Line #72 Literature/Necroscope


1	[[quoteright:250:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/necroscope.jpg]]
2	->'''Enter Freely, And Of Your Own Will.'''
3
4	''Necroscope'' is a series of UsefulNotes/ColdWar / [[SpyFiction Espionage]]/[[PsychicPowers ESP]]/VampireFiction novels by Creator/BrianLumley.
5
6	It is the 1970s and the UsefulNotes/ColdWar is at its height. Twitchy superpowers are poised to annihilate the other paranoid and twitchy superpower, and [[ApocalypseHow take the world with them]]. You can't get much more screwed than that... [[FromBadToWorse oh wait]], there are also vampires, necromancers and werewolves waiting in the wings to enslave or annihilate humanity (and willing to manipulate those governments to do it). Welcome to the world of ''Necroscope''. From the height of the cold war, into the future the world will be caught a long and drawn out conflict fought by government sponsored Psychics, Espers, and [[RagtagBunchOfMisfits oddly powered individuals]]. The opposition, pretty much the same, but you can also throw in the aforementioned supernatural creatures, a generous selection of mobsters, {{corrupt politician}}s, and [[TheMole traitors]].
7	----
8	!!Tropes:
9	* ActionSurvivor: The vast majority of E-Branch, since most PsychicPowers in this series don't have direct combat applications.
10	* AlwaysChaoticEvil: Vampires = bad guys, always. Unless you have PlotArmor of course, but even then...
11	* AlwaysSomeoneBetter: Necromancers can plumb the dead's mind for their secrets, but they must be on-site to manually torture the information out of their target. Necroscopes can simply ask for the information at vast distances, and almost always successfully since they don't require torture to interact with the dead.
12	* AndThenJohnWasAZombie: Vampirisation happens to the good guys every now and again. Eventually, [[spoiler:Harry Keogh is subject to this as well]].
13	* AnotherDimension: Sunside/Starside is a parallel version of Earth, and a [[DeathWorld profoundly alien and hostile version]] at that.
14	* AnyoneCanDie: And how. In this series named characters may die, characters may die to be brought back from the dead only to die again, and even dead characters can experience CessationOfExistence.
15	* ApocalypseHow: Not Earth for once, but the Vampire World through the wormhole was hit with a white hole, causing a Class 2. The impact knocked the moon into a closer orbit and tilted the planet's axis almost completely sideways, violently and dramatically remaking its terrain into the Sunside/Starside divide of the present day. Of the planet's original 250 million inhabitants, only a few thousand survived. Afterward, the altered day-night cycle allowed the Wamphyri to emerge and become dominant, permanently squelching the return of human civilization.
16	* ArcWords: ''"Enter Freely and of Your Own Will"''.
17	* AscendedToAHigherPlaneOfExistence: [[spoiler: Harry's]] ultimate fate.
18	** Also that of [[spoiler: Moebius]].
19	* AttemptedRape: The villain in the first book is almost raped by his female cousins at their aunt's bidding. It kind of messes him up, and the trauma of the experience leads directly to his StartOfDarkness. They might have thought they were doing him a favour ("We told you we had a surprise for you!"), but it's very quickly obvious that he doesn't share their enthusiasm for this plan.
20	* BeautyEqualsGoodness:
21	** Max Batu (ugly and evil), Ivan Gerenko (ugly and evil), Zek Föener (beautiful and good).
22	** Averted in the case of Boris Dragosani, [[BeautyIsBad who is described as a very handsome young man.]] [[spoiler: Then zigzagged when he turns into a vampire. He becomes notably more ugly in his vampiric state but can change back to his human form at will.]]
23	* BigBadDuumvirate: Triumvirate. In the E-Branch Trilogy, a trio of extremely powerful vampires sneak out through the gates and immediately begin plans to start a BrokenMasquerade scenario. [[spoiler: And succeed with flying colors despite dying in the process.]]
24	* BodyHorror: Oh god, where do we start? Probably most evident in his Vampire World books where it goes SerialEscalation.
25	* BoringButPractical: Out of the three Wamphryi to come to earth, the most successful one in infecting the local population en masse is none other than Lord Szwart. His brilliant plan? Hiding his vampiric spore production gardens in London's sewers right beneath a ventilation flue. This gives the deadspawn garden enough time to mature and contaminate London.
