Necroscope is a series absolutely laden with nightmare fuel from beginning to end courtesy of some of the most horrific vampires in fiction, a terrifying Cold War setting, and more extradimensional threats than you can shake a stick at.
- The first book alone is a pretty effective Establishing Series Moment since it manages to capture the whole horror that is the Cold War setting amped up with the new threat of ESP-aided espionage, and then it drops vampires into the whole setting who begin to engage in various feats of Body Horror on themselves and others that beggar belief. The first indication that vampires in this setting are more than the standard bloodsuckers is when Thibor Ferenczy crafts himself a yards-long ovipositor to infest his human stooge Boris Dragosani, and then it goes Serial Escalation from there throughout the entire series.
- A necromancer in this setting is not just someone who uses evil magics to force the dead to do their will like many other fictional settings. They use psychic powers to force the dead to feel pain as they torture them for their secrets and rip knowledge directly from their entrails as they scream into the deadspeak aether. And then one of them gets himself vampirized and starts getting the idea to figure out how his allies use their own psychic powers... It's a good thing Harry Keogh nipped that in the bud or the entire USSR would've been under the thrall of an immortal madman with biomantic powers and an ever-growing list of psychic abilities.
- The fate of Yulian Bodescu, who was tainted before his very birth by Thibor Ferenczy directly manipulating his fetus and tainting him inside his mother's womb. Throughout his life he developed into a sadistic abomination against nature who turned members of his immediate family into sex slaves upon coming more fully into his Wamphryi powerset, ultimately going on a rampage at the behest of Thibor in his dying throes that nearly killed Harry Keogh's wife and child. And the worst part? He was only intended to be a backup body for Thibor if his original was destroyed, and was largely an extremely immature vampire. The failed Grand Theft Me attempt led to a lot of dead members of E-Branch and trauma still felt over thirty years later in-series.
- The Perchorsk Gate. In response to the announced Star Wars project Russian researchers attempted to create a massively powerful energy shield that could cover the USSR from orbital bombardments. Unfortunately, Finagle's Law is the rule of thumb in the Necroscope 'verse and the equipment locked up in exactly the wrong way at exactly the wrong time and tore space-time a new fistula. Worse still, the energy blowback fused everything in its path in the complex into the evocatively-termed "magmass," which can contain metal, stone, plastic, and human bodies that were all fused together into horrifying heterogeneity.
- THE VAMPIRE WORLD. A world where the arrival of the original Gate messed up the planet's axial tilt such that the days and nights are weeks long would be bad enough. Human and trog civilization never truly recovered from the planetwide apocalypse, so technological development stagnated at the crossbow? Bad. A native species of hilariously infectious parasites fermenting in a swamp periodically turns people into monsters? Worse. Those monsters have dubbed themselves Wamphyri and taken control of the planet with humans as cattle? There are few greater hellholes in fiction.
- The Wamphryi themselves. The previous statement that they're among the most horrific incarnations of vampires in fiction was not an exaggeration. It's bad enough that vampires have Super-Strength, Super-Speed, and Super-Senses. But the vampire leech gives them a disturbing degree of Biomancy that allows them to reshape themselves into any form they please according to personal skill... and anything else provided they have adequate access to Human Resources. Warriors that can effortlessly take down fighter craft and loaded with a startling array of organic weaponry, flyers akin to giant manta rays that can capture in pouches on their underside so you can be taken alive, even Mundane Utility constructs like siphoneers that act as living plumbing systems or cartilage creatures that act as building material. Everything vampires make is made of humans distorted to unbelievable degrees and their aeries are nightmare factories. And these things rule the planet with an iron gauntlet.
- Janos Ferenczy. In his life, the bloodson of the monstrous Faethor Ferenczy. Driven by envy in life, he sought to become a vampire and used his great talent for telepathy and mesmerism to sexually assault his own mother. He only got worse as his life continued since he managed to stumble upon a variant of necromancy powered by the Outer Gods that allowed him to resurrect and kill and resurrect people at will, a textbook Fate Worse than Death.
