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Good things come to an end. Bad things have to be stopped.

The Anno Dracula series by Kim Newman is set in an Alternate History where Dracula defeated Van Helsing's group of vampire hunters and conquered Britain, resulting in vampires coming out of the woodwork and becoming visible (if not always exactly accepted) members of society.

One of the features of the series is that it is a Massive Multiplayer Crossover, with every significant vampire in fiction getting at least a mention or a cameo, along with an enormous number of other famous fictional characters who had not previously been associated with vampires. One of the main characters is Geneviève Dieudonné, this universe's version of the title character from Newman's Warhammer Fantasy series The Vampire Genevieve.

It consists of five novels and numerous short stories, listed here in chronological order:

  • Anno Dracula: 1888. Dracula rules England as Prince Consort. Jack the Ripper stalks vampire prostitutes in Whitechapel. Charles Beauregard, a (non-vampire) agent of the Diogenes Club, is sent to track the murderer down, and finds himself enmeshed in a plot to free England from Dracula's rule.
  • Seven Days in Mayhem: 1895. A comic book prequel in which Kate Reed joins a revolutionary group on the eve of Dracula's tenth jubilee. Illustrated by Paul McCaffery.
  • "Yokai Town": 1899. A prelude to...
  • One Thousand Monsters: 1899. A ship full of Vampires, led by Genevieve Dieudonne, Captain Kostaki, Sergeant Daniel Dravot and Princess Christina Light, are exiled from Great Britain by Prince Dracula. They are allowed to settle in Yōkai Town, the district of Tokyo set aside for Japan’s own vampires, an altogether strange and less human breed than the nosferatu of Europe. Yet it is not the sanctuary they had hoped for, as a vicious murderer sets vampire against vampire, and Yōkai Town is revealed to be more a prison than a refuge. Geneviève and her undead comrades are forced to face new enemies and the horrors hidden within the Temple of One Thousand Monsters.
  • The Bloody Red Baron: 1918. World War I devastates Europe. Vampires fight on both sides.
    • "Vampire Romance": 1923. A group of influential elder vampires meets in an isolated country house, and Genevieve Dieudonne attends at the behest of the Diogenes Club. Then the road washes out and somebody starts killing off the guests. Included in The Bloody Red Baron.
  • Dracula Cha-Cha-Cha (alt. title Judgment of Tears): 1959. Every vampire who is anybody is flocking to Rome for Dracula's wedding, but there is a mysterious vampire killer on the loose.
  • "Aquarius": 1968. Kate Reed investigates a series of vampire-related murders in Swinging London.
  • "Coppola's Dracula" 1976. Francis Ford Coppola is making the film for which he will always be remembered—an adaptation of Dracula starring Marlon Brando as Dracula and Martin Sheen as Jonathan Harker. The film crew is befriended by a young-looking vampire, who leaves with them when they return to America.
  • "Andy Warhol's Dracula": 1978. Johnny Pop, the young-looking vampire who came to America with Coppola's film crew, finds his place in his new homeland, on his way to becoming the next Dracula. He becomes rich and socially successful, but risks losing it all when the many enemies he makes along the way join forces against him.
  • "Castle in the Desert": 1977. A private detective investigates the death of his ex-wife, found at the bottom of her swimming pool with an iron stake driven through her, and the disappearance of her daughter, last seen falling in with a crowd of vampire cultists.
  • "Who Dares Wins": 1980. The Romanian Embassy in London has been taken over by "freedom fighters" who want Transylvania to become a homeland for the undead.
  • "The Other Side of Midnight": 1981. Orson Welles receives funding from a mysterious source to film the ultimate version of Dracula, and hires a private detective to find out why.
  • "You Are the Wind Beneath My Wings": 1984. A covert mission using undead agents to unseat the Ceausescu regime in Romania.
  • Johnny Alucard: 1976-1991. Incorporates several of the short stories above, then takes the action up to the early 90s. A vampire turned by Dracula comes to the United States with power on his mind.
  • Anno Dracula 1999: Daikaiju. A hundred years after One Thousand Monsters, the millenial celebrations in the former Yōkai Town herald the ascension of Christina Light. Richard Jepperson of the Diogenes Club has to find out what that means, and if it's something he needs to stop. But there are more forces at work than anyone realises.

Works in the Anno Dracula series with their own page:

    open/close all folders 

Tropes about the series as a whole:

    A-Z 
  • Adaptational Wimp: Vampires in this series do not need to be staked in the heart. The stabbing or removal of any major organ may be sufficient, although using a weapon not made of silver risks the vampire healing from the injury before they die.
  • Alien Space Bats: History is changed forever because vampires.
  • All Myths Are True: Vampires are real. Every fictional character who is a vampire is real. Everyone and everything native to Universal or Hammer Horror is real. Characters from all corners of the horror genre are real. Characters from works that owe anything to the horror genre are real.
  • Alternate History: The heroes of the original novel fail, Mina joins the undead and Dracula is free to spread his vampirism. However this isn't as bad as you think.
  • Aristocrats Are Evil: Most vampire elders (slang for any vampire who's outlived their mortal lifetime twice over) are assholes. A significant proportion of them go by "Count".
  • Ascended Extra: Kate Reed, who was actually written out of Dracula before publication, becomes a major character.
  • Bloodier and Gorier: Compared to Dracula, Newman's writings are much more violent, right from the opening pages in which one of Jack the Ripper's killings is retold in great detail.
  • Body Horror: vampires of certain bloodlines have virtually unlimited shapeshifting abilities that allow more creative individuals to do far more than simply turn into bats or wolves. Vampires are witnessed horrifically elongating their bones straight through their skin to form blades, unhinging their jaws like snakes, turning their tongues into long proboscises that allow them to puncture victims and suck blood from a distance, sprouting teeth and even entire new mouths from places they don't belong, and other grotesque modifications of the human form that wouldn't look out of place in The Thing (1982).
  • Composite Character: Done a few times, to work as many references into a character as possible. In particular, Dracula himself is implied to be every version of Dracula, ever (when we first see him, his body is constantly changing shape, and in the second book Bela Lugosi can pass as his double).
  • Deity of Human Origin: Several characters have this as a goal, with Daikaiju focusing on Christine Light and Jun Zero's attempts to become online deities.
  • Fantastic Drug: Small amounts of vampire blood can give humans temporary vampire traits (such as enhanced senses, vampiric speed and fangs) without turning them, and is portrayed as highly addictive. Alucard gets the idea to drain himself after feeding copiously to harvest large amounts of vampire blood, then drying and crushing the blood to make a snortable powder called "D".