26	* BrokenAce: Harry Keogh, to an enormous extent. Gaining early access to Necroscopy in his youth was bad enough since it ended up with him resigned to carrying out the last wishes of the dead, but his life ended up a huge TraumaCongaLine that started with his mother dying and escalated above and beyond his own death and Harry being left a shell of a man dedicated only to wiping out vampires and necromancers.
27	* CantActPervertedTowardALoveInterest: Canker Canison, [[OurWerewolvesAreDifferent of all]] [[AxeCrazy people]], treats his love with the utmost respect.
28	* CessationOfExistence: Even in a series where most people continue as disembodied minds after death, this is possible. The most common method is having one's remains scattered to prevent their spirit from being fully embodied in one place, but it is also possible for dead minds to cease existence by completing perceived UnfinishedBusiness.
29	* CosmicHorrorStory: Oh yeah. Ironically, this series is closer to the trope in spirit than the majority of Lumley's Franchise/CthulhuMythos-related work.
30	* CosmicPlaything: Harry, who loses everything and then is ultimately forced to [[spoiler: fragment his consciousness into innumerable shards of power to fight infestations of evil throughout time and space at the behest of an entity implied to be an angel or other celestial intermediary.]]
31	** Every other protagonist ends up a CosmicPlaything as well since they're only empowered by shards whenever truly horrifying world-ending scenarios are about to go down. And worse still, being empowered in this way can make them a target for the next ArcVillain to come along. Just ask [[spoiler: Nathan.]]
32	* CrapsackWorld: Both sides of the Gate. The human world is in the grips of the Cold War and coping with psychic espionage and vampire infiltration, as well as runaway climate change later in the series. The vampire world is a post-apocalyptic ruin laden with some of the most terrifying vampires in fiction.
33	* DeadPersonConversation: This is the protagonist's specific talent - not only to talk to the dead, but to get the dead talking to EACH OTHER, breaking what in some cases is a millennia-long isolation. This puts them heavily in his debt, to the point where [[spoiler: they will voluntarily drag themselves out of the grave to fight for him and his cause]].
34	* DeadlyGaze: A rare psychic power within the series. When wielded by a human it can incapacitate a healthy person briefly, but can kill individuals with weakened hearts. When wielded by a vampire, however, it grows more powerful with every use until it's reducing Wamphyri Lords to LudicrousGibs.
35	* DealWithTheDevil: Harry's deal with Faethor Ferenczy in book four does not end well.
36	* DeathActivatedSuperpower: More like Death-Enhanced Superpower. The Great Majority continue doing in death what they did in life, and that includes individuals with PsychicPowers. The most spectacular uses of powers in the series are carried out by corpses reanimated by Necroscopic power.
37	* DeathWorld: Sunside/Starside, the vampire homeworld, is definitely this. It's Earth, but an alternate version that has its axis of rotation tilted sideways, much like Uranus. What this means is that the southern hemisphere (Sunside) always faces the sun and is mostly scorching desert, while the northern hemisphere (Starside) is mostly frozen. Humans live on Sunside, where they ''would'' be safe from the [[HumanoidAbomination Wamphyri]]...except that the only livable parts of Sunside are so close to the equatorial mountains that they experience a regular, week-long day-night cycle, allowing the Wamphyri to hunt them at regular intervals. There are swamps along the equator that are not shielded by the mountains and hence safe from Wamphyri, but these are where vampire slugs breed, so anyone living there would become a Wamphyri themselves. The Wamphyri also breed monstrous war beasts on Starside, some of which are powerful enough to take down fighter aircraft.
38	** For their part, the vampires assume Earth is this, calling it "the hell-lands" because of its planet-wide day-night cycle.
39	* DeusExMachina:
40	** The end of ''Necroscope II: Wamphyri!'' where [[spoiler:Harry Keogh saves the day]].
41	** Pretty much any book with a Necroscope in it ends like this. Except maybe [[spoiler:in Avengers. Still, everything will turn out for the best even in failure, as seen by the precog]]. More like manages to salvage some small triumph from the utter wreckage of everything rather than victory in a meaningful sense though, as every book leaves humanity or/and our protagonists in a worse position than before.
42	* DeusExitMachina: For most of ''Necroscope II: Wamphyri!'', Harry Keogh (otherwise a GodModeSue) is unable to bring his full powers to bear because his spirit is bound to the body of [[spoiler:his infant son, Harry Junior]].
