The Red Baron of the title is the historical ace fighter pilot Manfred von Richthofen, who in this altered history leads a squadron of monstrous flying vampires. Dracula sides with Germany against the English, but vampires, now a part of everyday life, fight on both sides. (Newman has said that if he had realised he would get so many sequels out of the premise, he would have saved Kolchak up for a story set in the character's native 1970s.)Īnno-Dracula has won the Dracula Society's Children of the Night Award, the Lord Ruthven Assembly's Fiction Award, and the International Horror Guild Award for Best Novel, and was short-listed for the Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel. To give just two examples: the heroine is recycled from one of Newman's own earlier novels, and Carl Kolchak has a brief cameo as a reporter following the Ripper case. Unusually for the series, several of the borrowed characters in Anno-Dracula have no links to the period. Charles Beauregard, a (non-vampire) agent of the Diogenes Club, is sent to track the murderer down, and finds himself enmeshed in a plot to free England from Dracula's rule. But all is not going smoothly for the new regime: Jack the Ripper stalks Whitechapel, murdering vampire prostitutes. A virtual checklist of fictional vampires have come out of hiding and gained new social status. Dracula has married the widowed Queen Victoria, and rules as Prince Consort.
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