    • Ironically, the popularity of D can lead to an inversion of the usual vampire-human relationship, where humans hunt down and trap vampires to harvest their blood.
  • Fantastic Legal Weirdness: It's mentioned in the second book that the British government have effectively changed Britain's consitution: vampires in the royal line of succession are considered as dead, and so are passed over. This aims to prevent another immortal tyrant like Dracula, or Dracula again installing a vampire puppet on the throne.
  • Fantasy Kitchen Sink: As well as many different strains of vampire, the series features or refers to zombies (a vampiric strain), Mr Hyde, werewolves, aliens, magicians...
  • Faux Affably Evil: Dracula. "Dracula's smile was persuasive, but behind it were his teeth."
  • Good Thing You Can Heal: The ability to quickly heal damage is common to all vampires, but how rapidly and effectively depends on the vampire's bloodline and age. Dracula's line cannot regenerate lost limbs and the further down the descendancy from him the weaker the healing. Kaiser Wilhelm II who's made directly by Dracula, was able to have his crippled arm made normal. But Kate Reed who's several times removed from Dracula, continues to have poor vision even after turning. Then there's the stripper Isolde, a 1000 year old vampire. Her regeneration is so good that she survived decapitation by regrowing a whole new body from her chopped off head (and her burlesque act is to ritually flay herself in front of an audience before healing without a scratch).
  • Greater-Scope Villain: Dracula, or at least his influence, is always present, but he's almost never the actual antagonist directly opposing the heroes.
  • Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Both as a human warlord and a vampire, Dracula's MO is impaling his victims on metal spikes to demoralize his enemies, having killed thousands of people that way in both of his forms.
  • In Spite of a Nail: By the second book, World War One is happening in roughly the same way it did in our history (with a Lampshade Hanging that many believe it wouldn't have happened without the vampire influence), and by the third book (set in The '50s) the vampires seem to have had no real effect on history at all; they exist, but everything else is the same. "Coppola's Dracula" recapitulates the making of Apocalypse Now with bizarre precision, considering it's set in a different history and concerns a film based on a different book.
  • Kiss of the Vampire: Several characters, both warm and vampires, consider a vampire's bite an erotic act. Some humans almost become addicted to being fed upon and seek out vampire prostitutes for this reason exclusively. It is mentioned by Geneviève that vampires sometimes also bite each other as a sexual act.
  • Kryptonite Factor: Vampires are extremely vulnerable to silver, particularly as their wounds do not heal as quickly from it (vampire flesh actually pulls away from contact with silver), though elder vampires gain a resistance to it. In Dracula Cha-Cha-Cha Penelope, a vampire from the 19th century, mentioned she put her tongue against the silver-plated scalpel of Jack the Ripper and she got shocked into unconsciousness as a result.
    • Interestingly, most traditional weaknesses of vampires (crucifixes, running water, garlic etc.) are simply psychological, and so are usually only useful against newborns who are still afraid of them.
  • Massive Multiplayer Crossover: A combination of characters from both Victorian/Edwardian fiction in general as well as vampire characters, from Blacula to A.J. Raffles.
  • Missing Reflection: Vampires in general don't appear in mirrors, or appear only as a vague shape.
  • Muscles Are Meaningless: Averted. Growing older as a vampire increases their considerable strength, but size and build matter greatly. The vampire Nezumi claims to be a 1000 years old (she actually doesn't know how old she is exactly), but she gets picked up and impaled on a stalagtite by an armoured vampire that's likely centuries younger than her but much bigger. In turn that vampire is overpowered by big man Dravot, a vampire that's not even 100 yet. Genevieve is older than Vardalak's sire Dracula, but she actually had some difficulty forcing down the younger Vardalak.
  • Monster Delay: Dracula rarely and only briefly appears in the series, ensuring that his presence remains impactful. In Anno Dracula he only appears at the climax, after his presence has been felt on every page.
  • The Necrocracy: England toggles back and forth from malevolent to somewhat decent. The subjects include both vampires and "the warm." The former can be good, but the ones who wind up in authority tend to be somewhat self-serving.
  • No Immortal Inertia: Vampires, when they die, tend to revert to whatever shape they'd be if they hadn't become vampires (ie. rotting corpses, or if they're old enough, dust).
  • Our Vampires Are Different: Vampires come from a number of various "Bloodlines", but are considered biological entities with "just a touch" of magic (they don't cast reflections, for example). Some may be able to transform, while others have corpse-like features, and others suffer from blood frenzy. Religious symbols and even garlic only affect those vampires who believe they can. Sunlight only hurts younger undead, and silver only serves to counter their regeneration abilities; any sufficient organ damage (like, say, a stake though the heart) can kill them for good. Notably, Dracula specifically isn't vulnerable to as many things as he is in Bram Stoker's version; the turning point of history comes when he shrugs off an attack that, in Stoker's novel, seriously inconvenienced him. By the 1970s, a number of vampires have also gained mirror reflections.
  • Our Werewolves Are Different: They definitely exist in-universe, but we've yet to meet one. Usually werewolf gets spelled with a hyphen because that's how Stoker spelled it in Dracula.
  • Public Domain Canon Welding: The first novel combines original characters, the cast of Dracula, and cameos from nearly every other public domain work set in Victorian London, along with the occasional Lawyer-Friendly Cameo from characters created more recently. The sequels continue in the same vein, with the balance shifting away from Public Domain Canon Welding toward Lawyer-Friendly Cameo as the in-universe time period catches up with the age of copyright.
  • Really 700 Years Old:
    • Geneviève was turned when she was 16, during the Hundred Years' War.
    • Lord Ruthwen, another elder and the Prime Minister, looks like he's in his late teens or early twenties.
  • Reference Overdosed: Almost every single character who appears, named or otherwise, is either a Lawyer-Friendly Cameo or Public Domain Canon Welding.
  • Shout-Out: Any piece of seemingly unnecessary exposition, any background character who gets more than a sentence of description? A Shout-Out to something.
  • Silver Bullet: Silver is one of the few guaranteed ways to harm a vampire, so silver bullets make an appearance; in one of the books' many Shout Outs they're called "the Reid design".
  • Silver Has Mystic Powers: Silver is one of the few guaranteed ways to harm a vampire.
  • Stronger with Age: As a general rule, the older a vampire is, the stronger (and more in control of its powers) it becomes.
  • Surpassed the Teacher: Some young vampires are freaks of nature and wind up far more powerful than their parent in darkness in short time. Once example is the vampire Holly. She was made in 1959 by a broken old elder of no note. She quickly develops phenomenal shape-shifting and identity stealing powers. It's no wonder she and her husband quickly kill their father-in-darkness.
