Bram Stoker's Dracula swoops down on Dublin in the dark
Newman, best known for his Anno Dracula novels, which imagine the count surviving Van Helsing’s hunt, is also promoting Johnny Alucard, the latest in the series. In the novels, Dracula pops up in various times and places, from marrying Queen Victoria, to fighting in the First World War, to appearing in a La Dolce Vita-inspired Rome.
Newman says he has cultural permission to redeploy Dracula for his own purposes. “I see this material as open-source,” he says. “When you think about it, when Dracula was published, there was a 15-year period where you had Jekyll and Hyde, Sherlock Holmes, Dorian Gray, the Invisible Man. It was an extraordinary time. With industrialisation, the rise of popular culture, the growth of literacy, for whatever reason, we get these amazing characters — and all our popular culture, really.”
