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.

The Brontes: Infernal Angria by Craig Hurd-McKenney and Rick Geary

In our timeline, the Bronte siblings created several fictional worlds -- they started with Glass Town, which grew (mostly from Charlotte and Branwell) into the somewhat separate Angria, while younger siblings Emily and Anne invented the entirely separate land of Gondal. All of those were explicitly set in odd, "exotic" corners of the real world they were familiar with, and peopled with various lords and adventurers and such. And, of course, the three sisters all published novels set in the real England of their day, all beginning with debuts in 1847.

The Brontes: Infernal Angria simplifies this, as fiction often does. There is one land: Angria. It is real, somewhere other than Earth, and accessed, wainscot-style, from the playroom of their childhood house in Haworth. Time works differently there; visitors from England can enter Angria, have any number of adventures, and return at the moment they left...but time can also pass in Angria between visits. (If the reader suspects this is entirely for storytelling convenience, he can hardly be blamed.)

Craig Hurd-Kenney makes the origin of Angria specifically in the children's isolation and grief, starting in 1825 when their two older sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, died. (And a few years after their mother also died.) But he actually begins this graphic novel with a prologue set in 1861, years after all four of the younger Bronte siblings were dead, in which Charlotte's widower attends the death of her father, Patrick, and then destroys all references to Angria in the house. This seems to be setting up a later conflict, but it really doesn't pay off in the current version of Infernal Angria -- I suspect Hurd-McKenney originally had a much longer, more dramatic story in mind, and the current 90-page version is what he and artist Rick Geary were able to actually get done in the twenty-ish years they were working on it.

So Infernal Angria is one part secret history -- this is what the Bronte children were really up to -- and one part unfinished drama. We see the Brontes enter Angria and have adventures and interactions there, but it's all fairly thin and quick and melodramatic, as one might expect of plot points based on the stories told by a bunch of nineteen century pre-teens -- it's almost a distraction to the real concerns, back in England, which center on whether going to Angria at all is a good thing. The core tension is between the nature of Angria, that time-stopping power which is health-reviving for English travelers, and their father's religion. Hurd-McKenney is not always clear why these things should be in tension, unless he's implying Angria is an alternative afterlife. (My understanding is that the Brontes' fictional worlds were not pagan, so they should be as close to their god in Angria as in England. Hurd-McKinney, or his characters, seem to have different ideas but don't quite make them clear.)

I think this is Hurd-McKenney trying to construct a plausible secret history based on real history, and not quite succeeding, to my mind. It's also possible that the original conception of a longer, fuller story would have had more room to make that conflict clearer and stronger. But, as it is, it feel like the Brontes, as they each sicken and get near death in turn, make random choices about who they feel about Angria and Heaven without quite saying what those choices are and what the stakes are.

So I can't find Infernal Angria entirely successful. It's interesting, and knotty, and a thoughtful weaving of secret history. but everything didn't quite come together the way I would have liked. I should admit that I came to it as a fan of Rick Geary, the artist, rather than as a Bronte scholar or knowing anything about Hurd-McKenney -- so the fact that I think the pictures are more successful than the framework they support might just be what was to be expected. Either way, it's quirky and specific: fans of the Brontes, of secret history, of 19th century literature in general, and of vague religious conflicts will find things of interest here.

(Note: this book is not available from the usual hegemonic Internet retailer, nor from B&N or IndieBound -- finding it might be a problem. ISBN is 9781532386244, if you want to do some searching.) 

Book-A-Day 2018 #187: The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken

I don't want to say that you should never read famous children's books for the first time as an adult -- the world is vast, and none of us have enough time to read everything at the exact right time. But you should be aware that it won't be the experience that people who read it at the right age had.

It may be a good-enough experience; it may be an excellent experience. But you are not as young or innocent as the reader of that book is assumed to be, and that will make a difference.

I first read Joan Aiken's 1962 novel The Wolves of Willoughby Chase in June of 2018, fifty-six years after it was published and roughly fifty years after the point when I could have first read it. And so one of the things that struck me the most was that this must have been an influence on "Lemony Snicket's" Series of Unfortunate Events books -- I suppose they could both be riffing on the same 19th century originals, but they seem more similar than that.