  • Take That!: Newman isn't shy about giving unflattering portrayals to real-life personages he doesn't care for.
  • Transhuman: True vampires are essentially treated a separate species, but it is possible for a living human to gain superhuman abilities by drinking a vampire's blood without giving up some of their own blood in return, both of which are necessary to fully "turn." in The Bloody Red Baron, Winthrop is able to temporarily become as fast and as strong as a vampire while still being "warm", and the effects are hinted to never fully wear off, as Geneviève still senses vampiric power in him when she meets him in Vampire Romance, set five years later.
  • The Unmasqued World: After Dracula takes over England and all the vampires come out of hiding. It is oddly zigzagged, vampires are known to be real and that can't be reversed. So during the Terror, was a time of credulity where anything was believed no matter how ridiculous. After that important figures have taken to masquing powerful secret societies, true supernatural beings and whatnot from the public (Kate Reed cites this time of credulity as one reason why she won't write on the entity Mother of Tears). The world is going through another period of unmasquing as the 20th century is ending, with Johnny Alucard becoming a media giant and some events being too big to cover up as well as the advent of the internet.
  • Vampires Are Rich: Zigzagged. There are very rich vampires as Genevieve notes, with some shacking up with rich mortals and then inheriting their wealth after they die. But then, after discovering that Princess Asa is almost broke, Penelope notes that Elder vampires aren't used to dealing with money, having servants and lackeys to handle the numbers while they just spent. Genevieve herself is sometimes fairly well off as she has some successful investments over the years (though she still has to budget) while other times she needs a job and is at best middle-class, while Kate has to stay at the crappiest hotels because of her inconsistent income. Then there's John Alucard, who's a media mogul and drug kingpin with godlike wealth.
  • Vampire Variety Pack: The different bloodlines each features a different subset of vampire characteristics; only some bloodlines are able to transform into other shapes, for instance. Dracula's bloodline is said to be the only one where the metamorphosis involves dying and reviving (as opposed to transforming directly from a living person to an animate vampire), and the only one where a vampire has to rest in a box of his native earth; other bloodlines tend to regard this as a bit weird. Even within a bloodline, newborns who were diseased when turned may retain the physical signs of their illness, which can spread and worsen over time.
    • Taken up to eleven in One Thousand Monsters, where the Western vampires encounter many bizarre Japanese strains of vampirism, some of which are not even recognisable as once human.
  • Voluntary Vampire Victim: several characters offer their blood to vampires, sometimes out of friendship and kindness, other times because they find being fed on pleasurable or are paid to do it. Some groups campaign to enforce this trope by making non-consensual biting a capital offense.
  • What Happened to the Mouse?: Sherlock Holmes is mentioned as having been sent to a concentration camp in the first book, but his fate is never followed up on in any of the later stories after the fall of Dracula's regime. Given fellow prisoner Bram Stoker survived it's likely Holmes did as well.
  • Who Wants to Live Forever?: A common theme, as to be expected in a vampire novel.

Examples specific to the novel Anno Dracula:

    A-Z 
  • Achey Scars: Dr Seward's hand never fully recovered from the bite he received from Renfield the night that Dracula defeated the group, and as a result he is often in pain.
  • Age-Gap Romance: Charles Beauregard is 35 and his fiancée, Penelope, is 19. Charles and his late wife Pamela counted as well: at the time of her death she was under 19 and he was 28. Charles ends up on the opposite end of the spectrum during his fling with Geneviève, who is his senior by nearly 500 years despite looking like a teenager.
  • Always Someone Better: Geneviève is 50 years older than Dracula and so relatively unafraid of him and certainly not any of his offspring. When she's up against Mr. Yam, she gets an Oh, Crap! moment when she realizes that next to him, she's merely a child in age. The fight against him is a Curbstomp Battle where she hurts herself hitting him for no effect and he gives her a Neck Snap and crushed ribs. He only lets up because that was a warning attack, luckily Geneviève never encounters him again as Beauregard is able to use his connections with the Lord of Strange Deaths to call off Mr. Yam.
  • Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: Dracula is a veritable giant when he appears at the climax.
  • Badass Boast: Geneviève Dieudonne has one towards the end when she and Charles meet Dracula himself after he gives a long speech to her. Dracula is fifty years younger than she, and having seized control of London, murdering innocents and making himself a tyrant Prince Consort, is overly arrogant:
    "Were you not alone Geneviève Dieudonne? And are you not among friends now? Among equals?"
    "Impaler," she declared, "I have no equal."
  • Captain Ersatz: A cameo by an American reporter in a white suit and straw hat commenting on the Ripper case is a time-displaced Shout-Out to Kolchak: The Night Stalker, one of Newman's favourite shows. Newman has later admitted to kicking himself for lacking the foresight to see that the series would go on have installments set in the 1970s, where he could use Kolchak more naturally.
  • Chinese Vampire: Mr Yam, an assassin hired by Count Vardalek to kill Geneviève for publicly humiliating him.
  • The City Narrows: The Jago, a fictional London slum. The only people who seem to live there are thugs and vampires who shapeshifted beyond any resemblance to humanity. Even Geneviève, an elder vampire who lives in Whitechapel, is nervous going there.
  • Composite Character: The plot concerns Jack the Ripper killing vampire prostitutes, combining the real Ripper (whoever he may have been) with the fictional Dr. Seward from the original Dracula novel.
  • Cool Sword: Charles Beauregard's silvered cane sword.
  • Cruel and Unusual Death: How Von Klatka was assassinated. He was jumped by a gang of religious extremists, including one vampire, and once they pinned him down - the gang cut open his chest and stuck a stick of dynamite into the wound.
  • Dark and Troubled Past:
    • Charles Beauregard (see Death by Childbirth below)
    • Dr Seward, who has to live with the consequences of his group's failure to stop Dracula.
  • Death by Childbirth: Charles' wife died this way in India seven years before the beginning of the novel. He feels guilty about her death because he did not insist enough to make her return to Great Britain, where she would have received better medical care.
  • Depraved Homosexual: Vardalek, a diseased, murderously sadistic member of the Carpathian Guard who attempts to force himself on a publican's son before Geneviève forced him to back off. When Dracula issues an edict decreeing homosexuality punishable by death, a brothel in London is raided and Vardalek is found in the basement having killed one man and violently raping another. Being caught results in Kostaki deciding that he has to die too.
  • Deuteragonist: Charles Beauregard and Geneviève are the main characters, being the focus of the most chapters.