- Harry Keogh's ultimate fate. Despite all of his efforts, Faethor Ferenczy was ultimately able to trick him into vampirization. Despite his efforts to resist it, his Sanity Slippage is manifest in every POV chapter in the fifth book as he scrambles to finish his business before all his old friends at E-Branch justifiably try to kill him. He succeeds and manages to complete his business before heading to the Vampire World permanently, but even after a brief period of newfound love with the Lady Karen is ultimately killed in torturous fashion by the Lords Shaithis and Shaitan and finished off by a nuclear blast.
- Speaking of Shaitan, Shaitan the Unborn is the Monster Progenitor of the Wamphyri. He was monstrous enough starting out given that he was the creator of Wamphryi culture (such as it is) and methodologies for fleshcrafting, but by the time of the series he is roughly 3,500 years old. Vampires may be immortal but human flesh is not, and he has basically become a gigantic vampire leech as a result of his parasite outliving his human flesh after that timespan. On top of his monstrous countenance and horrifying arctic deathbeasts, he's strongly implied to be just the latest occurrence of the Necroscope multiverse's version of ACTUAL SATAN.
- The Lost Years duology featured more than its fair share of apocalyptic vampire threats. A horrifying lycanthrope who encased himself into amber for centuries to avoid dying of the Black Plague? Relatively tame. A Ferenczy crime boss who lost control of his metamorphism and became a Blob Monster who can see the future but is barely lucid and requires human sacrifices lest he engulf his kin? Bad. His son losing his own control of his powers onscreen and subsiding increasingly into mush over the course of the book? Awful. But worst of all, a vampire opts to work with the Chinese government to disseminate his genetic material. They think they're getting a Super-Soldier program. He's getting a veritable army of loyal vampiric thralls to turn China into a hive. It ultimately takes a well-placed nuclear explosion to put that plot down, and it's enormously clear that anything less wouldn't have sufficed.
- The return of the Wamphryi in the Vampire World Trilogy is potent nightmare fuel since there are numerous POV chapters from people caught up in the first raid after they had been thought dead for fifteen years. Raw panic, the ever-present threat of infection, and Nathan's Love Interest being kidnapped all lead to an incredibly horrifying situation that never slacks off even after the Szgany show the fruits of 15 years of Earth-aided technological development.
- The Serial Escalation on the Body Horror in the Vampire World Trilogy. It gets inventive and creatively gruesome since most of the lesser Lords of Turgosheim have engaged in recreational fleshcrafting to make themselves seem more intimidating and distinctive, but Vasagi the Suck takes the cake. Initially being forced to reshape his entire face into a siphon tipped with a needle-tipped tentacle, he is stripped of this after a fight and depowered by having his vampire leech ripped wholesale out of his spine. After three years of cultivating vampire mushrooms he managed to reacquire a leech and celebrated by warping his entire torso into a gigantic mouth with his ribs as teeth. And Nestor Lichloathe falls prey to this onscreen.
- The underlying feeling of hopelessness and frustration in the final trilogy. The world is already undergoing Gaia's Lament due to drastically accelerated global warming, but vampires are still making it back to Earth periodically after thirty years and taking advantage of the societal disruption this causes to secretly infect the entire world with vampirism. And the worst part is that these three vampires are incredibly competent despite their own personal insanities, so they ultimately ensure that The Bad Guy Wins.
- Even taking all of the above vampiric horror into account, the Necroscope multiverse has more than a few horrors that aren't extradimensional in nature, because they are literal aliens from within our own universe. The side novel known as The Touch deals with a triad of aliens known as the Mordri Three, which have the ability to reshape flesh in ways Wamphryi would consider improbable and excessive just with a touch. Their ultimate plan? To disprove the existence of a benevolent god by exacting a universal campaign of purest Evil. Their methodology? Using their starship's reaction drives to destroy entire planets by deliberately overloading it with gold, which serves as their fuel. They've done this three times at the time of this book, having destroyed their own civilization and two other planets loaded with sapients.