If I'd managed to read Wolves in the 1970s, of course, I would have been thinking entirely of the book itself.

Wolves is the first of a series, but it wasn't when it was written. As the new introduction by Aiken's daughter explains, this book alone took around a decade to write -- Aiken started it and then almost immediately had to put it aside for years due to pressures of a sick and then dying husband and the need to make a living. It became the first of a series later, after it was successful. Many series begin like this, when a success inspires a writer to see what else she might be able to do with that particular world. But Wolves stands by itself, as a world that is not entirely explained and is not entirely fixed in time.

It is England, but not the England of the 1950s and 1960s when it was written. Large bands of feral wolves roam the countryside, particularly in the very bleak winters, and Britons have only fairly primitive firearms -- muskets and fowling pieces -- to defend themselves. It also seems to be a traditional world: nothing like The Great War (let alone WWII) has happened to shake up the social structure.

So it's entirely normal for Sir Willoughby, lord of the ancestral home of the title, to set out on a long sea journey to repair the health of his sick wife, and equally as normal for him to leave behind his young and only child, Bonnie Green, in the care of a distant cousin-cum-governess, Miss Slighcarp, who he meets only briefly before departing. And it's basically as normal for Sylvia Green, another cousin and an impoverished girl about Bonnie's age, to be brought to the house at exactly the same time to also be put into Miss Slighcarp's care.

Well, maybe that's all pretty darn melodramatic, come to think of it, and reminiscent of a Gothic novel from the early 1800s. That is all deliberate, of course.

No governess in such ominous circumstances will ever turn out to be good, and so it is with Miss Slighcarp. She has fiendish plots, and torments the two girls horribly for a short time, until she actually sends them off to an even more horribly Dickensian school-slash-workhouse in the closest oppressive industrial town.

This is a short book, so all of these things happen quickly -- and thoroughly. Luckily, it's traditional in more than one way, so Miss Slighcarp's comeuppance is inevitable and won't be delayed much in a book only 181 pages long.

Wolves is evocative in the way of short classic books for children: it states things, and lets the readers fill in descriptions in their own heads. As I said up top, this is a trick that works much better on ten-year-olds than fortysomethings, so I found it amusing but the world a little undescribed and mysterious.

I don't know if I'll read the later books in the series: I understand the second one, Black Hearts in Battersea, follows a secondary character from this book, and the books after that follow a secondary character in that book. And apparently the world becomes more specific, and specifically alternate, in time.

I guess I was hoping for more wolves. This book has two kinds: the metaphorical ones, embodied by Miss Slighcarp, and the actual physical ones, who are a looming danger several times but never more than that. I may have been hoping for the wolves that come out of the walls. They don't appear here...and, of course, it is not all over at the end of Wolves.

Book-A-Day 2018 #90: The Nemo Trilogy by Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neill

One of the core joys of comic books for the past fifty years has been playing with other people's toys. I'm not hugely in sympathy with that impulse myself, but I can recognize that a lot of people want to do it, either directly (by writing comics) or indirectly (by reading those comics and arguing about how it should have been done).

Alan Moore, I'm coming to think, became a famous and respected comics writer because he has that urge on a level previously unknown to man: he wants to play with everyone's toys, all at once, together, making some massive Lego set that takes over his living room and forcing his family to quietly leave and go live with relatives. (My metaphor may be breaking down slightly.)

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen stories are clearly the strongest expression of that love: they take as many other people's fictional characters as possible -- those from authors safely dead and their works in the public domain, so their current corporate guardians can't cause problems -- and mash them together in various permutations.

(Lost Girls, on the other hand, is the fictional equivalent of taking the clothes off GI Joe and Barbie and making them kiss, then pretending they're having sex.)

I finally caught up with a League offshoot recently -- the three short graphic novels Moore wrote for League collaborator Kevin O'Neil to draw about "Princess Janni Dakkar," the daughter of Jules Verne's Captain Nemo. The three Nemo book, like the rest of the League stories, are entirely filled with other people's characters and settings and ideas: that's the point of that universe. It's Moore's only personal Amalgam universe, with all of the bits that he likes of every fictional world he's ever enjoyed.