  • Dirty Coward: When Van Helsing's campaign against Dracula ended in disaster, Godalming abandoned his companions and fled for his life. Now, as a vampire, he thinks only of advancing himself socially and is desperate to erase all memory of his association with the vilified Van Helsing.
  • Disproportionate Retribution:
    • Prime Minister Ruthven suspects this is why Dracula makes the edict of sodomy being a crime punishable by impalement. He believes that during Vlad's time as a hostage to the Ottomans, they used him as an occasional Sex Slave.
    • Why did Vardalek hire Mr. Yam to kill Genevieve? She prevented him from feeding on and raping Georgie, the son of the bar owner of the Ten Bells, and this humiliated Vardalek.
  • Dying Clue: Played with — one of the Ripper's victims, in her dying spasm, grabs the trouser leg of the attending doctor. The protagonists jokingly suggest that she was trying to tell them the killer's name was "Sydney Trouser", or that she was aiming for "Mr Boot" and missed. It takes them much longer to discover what the audience by this point already knows: that the doctor is the Ripper.
  • Emergency Transformation: Geneviève attempts to perform an Emergency Transformation on a friend who has been fatally wounded in an attack, but the friend chooses to die rather than become a vampire.
  • "Eureka!" Moment: Geneviève and Charles are struggling with their investigation into Jack the Ripper's murders. Geneviève wishes aloud that Dr. Seward were with them, as he treated all the victims and could have told them what they had in common. As soon as she says this, Charles realises something: They had Seward in common. Jack Seward.
  • Even Evil Has Standards: The biggest crime lords in London all decide to put aside their rivalries and offer their aid to the Diogenes Club to help find Jack the Ripper (in a scene probably lifted from Fritz Lang's M). Partially it's serial killing being bad for business (heightened police alertness and all) but a few of them hint that they're actually sickened by Jack's methods.
  • External Retcon: Van Helsing and his cronies are revealed to be less virtuous than Bram Stoker depicted them in Dracula. (Dracula himself is much the same, though, and certainly not a misunderstood hero.)
  • Fantastic Slurs: Some living humans call vampires "leeches", and some vampires have a rather derogotary way of saying "the warm". The Victorians sneer at noveau vampires as "murgatroyds", after Gilbert, despite turning vampire himself, satirizes them in the alt-world version of Ruddigore.
  • The Fate of the Princes in the Tower: Richard III, who is a vampire, denies sending assassins to kill his nephews. He did the job himself.
  • Full-Frontal Assault: Dracula in the climax.
  • Historical Domain Character: Bram and Florence Stoker, Queen Victoria, and Jack the Ripper are just the tip of the tip of the iceberg. Also, Jack the Ripper's victims, while all vampires, are named after the real Ripper victims plus one fictional victim, Lulu from Franz Wedekind's novels and Alban Berg's eponymous opera.
  • In Spite of a Nail: In a version of Victorian London that has undergone significant social and political upheavals as a consequence of Dracula's takeover, Jack the Ripper still exists and has basically the same career. More than that, the identity and motivations of the Ripper in this novel only make sense in the context of Dracula's takeover and the subsequent upheavals — meaning that a different history has led a different man to commit exactly the same crimes for different reasons.
  • Legion of Doom: A Victorian Legion of Doom comprising Fu Manchu, Professor Moriarty, Colonel Moran, Raffles, The Invisible Man, Macheath and Bill Sikes. In a twist, they join forces with the heroes to stop the Silver Knife, because Even Evil Has Standards...or at least, good business practices.
  • Littlest Cancer Patient: Lilly the vampire child is dying because her body can't control its shapeshifting and resources from the rest of her body is being sucked away by her useless batwing arm. Her biological mother doesn't care about her, with only Genevieve to be the one that loves her.
  • Looks Like Orlok: Graf Orlok himself when he appears as the warden of the Tower of London.
  • The Lost Lenore:
    • Lucy Westenra for Jack Seward.
    • Pamela for Charles Beauregard.
  • The Matchmaker: Florence Stoker has played a big part in getting Penelope Churchward and Charles Beauregard together before the story begins.
  • Mercy Kill: Charles Beauregard kills an already mortally wounded and crazed victim of Jack the Ripper, though it overlaps with self-defence as she had shapeshifted into an aggressive wolf. Later he does it again to Jack Seward, as he is gone completely mad and Dracula would probably torture him otherwise. He also gives the silver scalpel to an enslaved Victoria that she uses to give herself one.
  • Morally Ambiguous Doctorate: Dr Jack Seward turns out to be the Ripper. Dr. Moreau and Dr. Jekyll also appear in the story and are experimenting with vampire biology for their own individually creepy purposes, with the remains of Count Vardalek an especially happy find for the two.
  • Mugging the Monster: A couple of high-ranking Carpathian vampires are bullying the locals in a pub when Geneviève calmly approaches the group and asks them to stop. They initially dismiss her as a 'newborn' (i.e. a recent vampire) and attempt to throw their weight around with her too, but soon learn that she's far more powerful than them. One of the four, Captain Kostaki, is well aware of her true identity and shows genuine respect for her and her strength, going as far as to chastise one of his subordinates with disgust for trying to draw a silvered sword on her.
  • Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: After the confrontation with Geneviève descrived above, Vardalek, a Carpathian elder, decides to hire a Chinese vampire assassin to off her. However, Dracula has Vardalek impaled for his homosexuality, thereby indirectly helping remove the threat against her.
  • Nightmare Face: Von Klatka, one of the Carpathian Guards, has a grey corpse face as a result of being Dracula's accursed bloodline.
  • Nocturnal Emission: Dr Seward has them regularly following his erotic dreams of Lucy.
  • Out-of-Genre Experience: The Victorian murder mystery is temporarily interrupted by a Wuxia martial arts fight when a Chinese Vampire cuts in.
  • Politically Incorrect Villain: Dracula is homophobic to the point that as a Prince Consort he orders to impale every person caught in homosexual acts. It's particularly striking as several characters consider his hatred of homosexuality odd and no one seems to truly share it (despite the Victorian setting). He also runs the risk of creating scandals and enemies in high places for this.
  • Puppet King: Queen Victoria, in thrall to her vampiric consort. At the climax of the novel, she does a Heroic Sacrifice, thereby removing Dracula's claim to the throne.
  • Precision F-Strike: Both meta- and in-universe; towards the end, a chapter clinically details the movements of the two main characters as they, quite unwittingly, head towards one of Jack the Ripper's particularly gruesome murder scenes. The next chapter, which details what they see and what happens when they arrive, is simply called "Fucking Hell!" It appears that one of the main characters had this reaction word-for-word in-universe as well.