43	** Almost every book with a Necroscope in it uses this trope, since the combination of deadspeak and access to the Mobius Continuum is the very definition of a StoryBreakerPower. As a consequence, most new Necroscopes are denied the full breadth of their powersets until they can manage to unlock it through either the maturation of their powers or tutelage from people actually acquainted with prior Necroscopes, and generally just prior to the climax of the work.
44	* DiabolusExMachina: [[spoiler: The only reason Earth falls to vampiric corruption is because Nathan was accidentally hit by the blast of a wayward rocket during a post-war celebration. He loses his memories, preventing the most powerful Necroscope in the series from intervening and ending the final trilogy in the space of half a book.]]
45	* DirtyCommies: While there are good and bad people on both sides of the UsefulNotes/ColdWar, the Communist side is very notably less virtuous, especially in the first two series.
46	* DistantFinale: [[spoiler: The series as a whole ends with vampires managing to infect a vast proportion of the world's population, including the heroes, but an epilogue shows that after a millennium or so humanity ([[CreatorProvincialism specifically England]]) worked out a genetic cure]].
47	* DoingInTheWizard: Vampires (and werewolves) are the result of alien parasites, and thus not supernatural.
48	* DroppedABridgeOnHim: Dear God, is it raining bridges. Too many incidences to count. A couple of characters have bridges dropped on them, then are resurrected only to have yet another bridge fall on them.
49	* EnemyCivilWar: Constantly, and on all antagonistic sides. The Russians are dealing with typical Cold War infighting; the Wamphyri are dealing with constant internal strife brought on by their inborn ChronicBackstabbingDisorder. The book Bloodwar almost entirely deals with one of these on a grand scale, which ends with [[spoiler: the death of the old Wamphyri way of life as a whole.]]
50	* EnigmaticEmpoweringEntity: The golden darts that were introduced at the end of the original series, which empower every subsequent protagonist with the Necroscope powerset. [[spoiler: They're fragments of Harry Keogh's mind and talent which were deliberately fragmented and scattered across time and space to create Necroscopes in the time of greatest need.]]
51	* EvenEvilHasStandards:
52	** Exile to Earth is the fate for vampires that are too evil for other vampires. Yeah. And there is even a vampire ice Alcatraz for those that are worse than that. [[NiceJobBreakingItHero Which our heroes melt]].
53	** When [[spoiler:Harry]] realizes that his vampire parasite will eventually be beyond his control, he takes care to leave Earth. Before doing this, however, he takes the time to hunt down and destroy a necromancer who is also a serial murderer and rapist (in that order) of young women (while reflecting that even [[spoiler:Dragosani]] never sank this low).
54	* ExplosiveBreeder: A rare mutation among the Wamphryi produces a vampire with a leech that's capable of producing vast amounts of eggs, which are ordinarily produced only once in a vampire's lifetime. This is not only bad for the vampire since they die after expending all their biomass in the uncontrollable production of eggs, but the sheer number of eggs produced infect everything in the area and produce an unsustainable number of new Wamphryi. [[spoiler: Vavara from the E-Branch Trilogy is a massive threat to humanity partially because she is wholly unique in that she's a Mother of Vampires who can actually control her ability to produce eggs.]]
55	* ExtradimensionalShortcut: Harry Keogh acquires the power to transport himself instantaneously through a subspace-esque location known as the Mobius Continuum, with the only limitations being that a truly exceptional understanding of math and appropriate coordinates are required. Since he has the former and the dead provide the latter, there are very few practical limitations on the power.
56	* {{Expy}}: Inverted; anyone familiar with ''TabletopGame/VampireTheMasquerade'' will easily guess that the Wamphyri were the inspiration for the game's Tzimisce Clan.
57	* FanDisservice: Things that would be AnatomicallyImpossibleSex in most series are just part of the BodyHorror in this one, thanks to vampires' shapeshifting abilities. [[VaginaDentata Things usually]] [[OutWithABang turn out badly]].
58	** Johnny Found and his hollow-bladed murder weapon. [[spoiler:"Johnny doesn't want your dirty little fucky hole. JOHNNY MAKES HIS OWN HOLES!"]] A character so vile that even [[spoiler:a Wamphyri]] will go out of their way to dispose of him.