And so these books are stuffed with other people's characters and ideas -- so many of them that you have to be a pop-culture scholar to know who all of them are. Since I'm not Jess Nevins -- there's already one of him! -- I'm not going to go that deeply into the specifics. (Though I might be better read than I expected, since I recognized the Thinking Machine from his real name -- the benefits of a childhood spent read everything that came to hand.)

The trilogy covers most of Janni's life -- she's young and energetic in Heart of Ice, set in 1922, middle-aged and concerned about her family in The Roses of Berlin's 1941, and a dying, haunted old woman by 1975 for River of Ghosts. The three books are closely connected by the same antagonist -- H. Rider Haggard's Ayesha (aka "She"), the immortal white African queen. I call her the antagonist and not the villain because Janni sets the whole thing in motion by stealing what seems to be the entire wealth of the exiled Ayesha at the beginning of Heart of Ice.

Of course,  Janni is in the old family business -- she's a pirate. And if one sets up as a pirate, one can't be surprised when other people take offense to their things being stolen. It's not quite true to say that one unwise attack blighted the rest of Janni's life, since this is a horrible 20th century full of monsters and villains (not least Janni and her fellow megalomaniacs and criminals, who seem to run roughshod over everyone else and may actually rule the world! bwaa ha ha ha!), but it certainly didn't help.

So Heart of Ice tells the story of a badly planned expedition to Antarctica, to what Moore does not exactly call the Mountains of Madness. Janni's rapidly shrinking forces, who I think are all minor British adventure heroes of the 19th century, are harried by a group of American "science heroes" hired by Ayesha's current benefactors. The group is led by a thinly veiled Tom Swift, here under a veiled name because trademarks are far more durable than copyrights.

Then The Roses of Berlin sees Janni and her husband, Broad Arrow Jack, fighting their way into a Rotwangian nightmare Berlin to save their daughter and her husband (the second generation Robur) from the evil clutches of the worse-than-Nazis, who are inevitably allied to Ayesha. And, again, Robur and "young mistress Hira" were engaged in war on Germany when they were captured -- the enemies in these books may be horrible and cruel and entirely wrong for this world, but they're equally sinned against by our putative heroes.

Finally, an obsessed Jenni chases rumors of a reborn Ayesha up the Amazon to the obligatory den of hidden Nazis and their robot bimbo army in River of Ghosts, bringing an end to the story of Janni and Ayesha, though the Nemo family will live on, for potential sequels.

At the end of it all the world is still, as far as we can see, run by the villains of popular literature, and there's no sign it's anything but horrible for anyone who isn't the star of a story Moore liked as a child. We did have three gorgeously-drawn adventure stories full of wonders and terrors, and a game of spot-the-reference that many of us will have enjoyed a lot. But it all does feel faintly pointless, as if Moore can write these everybody-else's-characters-fight stories in his sleep, and is now doing so.

This Is Not the Future I Was Promised

Today, I got an e-mail promoting "backplanes." I was momentarily excited, visualizing some kind of backpack-mounted personal-flight device -- maybe not a jetpack, specifically, but certainly something cool.

Sadly, a backplane turns out to be something dull and technical having to do with computer monitors, and my dreams are shattered.

Have we lived and fought in vain!?

Shades of Milk and Honey by Mary Robinette Kowal

Jane Austen famously described her novels -- in a description subsequently often quoted to denigrate her work and that of other female writers, either overtly or through a backhanded head-pat -- as "The little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush as produces little effect after much labour." Mary Robinette Kowal's first novel, Shades of Milk and Honey, is deeply in that Austenian tradition, and will certainly garner a few head-pats of its own, from the clueless and the sensation-addicted. But writing a novel this quiet, this domestic and constrained and pure, in the early 21st century -- not to mention doing it in a genre as entirely built on external action and what teenage boys call "adventure" as fantasy -- is surely one of the most radical things that any writer could hope to do, a perfectly shaped and wielded knitting needle thrust, with all the best taste and tact possible, right into the Achilles heel of the genre.