  • Replacement Goldfish: Penelope is this for Charles: she and his late wife Pamela were cousins who were raised together and shared a few physical traits and mannerisms. A creepier example is Mary Jane Kelly for Dr. Seward. He uses Mary Jane to act on the sexual desires that Lucy (as a vampire) inspired him and to cope with her death. Both are conscious of their role as replacements and they both exploit it at first, but end up rebelling againat it.
  • Sanity Slippage: Dr. Seward increasingly breaks down over the course of the novel, eventually becoming unable to distinguish his vampire lover from the very-dead Lucy Westenra.
  • Shut Up, Hannibal!: At the climax, Dracula attempts to persuade Geneviève that she should be siding with him instead of with the mortals. She's not swayed. She also doesn't appreciate his condescending tone towards her, as she was already a vampire when he was merely a baby; he is the junior vampire to her, and she quickly reminds him of it.
  • Silver Bullet: Silver is one of the few guaranteed ways to harm a vampire, so silver bullets make an appearance; in one of the books' many Shout Outs they're called "the Reid design". Kostaki is shot in the leg by Dravot with one.
  • Silver Has Mystic Powers: Silver is one of the few guaranteed ways to harm a vampire. Under Dracula's rule of England, it's a restricted substance, subject to the same controls as poisons like arsenic. The serial killer uses a silver-edged knife to kill his victims, and is commonly called "the Silver Knife" before "Jack the Ripper" catches on.
  • Switching P.O.V.: The book follows Charles Beauregard, Genevieve Dieudonne, Captain Kostaki of the Carpathian Guard, Jack Seward and Lord Godalming.
  • Sword Cane: Charles Beauregard uses one as an upper-class British gentleman. He eventually has it coated with silver so it will more effectively deal with vampires.
  • Token Good Teammate: Captain Kostaki alone of the Carpathian Guard displays decency and empathy. He is cordial to and respects Mackenzie, a warm policeman, while disapproving of many of his peers: cruel Von Klatka, blusterer Iorga, impertinent Cuda and arrogant Hentzau. He also shows sympathy for his Christian opponents, having once fought a holy war himself, and respects Geneviève appropriately unlike the rest of the Guard. He'll still follow Dracula's orders and hold up his regime, but he'll resent some of its less ethical behavior.
  • Undead Child: Two vampire children in Whitechapel, Lily Mylett and Rebecca Kosinski. Both are the only vampires in their families and Lily is mentioned as having been turned "for a lark" by a rich gentleman. Turning children and abandoning those you turned are both generally considered bad practices by vampires, however.
  • Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Some vampires are implied to have the traditional fangs (Inspector Lestrade's are described as tusks) and evening dress, but walk about in public without a second thought.
  • Van Helsing Hate Crimes: Jack the Ripper is a vampire hunter, and seen in exactly the same way as the real Ripper was (that is, most people think he's a monster, but a handful don't see the women he kills as really being people).
  • Villainous Breakdown: In the climax, Geneviève and Charles gain an audience with Dracula. He acts welcoming but arrogantly self-assured in his power, boasting to Geneviève about how he has created a utopia for the undead. However, once Charles assassinates Queen Victoria, thus dissolving Dracula's claim to the throne, he devolves into a feral beast, "[spitting] rage and hate."
  • Wrong Side of the Tracks: Whitechapel, much as it was in real life at the time.

Examples specific to the novel One Thousand Monsters:

    A-Z 
  • Abhorrent Admirer: Lord Kawataro is a nasty kappa who hates all foreigners and wants these newcomers beheaded except for Christina who he had been wooing. He wants her to be his concubine to her disgust.
  • Aerith and Bob: When one of the refugee vampires wakes up, Dravot is dismayed. It's another mouth to feed in a place where food is hard to come by and he thinks her name is ridiculous. What sort of name is Arcueid Moonstar. With their luck, she'll turn out to be another princess, only this one a princess of the Moon.
  • All Your Powers Combined: Christina Light drew power from all the inhabitants of Yokai Town, and from Lord Majin and his dragon eggs to completely crush him. Earlier Christina was fused with Yuki-Onna where these two godlike vampires combined their power.
  • Armor-Piercing Question: Princess Christina Light delivers an epic one to Geneviève, having insight of Geneviève's self loathing of her vampiric nature. Telling her that she needs to learn how to love her fellow vampires, sometime.
    "You don't see the worth in us," she said. "The beauty. The potential. You see only red thirst. And you hate that. It's a dishonorable obligation and you feed in shame. You don't have a reflection because you don't need one. You see Dracula and think you're the same as him. A monster. A repentant, abstinent, holier-than-mere-bloodthirsty-immortals monster, but a monster for all that. You love the warm in the abstract and the particular. Your Charles - Mr Beauregard of the Diogenes Club - you love him. That's part of your story. Everyone knows it. Kate loves him too, of course. That must be a trial for you both. I should like to meet this extraordinary man, though I'd better not, to avoid disappointment. There have been and will be others. All warm, living, not vampires. You couldn't love Kostaki, though he would die for you. You don't even look at him and wonder - the way men and women look at each other and wonder - how it would be. Why can't you love a vampire, Gene? Is it because you can't love yourself?"
  • Army of Thieves and Whores: When the yokai were under attack by the Black Ocean, Dravot and Kostaki noted how undiscipline and disorganized the defenders were. This was given as the yokai were a mix of generic workers, prostitutes, priests, serial killers, gangland thugs and the occasional actual warrior or soldier. But it didn't take long for them to become a Badass Army.
  • Ass Shove: In the Suicide Park, the westernized obstructive bureaucrat begs for a swift death as he's bent over and buggered by the long, barbed tongue of a hungry Kappa. Lord Majin obliges and cuts his head off.
  • Asskicking Leads to Leadership: That's how the yokai roll, Yuki-Onna is far and away the most powerful yokai. So she's their queen. She had been challenged which resulted in a winter that caused a 70 year famine.
  • Bad Boss: Captain Death Larsen of the Macedonia. Popejoy used to be known as Hawkeye, but Death Larsen smashed one of his eyes in with his weighted rope. Larsen also killed some of his sleeping vampire passengers as a show of power to those who were awake. He's eventually rewarded for this behavior by a much deserved mutiny at the end of the novel, with him being tossed into the bay and Popejoy taking over as Captain.
