Anno Dracula - Kim Newman [159]
The armadillo. In one of the oddest moments in Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931), an armadillo is seen among the vermin inhabiting Castle Dracula in Transylvania. Yes, armadillos are native to the Americas and highly unlikely residents of Romania. Personally, I don’t think this an error on the part of the filmmakers, but a sign of wrongness – creepier somehow than the attempt at depicting a giant insect (a regular-sized bug on a miniature set) made in the same sequence. So, here’s that armadillo again.
Countess Barbara de Cilly (c. 1390-1452). Holy Roman Empress, Queen Consort of Hungary and Bohemia, known as ‘the Messalina of Germany’. She was instrumental in founding the Order of the Dragon, which is where Dracula got his title from. Her descendants include all the Royal Houses of Europe. Besides the scheming and treachery inherent in holding offices like Holy Roman Empress, she spent her last days – after an inevitable ousting from power – studying alchemy and the occult. Some sources suggest her as the real-life model for LeFanu’s Carmilla, but she’s figured surprisingly rarely in vampire fiction.
‘sword-point darting like a dragonfly’. Thanks to Helen Simpson, the original copy-editor of Anno Dracula, for knowing what I meant, even though the manuscript said ‘darting like a snapdragon’. Helen fixed many of my other brain-freeze moments.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Of course, this novel would not exist without Bram Stoker’s 1897 Dracula. So he should get the lion’s share of the credit for establishing an entire category of vampire fiction. In taking hold of the material Stoker laid down, I must also acknowledge a debt to many scholars. Most often consulted were Leonard Wolf’s The Annotated Dracula and Christopher Frayling’s Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula, which point out many of the byways I found myself exploring, but I should not care to underestimate Basil Copper’s The Vampire in Legend, Fact and Art, Richard Dalby’s Dracula’s Brood, Daniel Farson’s The Man Who Wrote Dracula, Donald F. Glut’s The Dracula Book, Peter Haining’s The Dracula Centenary Book, Raymond T. McNally and Radu R. Florescu’s In Search of Dracula, Michel Parry’s The Rivals of Dracula, Barry Pattison’s The Seal of Dracula, David Pirie’s The Vampire Cinema, Alan Ryan’s The Penguin Book of Vampire Stories, Alain Silver and James Ursini’s The Vampire Film, David J. Skal’s Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen and Gregory Waller’s The Living and the Un-dead.
In addition, for numerous historical, literary and frivolous details, I must credit W.S. Baring-Gould’s Sherlock Holmes: A Biography and The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, Paul Begg, Martin Fido and Keith Skinner’s invaluable The Jack the Ripper A to Z, Richard Ellman’s Oscar Wilde, Philip José Farmer’s Tarzan Alive and Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life, Andrew Goodman’s Gilbert and Sullivan’s London, Steve Gooch’s translation of The Lulu Plays of Frank Wedekind, Melvin Harris’s The Ripper File, Michael Harrison’s The World of Sherlock Holmes, Beth Kalikoff ’s Murder and Moral Decay in Victorian Popular Literature, Laurence Lerner’s The Victorians, Norman and Jeanne Mackenzie’s The Time Traveller: The Life of H.G. Wells, Sally Mitchell’s Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia (especially useful in the pre-internet days for information on lots of things), Arthur Morrison’s A Child of the Jago (with a biographical study by P.J. Keating) and David Pringle’s Imaginary People: A Who’s Who of Modern Fictional Characters. Among the friendly eyes who glanced over the manuscript in various forms, I should like to credit Eugene Byrne, for his detailed historical carping, Steve Jones, Antony Harwood, Lucy Parsons and Maureen Waller.
I have to mention various people who happened to be nice to me during the composition of this novel, subtly influencing the text through