Milk and Honey is, in nearly all ways, a novel Jane Austen could have written. The ending does pull back somewhat more than Austen typically did, irising out to give a quick vision of the future after this story ends. And the world depicted in Milk and Honey is more fantastical than the one Austen knew -- the manipulation of glamour, folds of reality that can create illusions fooling many senses, has been added to the catalog of feminine, decorative virtues, and are even attempted by a few men engaged professionally in the work. Glamour is thus like cooking: if a man does it, it's impressive and entertaining. When a woman does it -- and she likely does it every day, if she does it at all -- it's only what's expected of her, and sufficient to show that she has the required virtues.

Milk and Honey is an alternate-world version of Sense and Sensibilty: sensible older sister Jane Ellsworth is the plain one, highly gifted in the manipulation of glamour and deeply intelligent, but outshined in beauty by her more frivolous decade-younger sister Melody. And, of course, their father has no sons, leaving his estate -- which is comfortable but not palatial -- entailed over to a distant relative on his death. Jane is our heroine and center, as she must be, and Milk and Honey follows her journey from the verge of spinster-dom to a much happier life. The novel takes place in that small, constrained, very Austenian world of rare balls, daily visits (or chances for visits) and walks across the countryside, with the same few people coming across each other again and again over the course of a few months. There's the mildly tedious local grande dame, her favored and dashing nephew, the local lord who may become someone's suitor and his younger, protected sister, who may become someone's friend. And then there's the great glamourist from London, down in the country as a tutor and to assemble a magnificent room-sized environment for the grande dame.

This is a novel in the Jane Austen manner, so Jane Ellsworth will be smart and cutting and thoughtful and lovable along the way, until her perfect life finally comes into view. Kowal allows herself somewhat more action in the last fifth of the novel than Austen would have -- though that action is all entirely period-appropriate. Shades of Milk and Honey is unabashedly painted with a tiny brush on two inches of ivory -- a style that has never been much in fashion, in any literary precincts, and is the diametric opposite of the usual expectations for a fantasy novel. So that it was done at all is impressive, and that it was done this well is a cause for joy -- since Milk and Honey is a lovely, quiet idyll of a world that never was, and one of the vanishingly rare fantasy novels that is entirely about the happiness of a small clutch of people, needing nothing more.

Half a Crown by Jo Walton

It could be said that Walton writes anti-genre novels: her characters tend to be completely wrapped up in their time and place, not necessarily ordinary, but deeply typical and representative. They rarely even dream of smashing everything and lighting out for the territory, as the typical pulp hero would do instinctively; they're settled and reserved, like good Britons or Canadians.

There's even a point, late in this book, where a top government official, in charge of a vast apparatus of secret policemen (and an only slightly less-vast apparatus even more secret) responds to a punishing personal attack on his power from another, rival government official by running and hiding. A Walton hero, unlike most real-world top leaders, doesn't even think about turning his teeth on his attackers; the default assumption is that a Walton hero won't have any teeth worth using.

This reader had a strong urge to quote The Untouchables at that character -- "They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue." -- and not see him abandon his power. But Walton isn't really interested in characters who have power, and so she maneuvers the few who actually do into situations where she can keep them impotent and oppressed.

Half a Crown is the third in the Small Change Sequence, after Farthing and Ha'penny -- it's not precisely a trilogy, but it is a series of three novels set in the same world and with one major continuing viewpoint character. It's set several years after the first two books, in 1960, and has a somewhat more hopeful set of possibilities than the earlier books did. That's not to say that Half a Crown is sweetness and light; this is an unpleasant alternate history -- in which Hess's flight to Scotland in 1941 led to a brokered peace, a fascist UK, and a Europe solidly in Nazi hands -- and the hopefulness mostly lies in this world possibly having the opportunity to get to something like real democracy and honest civil society.

As usual, the viewpoints alternate, between the third-person Peter Carmichael chapters and those in first-person, from a young woman -- this time Carmichael's "niece," Elvira. The two threads intertwine earlier in this book than in the previous two, and have stronger cross-connections. As to the plot: well, Elvira is about to debut, and Carmichael is head of the Watch, Britain's secret police. Hitler is coming back to London, for a "peace conference," as is the ex-King, the Duke of Windsor, whose followers think the current government is not nearly cruel and tough enough. Protests are beginning to rise, on both sides.