  • Badass Normal: Popejoy has punched up Black Ocean soldiers, giants and hostile yokai while he was a normal man. Mantis is an older Japanese woman who's a serial killer so feared that the authorities imprisoned her in Yokai Town where she easily earns the locals's respect.
  • Bash Brothers: Captain Kostaki becomes one with Mr. Bat (a.k.a 30 Bats or 30 Icicles), the vampire samurai and brother-in-darkness to the evil Dorakuraya.
  • Black Magic: Lord Majin has magic that lets him generate earthquakes, create a Nigh-Invulnerable magical barrier and give him eternal youth. The source of his magic is that he takes Japan's undesirables for punishment by feeding them to the yokai of Yokai Town. From the agony of the victims and the blood frenzy of the yokai, he draws in that negative energy.
  • The Bus Came Back: Captain Kostaki returns as a POV character after a 25 year absence since he was imprisoned at the end of the original Anno Dracula. From the same story - Mr. Yam, the Chinese Vampire assassin who completely fucked up Geneviève, also returns.
  • Captain Ersatz: Popejoy, a sailor who winds up with supernatural abilities and a penchant for spinach.
  • The Cassandra: Drusilla Zark. Most of the cast ignores her precognitive warnings because she comes off as a Mad Oracle. Through the novel it becomes apparent she is accurately predicting later events in the story and what the characters will do, their fates, often in vague ways. At certain points she even hints at the events of the upcoming sequel Anno Dracula 1999 Daikaiju. Kostaki begins to take her predictions a bit more seriously, and she has moments of lucidity in her predictions, going in and out of them.
  • Chinese Vampire: Mr Yam, who's a useful ally in this story - putting his hopping might to use with the heroes.
  • Cool Sword: Captain Kostaki's silvered Carracks Black Sword from his Knights Templar days. Dorakuraya wants to enlist Kostaki as it's one of the few weapons capable of killing Yuki-Onna.
  • Curb-Stomp Cushion: In the series, mobs of humans versus vampires results in staked vampires. Not in this case...the Black Ocean had no chance of winning. Their weapon and training advantages was actually miniscule against the Yokai and Vampires numbers (many of whom were armed or picked up guns from fallen Black Ocean), ferocity and powers (that's before the Yuki-Onna and Christina Light fusion joined the fight). The Black Ocean did manage to kill a fair number of locals, with Clare Millinger, Lord Majin with his mech and some of the freakier Black Ocean fighters accounting for the majority of the kills.
  • Deuteragonist: Geneviève and Captain Kostaki are the main characters and POVs.
  • Elemental Powers: Christina Light has light and to a somewhat lesser degree the electromagnetic spectrum, Yuki-Onna has tremendous ice powers (she once put Japan in a 70 year winter famine as a side-effect of a battle with a jorogumo), O-Same is a fire being that once burned down most of Edo in the Great Fire of Meireki.
  • Emergency Transformation: Popejoy the Sailor Man is mortally injured in battle, and Geneviève offers again to give him her blood. Before anything can happen, a Yokai lady, smitten with the sailor, steps in and gives him her own blood instead.
  • Evil Puppeteer: Tsunako Shiki is one of Yuki-Onna's pets and she has a fascination and mastery with toys and puppetry, using her skill in these to torment Kostaki. She's so much The Gadfly, that during the battle with the Black Ocean, she turns her puppets on Geneviève for amusement.
  • Four-Temperament Ensemble: The four core characters, the leaders of the exiled Vampires:
    • Sanguine: Sergeant Daniel Dravot.
    • Choleric: Princess Christina Light.
    • Melancholic: Captain Kostaki.
    • Phlegmatic: Geneviève Dieudonne.
  • Fantastic Ghetto: Yokai Town is Japan's dumping ground for every vampire in the country, as well as any foreign vampires that land on its shores.
  • Fusion Dance: Christina Light in her immaterial light form, joins bodies with Yuki-Onna. Together they form a 20 feet tall version of Yuki-Onna with an electric aura.
  • Half the Man He Used to Be: Minor character Arcueid Moonstar is cut in half during the battle against the Black Ocean, though she lives through it.
  • Heterosexual Life-Partners: Between Captain Kostaki and Sergeant Dravot suddenly, surprisingly. Even after Dravot shot Kostaki through the knee with a silver bullet, murdered his comrade Inspector Mackenzie and framed him for it, getting him thrown into the Tower of London, governed by Nosferatu himself Graf Orlok. Geneviève is rightly baffled by the friendship as such. Explained in Kostaki's POV with the revelation that both of them are Freemason Brothers, Dravot through his original source material, Kostaki through the Knights Templar. Leads to hilarious and awesome teamwork through the book, including battling samurai, chatting about 'the ladies', singing and exchanging secretive Freemason phrases out in the open.
    "On the level, Brother Taki..."
    "On the square, Brother Dravot."
  • Highly-Visible Ninja: Kawataro has four Kappa ninja henchmen who are armed with katanas, nunchaku, bo staff and sais. They're not very competent, serving only to get eaten by Clare Millinger while they were jailing Geneviève and their weapons were picked up by more notable individuals in the fight against the Black Ocean soldiers.
  • Humongous Mecha: What's a story in Japan without a mech. The statue that Lord Majin keeps spying on Yokai Town from, turns out to be mechanized automaton powered by steam engines, magic sigils and a lot of men. It has Maxim machine guns in its eyes, flame jets to keep enemies at bay and can release a torrent of boiling oil out of its mouth.
  • The Idealist: Captain Kostaki is revealed to be this, after it was hinted in Anno Dracula. It is reflected in his POV chapters, and noted by Geneviève, who has a great deal of insight into the Knight Templar, after he has been brainwashed into stabbing her only to come to his senses upon looking at what he has done to her.
    As Kostaki shook off Dorakuraya's puppet strings, I was afraid he'd realize what he had done and be broken in himself. Honor was his straitjacket. He abided by a code Dracula and his party had long since abandoned. Only someone as stubbornly idealistic could have been so sorely abused.
  • Literally Shattered Lives: The Christina/Yuki-Onna fusion crystallizes Clare Mallinger with a single Freeze Ray. Arcueid Moonstar then nails her with a slingshot and breaks her.
  • The Juggernaut: The vampire murderess Clare Mallinger is eaten from within by a Black Ocean-aligned jorogumo. The result is a Giant Spider with scythe blade arms that can cut through a kappa's shell with ease, carapace so strong that silver and steel blades just bounce off it (as do explosive rockets) and when her eyes are shot out with silver bullets they regenerate seconds later. Additionally she can breathe out deadly swarms of vampire butterflies and grows bigger as she eats more enemies. Clare's as invincible as it sounds, she's stopped only when she meets the even mightier juggernaut in the Christina Light/Yuki-Onna fusion.