59	* FighterMageThief: Played interestingly in the Vampire World trilogy on the surface. Vormulac Unsleep is the FrontlineGeneral who keeps his troops in line with sheer intimidation, and thus is the Fighter. Maglore the Mage is obviously the Mage, as he is a proud mentalist of formidable telepathic power. And Devetaki Skullguise is the Thief, being a cunning schemer with designs on acquiring powerful weaponry to compensate for a lack of direct force. However, Devetaki is actually a far more powerful telepath than Maglore, Maglore is just as prone to backstabbing as Devetaki, and Vormulac is thus the only one who plays it straight by virtue of being straightforward and untalented at ESP.
60	* FromBadToWorse: Basically the entire series can be summed up as the "Vampire version of Anime/NeonGenesisEvangelion."
61	* GothicPunk: mixed with a bit of Steam Punk, this is the vibe of the architecture and bio-machinery of the Starside Wamphyri, with their giant organ piano's and flyers with elaborate, ornate metal saddles.
62	* GovernmentAgencyOfFiction: Multiple countries in this series have an E-Branch, a secret organization dedicated to locating and nurturing the talents of espers for the purposes of homeland security. Britain and Russia have the most powerful branches. [[spoiler: In the case of Russia, had.]]
63	* GreyAndGrayMorality: Although often veering into outright BlackAndGreyMorality or even EvilVersusEvil, especially when vampires are involved.
64	* HeartIsAnAwesomePower: Intuition is an awesome power. Nestor Kiklu received an empowering shard from Harry Keogh's death that granted him superhuman intuition, and that intuition helped him survive innumerable potentially fatal accidents as a human and allowed him to slide into the life of a Wamphyri/necromancer with terrifying speed.
65	* HeterosexualLifePartners: Ben Trask and Ian Goodley.
66	* HiddenElfVillage: The cave enclaves of the Thyre, a near-human race from the vampire world with racial telepathy and a pacifistic society. They help train Nathan in his burgeoning telepathy and Necroscopy.
67	* HopeSpot: The last book of the Vampire World trilogy lets the characters and readers believe the vampire threat has been destroyed for good. The fact that it's not the last chronological installment should clue you in on how well ''that'' went.
68	* HumanoidAbomination: The Wamphyri were human beings at some point in the (usually [[Really700YearsOld distant]]) past, but were infested with a vampire symbiote and became something much worse. The resulting ''thing'' looks almost like a human being, but has wolflike and batlike facial features, and also has gruesome powers not normally associated with vampires, most notably the power to reshape their own flesh and that of others pretty much on a whim.
69	* IHateYouVampireDad:
70	** The Wamphyri tend to detest their vampire fathers, because they're sadistic and even incestuous. Not least because the turning process is essentially rape with a side-order of BodyHorror, or as the luckless Dragosani finds out: [[spoiler: "like sitting on a fountain of acid".]]
71	** Vampires also ''love'' eating each other, even more than eating humans, so they tend to keep their progeny around just to feed off them, (and the progeny would feed off their creator if they could, so there's no love lost there).
72	* ISeeDeadPeople: The pathway to ultimate power in the setting, since the dead hold many secrets.
73	* InhumanEyeConcealers: The Wamphyri often sport vivid scarlet eyes, though most are able to conceal them while dealing with mortals. In the first book, [[spoiler: Boris Dragosani]] doesn't learn how, and thus spends several of the later chapters concealing his increasingly inhuman eyes behind sunglasses.
74	* InstantPeopleJustAddWater: It's possible to raise the dead by first reducing their bodies to dust before doing the magic. Albeit a special mix of chemicals is used, not actual water.
75	* JustBeforeTheEnd: The final trilogy, which takes place after runaway global warming has devastated portions of the planet. [[spoiler: And in a more supernatural sense, just before TheBadGuyWins and turns the planet into a vampire hive for centuries.]]
76	* KillItWithFire: The most reliable way to dispose of vampires, although the ashes are still suspect.
77	* KleptomaniacHero: Harry does an awful lot of stealing, mostly of weapons.
78	* LooksLikeOrlok: A very common affectation among the Wamphryi, given that the infection reshapes the features to be more batlike or wolflike at baseline and some vampires lean into it for aesthetic reasons.
79	* LovecraftianSuperpower: True Wamphyri can reshape flesh and bones (both theirs and others') like Play-Doh. [[BodyHorror And they're both very imaginative and very sadistic]].