Walton started this series with clear and definite parallels to the modern day; those have become less important in the later novels, though this one has the whiff of 1989 about it. (Better that than 1956, or 1968.) And her fascist England is still horribly plausible, taking the worst tendencies of the British people and using them as the basis of her world. Some alternate histories feel more like wargaming, or special pleading -- this world is a horrible one that we narrowly avoided, and Walton's story gains strength from that.

I wouldn't start here as a new reader; drop back to Farthing if you haven't read any of these books yet. But they're well worth reading; these three novels are both fine crime novels and compelling evocations of the kind of world that we all must work to keep as far away as possible.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon

When this book was originally published in May, I was planning to get a copy from my employer and read it relatively quickly. And that shows what happens to plans...

I haven't read any of Chabon's previous novels, but I certainly know about him. (I've had Kavalier & Clay on the to-be-read shelves for several years now, for example.) The interesting thing to me about Chabon's career is that he still sees himself as a literary writer semi-slumming in genre fields (with Kavalier being about comics, Yiddish an alternate history detective novel, the YA fantasy Summerland, the detective novella The Final Solution and the new Michael Moorcock homage The Gentlemen of the Road). I see someone whose last "mainstream" book was a decade ago and who hasn't quite come out to himself yet.


The Yiddish Policeman's Union's flap copy tries to make the book sound larger and encompassing many genres -- it even throws in "love story," in its desperate attempt to keep it from seeming like an identifiably genre book -- but it's really not that complicated. It's a Chandleresque detective story (though shorn of most of Chandler's reflexive sexism) set in an alternate history that Chabon means to be taken seriously. Chabon's Federal District of Sitka is no joke, metafictional or otherwise; it's a living, breathing place and the real home of his characters. He's constructed it carefully, thinking through the implications and possibilities with real skill and verve -- worldbuilding as a true artist can, when he has a world worth building. At the same time, Chabon never stoops to explaining his world to the reader -- he steeps us in it, makes us live there alongside his characters, so we come to know it in bits and pieces, as we know our own world.

The Federal District of Sitka, Alaska exists because Israel failed -- the war of 1948 had a different outcome in this world, and most if not all of the Jews living there at the time were slaughtered. (But there are hints that this was not the changepoint; this world was different from our own from at least 1941.) The US provided a "temporary" refuge for millions of displaced Jews (mostly German, it seems) in Alaska -- with a sixty-year lease. Yiddish Policemen's Union takes place at the end of 2007, mere months before the District goes back into the hands of the local Tlingits. (Who have their own decades-long history of border disputes and flashpoints with the Sitkaniks by this point.)

Meyer Landsman is a cop, a homicide detective told to clear up all of the open cases -- one way or another -- in the next six weeks. But he's just discovered another dead man, a former chess prodigy and current heroin addict living under an assumed name in the same shabby hotel as Landsman. Since this is that kind of book, and Landsman is that kind of cop, he can't help but follow the case. He can't help but shove his nose where he shouldn't, follow threads better left alone, and connect things that those in power would prefer to be unconnected.

The ending doesn't entirely work; it falls halfway between a bleak literary ending and a traditional detective-story's catharsis, as if Chabon either couldn't decide or was trying to have it both ways. But the novel works; it pulls us into Landsman's head and his world, and holds us there from first page to last. Unlike many alternate histories, Landsman's world isn't clearly worse (or better) than our own -- it's muddled, and full of problems, but still a world, still a place to live in and make a life. Some points of the worldbuilding see Chabon making particular contemporary parallels, but he's still enough of a literary writer to keep one eye on the judgement of fifty-years-hence, which keeps him from getting too strident.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union is one of the better SF novels of the year; I wouldn't be surprised to see it on the Hugo or Nebula shortlists. (Assuming the Nebulas manage to get a shortlist together at all.) I don't think it's quite as impressive within the larger sphere of novels full stop, but it's still a damn good book. I should probably read me some more Chabon.