  • Kick the Dog: Instead of fighting Captain Kostaki and Mr. Bat, Dorakuraya cuts down the terrified catgirl Topazia Suzuki. Kostaki and Mr. Bat in turn cut him down.
  • Lady and Knight: A heartwarming vampiric variation forms between Medieval Vampire Elders Geneviève Dieudonne and Captain Kostaki. Kostaki is revealed to be an actual Knight Templar, and refers to her often verbally and in thought as 'Lady Geneviève' and 'my Lady Elder'. He protects and looks out for her through the course of the novel, gradually realizing that he has fallen in love with her. Princess Christina Light goes as far as calling him Geneviève's 'faithful Captain', and points out that he would die for her.
  • Love Epiphany: Captain Kostaki comes to this epiphany when he has been mentally manipulated by one of the villain's powers into stabbing Geneviève through the gut. It kicks in when he looks at her face and realizes what he has done to her. He is able to break free of the villain's hold upon this realization, and not long after cuts his head apart. There were hints his feelings were turning this way through his POV chapters. There are a few examples that imply him working it out, but it becomes obvious beyond a doubt at this point. It's also something both Geneviève became aware of, and something Christina Light teases her about.
  • Noodle Incident: Geneviève recalls that Christina isn't at full health, when she first fought Lord Majin. She remembered Kate Reed telling her of a humiliating incident involving Christina getting merged with a wall of the Tower of London during a terrorist campaign against Dracula. More details emerge in the sequel story 1999 Daikaiju
  • Our Vampires Are Different: All those weird and wily Yokai...they're just a different lineage of vampire.
  • Passing the Torch: Yuki-Onna returns to her slumber, passing her role of rulership over the yokai to Christina.
  • Religion of Evil: Lord Majin and his Black Ocean followers worship Taira no Masakado, the Japanese earthquake god. Lord Majin also favours Enma-Ou, the ruler of Hell.
  • Sealed Badass in a Can: Yuki-Onna, the queen of the yokai, had sealed herself away in ice inside a hidden castle under Yokai Town. An accidental blood splash from Geneviève is what wakes her up.
  • Seeking Sanctuary: What the exiles from London are looking for in Japan's Yokai Town, in the end Christina Light makes a deal with Tokyo. She gets a 100 year lease on the land of Yokai Town and makes it into Casamassima Bay, a port where vampires are around the world may find safe haven.
  • Sequel Hook: Drusilla keeps referring to how they're going to need the School Mouse. At the end of the novel, Christina sends an invitation in 1999 to Richard Jeperson of the Diogenes Club and Miss Mouse (the elder vampire schoolgirl Nezumi).
  • Silver Bullet: Kostaki was shot in the leg by Dravot with one in Anno Dracula, and is still suffering constant pain from the remaining shards 11 years later.
  • Sorcerous Overlord: Lord Majin is a more contemporary version. He's the de-facto ruler of Yokai Town (the Emperor and the Black Ocean society don't care what he does behind its walls, while Yuki-Onna is sleeping on her role as queen) and uses Yokai Town as a place to sacrifice undesirables to augment is his sorcery, with his aim to eventually take over the whole of Japan.
  • Spanner in the Works: Lord Majin's plan was to spend more time collecting power until he's ready to attack Tokyo itself. He's forced to launch an all-out assault on Yokai Town when he discovers that Christina Light is trying to wake up Yuki-Onna, the one being that was powerful than him.
  • Supporting Protagonist: What Geneviève and Kostaki are in this book, they provide the view-points but it's really the Christina Light story. Geneviève even makes a snarky quip that the purpose of the Knights Templar and hundreds of years of Free Masonry was to bring about the apotheosis of Christina Light.
  • Took a Level in Badass: Christina Light becomes more powerful in her light powers after her initial loss to Lord Majin, to the point where she's practically Ascended to a Higher Plane of Existence.
  • Underestimating Badassery: Geneviève thought that Christina was a snooty little dilettante with nice sparkly skin. She grossly underestimates the younger vampire's intelligence and actual powers.
  • Vegetarian Vampire:
    • Captain Kostaki has vowed to stop drinking blood in order to keep control over himself, and not give into his Red Thirst. His substitute is to eat aniseed balls, and he even receives a big packet of them from Geneviève as a Christmas present at the end, much to his pleasure.
    • 'Popejoy' The Sailor Man, who after being mortally wounded in battle was transformed by a Yokai lady of a plant-like bloodline. The bloodline requires sustenance of not human blood, but high iron content vegetable matter. Fortunately his ship was already well stocked with plenty of tins of spinach.
  • Villain Respect: Lord Majin was quite impressed with Christina standing up to him and he gives Geneviève a medicinal scorpion to save the fallen vampire.
  • Wound That Will Not Heal: Christina isn't very good at recovering from injuries to her physical body, after her battle with Lord Majin, she winds up with an useless arm and a permanently red eye. Geneviève noted that Kate Reed told her that 5 years ago Christina had been injured and after that she's had difficulty staying solid.
  • Youkai: It's a fantasy world Japan, so naturally they appear in this story. They turn out to be vampires, just ones that push the shapeshifting a lot further than most.

Examples specific to the novel 1999 Daikaiju:

    A-Z 
  • Ascended to a Higher Plane of Existence: There's a celebration for Christina Light's upcoming transition, though in her case, it's more going on to an even higher state than the one she ascended to in One Thousand Monsters.
  • Cyberpunk: An Anno Dracula version. Christina Light has gone from well-meaning anarchist to creating the MegaCorp "Light Industries", which while not malevolent, hasn't done anything to improve the lives of humans or vampires. Vapid pop culture like idol group Cham-Cham, rules the airwaves and numbs the populace. Tech cult Aum Draht who worship the "Wire" (an alias of the evil Jun Zero) and attempted a bioterrorism incident. In the Bund, there are power armoured police with bladed yo-yos who chop off limbs and are hired on the basis of looks rather than competence. And of course a dangerous cyborg hacker...
  • A Day in the Limelight: Japanese elder vampire Nezumi had featured a few times as a minor character. Here she's the main protagonist.
  • Body Horror: Dr. Akiba of the EarthGuard is slashed by D.K., the renegade EarthGuard driver, and pushed into a pack of ravenous yokai. They rip apart his face and tear up his chest, before he's able to save himself by injecting himself with vampire blood but all those yokai bites corrupted the process. The yokai then consider this newborn vampire/yokai one of them and let him go. His face is still mangled but the wounds on his chest start sprouting vestigial eyes and mute fanged mouths. Those mouths are able to spit fangs out, as D.K. finds out. Eventually his facial wounds seal up and render him into The Faceless.