80	* MagicMushroom: The mushrooms growing on a vampire's grave can vampirize you.
81	* TheMasquerade: The vampires generally have a vested interest in maintaining this and even have a proverb that ''"Anonymity is Synonymous With Longevity"'' (with a couple of minor exceptions). In the final two books the {{Big Bad}}s break this ''hard''.
82	* MindRape: Used liberally by all sides. Virtually every main character gets the treatment at some point, and usually from their own allies.
83	* NakedNutter: Subverted; in his introduction, Boris Dragonsani ritualistically prepares for necromantic study by stripping naked and using the corpse as a cushion, then butchering the body while still nude. Though the observers assume that Boris is some kind of lunatic, Gregor Borowitz makes it abundantly clear that the necromancer is perfectly sane, a point he proves when Boris manages to uncover the truth and save Borowitz from a traitor while still without a stich of clothing on him. [[spoiler: More to the point, when Boris actually does begin to slip into psychopathy as a result of being impregnated with a vampire symbiote, he remains fully clothed.]]
84	* {{Necromancer}}: A type of psychic who can commune with the dead... by horribly defiling their corpses and souls. Necroscopes don't need to be horrible to communicate with the dead, and are correspondingly better appreciated by them.
85	* NiceJobBreakingItHero: Numerous examples, but the worst incites the ending of the series. The protagonists manage to save the vampire world by realigning its axis via psychic powers into an Earth-like orbit, but this melts the Icelands that were a prison for three extremely powerful Wamphyri who [[spoiler: bring their plague to the human world successfully.]]
86	* NothingButSkulls: The cover of every book features a grotesque skull (or pile of skulls).
87	* OminousHairLoss: Subverted! Boris Dragonani begins exhibiting a receding hairline around the halfway point of the first book, and his boss attributes this to poor health. In the narration, however Boris reveals that his hairline isn't receding at all: his skull is changing shape. [[spoiler: As it turns out, he's been infested with a wamphyri symbiote and he's transforming into a vampire.]]
88	* OrganicTechnology: The Wamphyri make extensive use of this, generally using [[HumanResources human flesh]] as building material. They rely on it so much that they don't even really know how to work metal, instead relying on a specific village to supply them with crafted weapons.
89	* OurSoulsAreDifferent: Harry spends book 2 as a disembodied soul but for some reason is not considered dead.
90	* OurVampiresAreDifferent: Vampires are symbiotic/parasitic fungi. More specifically, they're infected with a kind of symbiotic leech that gives them superpowers and a thirst for blood. It also gives them disturbingly [[BodyHorror metamorphic flesh]] and makes them into total sociopaths. The only way to kill them is fire, beheading, or sunlight.
91	* OurWerewolvesAreDifferent: The Werewolves are vampires, or at least vampires whose leeches are descended from infected wolves. Aside from the usual powersets, they also gain the capacity to assume full lupine forms and increased power during the full moon.
92	* OurWormholesAreDifferent: Type 3, though referred to as "grey holes."
93	* OutsideContextProblem: Book 4, Deadspeak, features Janosz Ferenczy. Janosz is distinguished not simply by the fact that he is functionally a HalfHumanHybrid ascended to full vampirism, but he actually possesses necromantic magic rather than the usual psychic necromancy possessed by every other necromantic character in the series. And that magic is derived from Yog-Sothoth, which places the Necroscope universe in the Franchise/CthulhuMythos.
94	* ParasitesAreEvil: The Wamphyri walk a wobbly line between symbiosis and parasitism: essentially a race of alien leeches, they empower their hosts with immortality, inhuman strength, necromancy and the ability to warp flesh at a touch. Unfortunately, being bonded means being painfully and unwillingly impregnated with a fetal vampire symbiote - complete with rape imagery - and subject to its hunger. Regardless of how benevolent they were beforehand, hosts are all gradually corrupted into villainy by their new appetites, to the point that any differences between the parasite and its host vanish: the end result is a [[TheSociopath sociopathic]] HumanoidAbomination that will think nothing of committing murder, torture, anatomically-impossible rape, and other crimes too hideous to describe. Vampires are considered so evil in this setting that, upon dying, they're actually excluded by the other dead minds, who want nothing to do with them. [[spoiler: Even Harry Keogh isn't immune to this sort of treatment once he gets infected by a vampire symbiote and it has ramifications for the rest of the series.]]
