To be a vampire is the essence of modernity.'In order to effect that change, Dracula and his forces must first win the war, and Bloody Red Baron is an impressively-controlled intense maelstrom of action sequences, many of the most vivid featuring the title character, Manfred von Richthofen, the Bloody Red Baron himself, Germany's foremost flying ace (in a disturbing-yet-funny nod to the character's immortalization in the famous 'Peanuts' cartoon, when the Baron comes across a beagle, he pulls his revolver and shoots the dog). 'Under his standard, the world will change. 'The Graf von Dracula embodies the glories of the past but is not blinded by them,' rhapsodizes an undead Edgar Allan Poe at one point. Dracula, aided by Ludendorf and Hindenburg, in league with Kaiser Wilhelm and King-Emperor Franz Joseph, is leading his Central Powers against the Allied Powers, intent on taking over the all Europe and spreading his own dark brand of enlightenment.

In Bloody Red Baron, the year is 1918, and the world is at war. Fighting Dracula's state-run tyranny is a motley assortment of characters, including vampire 'elder' Genevieve Dieudonne, spunky reporter Kate Reed, and various members of Mycroft Holmes' Diogenes Club, and a kind of victory is achieved in the book's nail-biting climax. This series of gorgeous reprints from Titan Books continues with a new paperback edition of Kim Newman's 1995 novel Bloody Red Baron, sequel to the author's fantastic Anno Dracula, in which the nefarious Count (and his undead Carpathian cronies) enslaves Queen Victoria and becomes her immortal Consort, uncrowned king of an England suddenly overrun with vampires who are forced into an uneasy co-existence with 'warm' humans.

The Bloody Red Baron by Kim Newman