entirely align - there's an event at the end of the novel Anno Dracula, set in I think 1888, that would make some of the background of Anno Dracula: 1895: Seven Days in Mayhem impossible. (Or maybe I'm misremembering, and getting the wrong impression from a quick skim of a Wikipedia article.)

Anyway: this is a brand extension, possibly a slightly alternate version of the previous story, and either a new or a re-introduction for the comics audience. Dracula rules the United Kingdom, at the height of its empire, with an iron fist, and some of our central characters are members of the anarchist cell Council of the Seven Days, devoted to overthrowing his rule - particularly journalist and vampire Kate Reed. The other main character is Penelope Churchward, who was a secondary character in the original novel and here is a few years further on her social-climbing track, now a vampire and main planner for a gala Jubilee for the tenth anniversary of Dracula's reign.

The Jubilee and the the anarchists plots twine around each other, as various police forces (mostly vampire-powered) chase the anarchists, capture and torture some of them, and various fiendish plots go on the background. There's also a Fu Manchu-like figure, the Lord of Strange Deaths, loosely connected to the main plot - his daughter is also part of a separate, also loosely related, group of female adventurers/thieves who come to Kate's aid a couple of times.

In the end, there is an attempt at a huge assassination/explosion, as there must be. Penelope and Kate, who are actually old school chums (this is not unrealistic; in fiction or reality, upper-crust England has only a few dozen people and they all know each other) end up working together to foil it for varying reasons.

There's a lot going on in a short series, and, again, I'm not sure if this 100% fits the timeline established in the original novel. Still, it's the same kind of thing, done well, and full of Easter eggs for fans of old horror novels. Artist Paul McCaffrey has a very modern look, to my eye - I might have expected some more obvious 19th century touches - but he handles crowd scenes and chaos well and delivers on the visual storytelling end.

This is a brand extension, but it's a nice reintroduction for fans of Anno Dracula and a perfectly good introduction for comics readers who don't know the series. It might even send them back to the novels, which wouldn't be a bad thing.