95	* PayEvilUntoEvil: A mantra of Harry Keogh to the point of being ArcWords, and an attitude held by most in the series since only truly inhumane measures can keep Wamphryi dead.
96	* PhantomZone: The Wamphyri see Earth as this, humanity has the vampire world as this.
97	* PortalCut: An application of Mobius Continuum doors that only starts receiving use later in the series when the users start getting more creative with their power than simply teleporting a bomb into an enemy stronghold.
98	* PowerFist: The preferred weapon of Wamphryi on their homeworld is the battle gauntlet, a gigantic armored fist loaded with nasty extendable blades and other instruments of rending flesh. The Wamphryi have no skill in metalworking, so these gauntlets are made for them by supplicant tribes of Szgany.
99	* PowerIncontinence: A problem possessed by many vampires in the series, but most profoundly expressed by the Francezci family and the Lord Szwart. Both of their respectively families have an inherited tendency to lose control of their metamorphic powers. Angelo Francezci is reduced to a BlobMonster in the Lost Years duology, his son Francesco isn't far behind, and Szwart is terrified of light since it reveals that he's a small EldritchAbomination at the time of the series.
100	* PowerParasite: Harry Keogh, or Deadspawn, spends the entire book taking other people's powers (to be fair most of them weren't needing them since they were dead at the time) for the final confrontation with the BigBad in the alternate universe. ItMakesSenseInContext.
101	** Boris Dragosani did the same thing in the first book, but was less successful since he had to actually be on-site to torture the secrets of psychic powers out of his victims.
102	* PowerfulButIncompetent: The majority of the vampires in the Vampire World trilogy, as a consequence of having spent their time in a land filled with supplicant tribes and thus having no experience with open warfare or prey that can fight back.
103	* PsychicRadar: In the ''Necroscope'' novels people who have this "Talent" are called spotters, and are rarer even than regular Talents.
104	* RandomlyGifted: How talents are handed out.
105	* RedScare: This series takes place during the Cold War, after all. Unusually for the genre, a number of sympathetic Communist characters are included that assist the protagonists with their efforts to wipe out vampirism.
106	* ResistTheBeast: [[spoiler: Harry Keogh manages to do this once he gets infected so that he can get back into the vampire world without engineering the fall of the human race. Much later the entirety of E-Branch's heads and the Necroscope Jake Cutter are infected and end up holding off their vampiric urges with HeroicWillpower long enough to build a means for society to continue post vampire apocalypse.]]
107	* RetiredMonster: Faethor Ferenczy, retired due to death. In this series that is no bar to being an active participant of course. His one attempt to come out of retirement does not go well for him.
108	* SanityHasAdvantages: The Wamphyri parasite enhances everything about a human physically and mentally to extreme levels. Unfortunately for them, that includes existing mental instability and makes emotions incredibly intense. The end result is that vampires functionally lack free will since they're by and large beholden to their whims and their parasite, and this species-wide insanity is the only reason they haven't taken over both worlds centuries ago. [[spoiler: When some sane and effective vampires show up, it spells the end for the human world.]]
109	* {{Satan}}: Possibly appearing under the name Shaitan. Who happens to be the first vampire rather than a devil/fallen angel.
110	* SealedEvilInACan: Once per book. From a werewolf encased in amber and resin for hundreds of years, to a Vampire Ice-Alcatraz (which the heroes melt [[note]]They do this to kill off one Vampire menace, and by doing so release a whole new one of even more evil, and worse, competent ones; [[NiceJobBreakingItHero Nice Job Melting It]][[/note]]).
111	* ShoutOut:
112	** "Enter freely, and of your own will" is a phrase with significance in the classic vampire novel ''Literature/{{Dracula}}''.
113	** The method of raising the dead by first reducing their bodies to dust before doing the magic seems to be a ShoutOut to Creator/HPLovecraft, who had a similar plot device in ''Literature/TheCaseOfCharlesDexterWard''.
114	* SovietSuperscience: The USSR tries to put a DeflectorShield over the entire country, but instead accidentally rips Space-Time a new arsehole. Oh, and turns the small hard-to-reach wormhole to the Vampire World into the equivalent of an expressway.
