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A review by flying_monkey
Dracula Cha Cha Cha by Kim Newman
adventurous
dark
mysterious
medium-paced
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.25
In Dracula Cha Cha Cha, we've moved on to Rome in the late 1950s. It's the Rome of 'La Dolce Morte', rather than 'La Dolce Vita', as vampires and warmbloods are enjoying the decadent lifestyle, and there are writers, film starlets, priests, fashionistas, spies and chancers aplenty.
The main event is that our old friend Dracula is getting married, again to a vicious Moldavian princess, and no-one is quite sure what he is up to, apart from the fact that he's definitely up to something. He's commandeered the legendary Otranto Palace (moved in this novel, to just outside the capital), which has become a centre of intrigue. However, he's in danger of being upstaged by a mysterious costumed killer of elder vampires, who seems to operate with impunity across The Eternal City, and perhaps the ancient spirit of the city itself.
Into this cauldron comes the three vampire 'everywomen' who seem to be forming the core of Newman's ongoing mythos Genevieve, who is looking after Charles Beauregard, finally dying at the age of 105 (her attentions have kept him alive, but without him actually turning, he cannot live forever), Kate Reed who's after the big story as usual, Beauregard's ex-fiancee, Penelope, who has seduced (or been seduced by) an enigmatic American warmblood by the name of Tom (Highsmith's Ripley, obviously...). and a self-confident but also rather destructive Scottish agent of the Diogenes Club called Bond, Hamish Bond! Finally, Dracula's entourage also includes
A kitsch mixture of Three Coins in the Fountain, Fellini, exploitative Italian 1950s horror movies and early Bond films, Dracula Cha Cha Cha - the title is a real(ly terrible) contemporary song BTW - is a heady almost overpowering cocktail, a bit like the bloody aperatives enjoyed by fashionable nightclubbing vampires in the story, and just like the taste of blood itself (so we are told), strangely addictive, if not quite as good as the previous novel in the sequence.
This reissued novel also contains another Anno Dracula novella, which serves to bridge between this novel and the next in the series. Set at the end of the 'swinging London' period, in 1968, it takes place in the confrontation between racist anti-vampire movement fronted politically by Enoch Powell and represented on the streets by silver-capped boot wearing (soon-to-be) skinheads and hippy vampire fundamentalists egged on by elder and former secret police chief, Caleb Croft, now a charismatic lecturer at a minor London university. In addition to Kate Reed, who is reporting on a series of murders of newly turned vampires, we get to meet Japanese vampire assassin, Nezumi, again, who is, like Reed, working for the secretive Diogenes Club, largely it seems as a kind of not-very-secret bodyguard for the Irish vampire reporter. Packed with all the usual characters and references (including a whole array of British fictional coppers), it captures the atmosphere of end of the 60s in Britain very well, but perhaps isn't quite so successful as a story.
The main event is that our old friend Dracula is getting married, again to a vicious Moldavian princess, and no-one is quite sure what he is up to, apart from the fact that he's definitely up to something. He's commandeered the legendary Otranto Palace (moved in this novel, to just outside the capital), which has become a centre of intrigue. However, he's in danger of being upstaged by a mysterious costumed killer of elder vampires, who seems to operate with impunity across The Eternal City, and perhaps the ancient spirit of the city itself.
Into this cauldron comes the three vampire 'everywomen' who seem to be forming the core of Newman's ongoing mythos Genevieve, who is looking after Charles Beauregard, finally dying at the age of 105 (her attentions have kept him alive, but without him actually turning, he cannot live forever), Kate Reed who's after the big story as usual, Beauregard's ex-fiancee, Penelope, who has seduced (or been seduced by) an enigmatic American warmblood by the name of Tom (Highsmith's Ripley, obviously...). and a self-confident but also rather destructive Scottish agent of the Diogenes Club called Bond, Hamish Bond! Finally, Dracula's entourage also includes
A kitsch mixture of Three Coins in the Fountain, Fellini, exploitative Italian 1950s horror movies and early Bond films, Dracula Cha Cha Cha - the title is a real(ly terrible) contemporary song BTW - is a heady almost overpowering cocktail, a bit like the bloody aperatives enjoyed by fashionable nightclubbing vampires in the story, and just like the taste of blood itself (so we are told), strangely addictive, if not quite as good as the previous novel in the sequence.
This reissued novel also contains another Anno Dracula novella, which serves to bridge between this novel and the next in the series. Set at the end of the 'swinging London' period, in 1968, it takes place in the confrontation between racist anti-vampire movement fronted politically by Enoch Powell and represented on the streets by silver-capped boot wearing (soon-to-be) skinheads and hippy vampire fundamentalists egged on by elder and former secret police chief, Caleb Croft, now a charismatic lecturer at a minor London university. In addition to Kate Reed, who is reporting on a series of murders of newly turned vampires, we get to meet Japanese vampire assassin, Nezumi, again, who is, like Reed, working for the secretive Diogenes Club, largely it seems as a kind of not-very-secret bodyguard for the Irish vampire reporter. Packed with all the usual characters and references (including a whole array of British fictional coppers), it captures the atmosphere of end of the 60s in Britain very well, but perhaps isn't quite so successful as a story.