115	* SquishyWizard: The few psychics in the series with direct offensive powers, i.e. Necroscopes are firmly this. Extremely potent psychic powers, still completely human in body so a bullet or physical blow can stop them. [[spoiler: Not so much post-Wamphryi infection, with Harry Keogh and Jake Cutter becoming nightmarishly powerful as a result.]]
116	* StableTimeLoop: Possibly the origin of the Wamphyri, as detailed in the fifth and sixth books. Shaitan, the first vampire, falls into the Vampire World after a great unspecified battle and breathes in vampire spores from a hideous corpse he finds in a swamp. As it turns out, [[spoiler: the corpse is that of the vampirized Harry Keogh, which got blown back in time due to a nuclear explosion near a wormhole... that also killed Shaitan's future self.]] ItMakesSenseInContext.
117	* {{Sucksessor}}: Harry's son Nestor proved in short order to be far less morally pure than his father or brothers even before suffering a bout of amnesia and winding up a necromantic Lord of the Wamphryi.
118	* SuperiorSuccessor: Both of Harry's Necroscope sons are this in theory. Harry Junior has his father's Necroscopy from birth and an even greater grasp of Mobius math that allows interuniversal travel, and Nathan inherits Necroscopy along with extremely powerful telepathy and his own means of achieving interuniversal travel. [[spoiler: As with their father, they are subject to conditions that hinder their effectiveness. Harry Junior ends up vampirized and scorched into a bestial state by the sun, and Nathan has his memories temporarily destroyed by a TapOnTheHead so he can't interfere with their plan to infect Earth.]]
119	* TailorMadePrison: The USSR treat the vampire world of Sunside/Starside as this while Sunside/Starside reciprocates. When the two sides work out it isn't...
120	* ThePrettyGuysAreStronger: It is lampshaded in Invaders that historically the more hideously deformed Wamphryi in the series are at best cannon fodder compensating for weakness with external monstrosity. Naturally, most of the vampires out of Turgosheim in the Vampire World trilogy are portrayed as both extremely distinctively deformed... and die in droves even before the climax of the final Bloodwar.
121	* TrilogyCreep: Started as a trilogy, now up to 18 books and short story collections.
122	* UndyingWarrior: [[OurVampiresAreDifferent The Wamphyri]] indulge heavily in violent lifestyles, having been gradually corrupted into enjoying bloodshed and rape by the eldritch parasites within them. In particular, those on Earth have exhibited a very rich military history: [[SealedEvilInACan Thibor Ferenczy]] committed so many war crimes in the service of his mortal monarch that he accidentally gave Vlad the Impaler his title in the process, while his sire [[RetiredMonster Faethor]] gleefully helped sack Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade, rode with Genghis Khan in the unification of Mongolia, and even served in the Ottoman Empire's conquest of Byzantium.
123	* VillainProtagonist: Dragosani is this in the first book, which is at least half devoted to him.
124	* VisionaryVillain: Devetaki Skullguise counts, given her grand aims of invading Earth and co-opting our weapons technology and vast numbers to ensure eternal Wamphyri supremacy. [[spoiler: She gets leprosy and a fatal dose of sunlight for her efforts.]]
125	** The trio of vampires from the E-Branch trilogy, who successfully execute a plan to [[spoiler: infect all of Earth with a plague of vampirism, which results in centuries of horrifying bloodshed until a cure for vampirism is discovered.]]
126	* WritersCannotDoMath: The math problems used to establish that young Harry is a genius are accurate enough, they're just not really impressive to actual mathematicians.
127	* WrongContextMagic: Necroscopy itself. Necroscopes can communicate with the dead via the medium of Deadspeak, which cannot be detected by espers except as a large disturbance in the psychic aether. [[spoiler: And the dead will rise from the graves to fight for Necroscopes willingly out of sheer love, animated by the weird talent in question.]]
128	* YouCantFightFate:
129	** The future is fixed; anything a prognosticator foresees ''will'' happen. The best you can hope for is that you misinterpreted the vision, resulting in a ProphecyTwist. Not only that, if you try to peek at your ''own'' future you are guaranteed to discover that you'll be dead in less than a day.
130	** Not literally, though it happens the first time we see it done, but when Harry does it he finds out that [[spoiler: his life-ribbon is tinged red, and everything he's done to rid himself of vampiric taint is doomed to fail.]]

Context Literature / Necroscope