    • The bioagent that Aum Draht was using is a dangerous fungus that will cause the victim to agonizingly sprout mushrooms where they were splashed and will have their body parts converted into puffballs that spread throughout the body. This fungus works even on vampires.
  • Book Dumb: Turns out Nezumi has the memory of a goldfish when it comes to learning most school subjects, which is why she's still spending decades trying to graduate middle school. However if a subject involves combat, survival training and related, she'll master it and the lessons will stick.
  • Cyborg: Jun Zero has his bionic hand Lefty and EarthGuard enforcer, Caterpillar has been rebuilt into an armoured human tank with a flamethrower arm and a mace hand. As a reward for success in his mission,EarthGuard driver, D.K. would be getting cybernetically grafted to Drive Kaiju supercar.
  • Cool Tank: On patrol of the Bund are high-tech one-man tanks, D.K. the EarthGuard driver recalls being caught before by police using Spider Tank vehicles. And while not a tank, EarthGuard has the Armourdillo, a Cool APC that's extremely large and has scalelike armour. Armourdillo also has a pointed prow and a cowcatcher. Armourdillo's windows are really tough and withstood the impact of a falling man, but these aren't quite strong enough to hold back frenzied yokai.
  • Computer Virus: Inverted, Harold destroys Jun Zero not by uploading a computer virus into the system that Jun's in. Instead Harold finds the codes that's protecting the system from the "Millennium bug" and erases those. This crashes the system permanently and annihilates Jun Zero.
  • Demonic Possession: Among the creeps that was the EarthGuard unit sent to the Bund, was a teenaged serial murderer, Killer who had a demon constantly floating in his proximity and controlling the boy.
  • Deuteragonist: Nezumi and Harold Takahama are the main characters and POVs, though Richard Jeperson and Detective Azuma get almost as much prominence.
  • "Die Hard" on an X: …in this case, 'Die Hard in an Office Building' (which just happens to also be a giant, mechanical, kaiju).
  • Exotic Entree: For the banquet at the party, Golden grade blood from special "pigs" was being served on tap. Golden is banned in most countries according to Jeperson. He notes that families lease out their male children for a fortune to vampires. The young boys are then castrated, fattened and kept in a container to keep them artificially small while their blood ages - the effect being a fat toddler in their late teens or early twenties. When the Golden is finished his career, he's often vampirised so he can regrow his missing bits. In a bit of Laser-Guided Karma, some of the Golden escape during the battle and go around biting the vampires.
  • Expy: The Bund a.k.a Cassamassima Bay is clearly an expy of Hong Kong, right down to the hand-off back to the original country after a 100 year lease. The Aum Draht cult is based on Aum Shinrikyo but with a cyberpunk flair.
  • Fair Cop: The 3 Sakis, wig-wearing vampires in blue power armour and carrying bladed yo-yos, who were hired to help police the Bund.
  • Foreshadowing: Before she actually appears in the epilogue, Sonja Blaue gets namedropped as an ultra-cool, leather-clad, sunglass-wearing vampire bounty hunter by Harold, who dreams of teaming with her.
  • Four Eyes, Zero Soul: Jeperson did a psychic reading on EarthGorce's Colonel Golgotha a military wetworks specialist who keeps wearing aviator glasses. Jeperson is chilled to find barely a trickle of emotion from the man.
  • Gentleman Thief: There's an infamous vampire thief that can turn into a shadow and do short-ranged teleportation. He tries to be a gentleman thief but he's a bit too much of a dick - being rather cowardly and not above robbing corpses. He gives his name as Anthony Peak — which also happens to be a species of lupin. Jeperson isn't fond of the Gentleman Thief idea, noting many of them were also hardened killers.
  • Government Agency of Fiction: Originally a Japan Self Defense Force special unit, EarthGuard is an Asian and Anzac joint agency for protecting the planet against any threats, from bioterrorism to a possible alien or supernatural invasion.
  • Green-Eyed Monster: Radu is extremely envious of brother Vlad. Vlad is the Impaler, The Dreaded amongst humans and vampires for centuries. Radu is largely forgotten and his title "The Handsome" was actually a backhanded compliment as it meant soft (Radu mentions that behind his back, people would also refer to him as "The Pouffe").
  • Gunship Rescue: Super-rich vampire Syrie Van Epp is the head of charity group Wings Over The World - a cover for a high tech strike force/rescue team. When the Daikaiju mech is moving about the Bund, Syrie calls her team to send advanced gunship Black Manta to save the day. The Black Manta is so heavily armored that the Daikaiju's anti-aircraft guns just bounce off it, but it can't withstand the Eye Beams and the Manta's missiles aren't hurting the mech, so they fly into Daikaiju's open mouth and disembark. The ascencion has already been stopped, but the Wings team is able to help round up bad guys and call in a Flying Saucer and EvangeLION mechs to provide medical attention.
  • Hardboiled Detective: Detective Azuma was every criminal's worst nightmare and that was before he became a vampire with an extra set of fangs on his knuckles. His penchant for some Police Brutality is overlooked by his superiors because of his outstanding record in finishing a case.
  • Hired Guns: Jeperson notes that Nezumi isn't actually one of his "Lovelies", she's just a schoolgirl that the Diogenes Club occasionally contracts when they want extra muscle. Besides the Boxed Crook recruits, General Gokemidoro's EarthGuard team is also composed of mercenaries plus a few regulars.
  • Hoist by Their Own Petard: Jun Zero had almost all of his own personality sucked out of his body to create Nice Guy Harold Takahama, while having his original persona uploaded in a bionic hand. Harold would be the one to kill Jun Zero.
  • Humongous Mecha: Daikaiju Plaza is a Godzilla-shaped tower with one golden eye and one crimson. People think it's Christina vanity project. What it turns out to be is giant mech with anti-aircraft turrets and powerful Eye Beams.
  • I Hate Past Me: Learning what a monster Jun Zero is, Harold happily obliterates his old self.
  • Incorruptible Pure Pureness: Incorruptible and with a morality guided by "all girl school" fiction, Nezumi is the one individual that everyone expected to pass Christina's test of purity. She doesn't even like blood, almost throwing up when some splashed in her mouth.
  • Lamarck Was Right: Averted. Nezumi was sired by Yuki-Onna and may even be one of the biological children of the godlike Snow Witch and a woodcutter. Yuki-Onna can snowstorm an entire country for decades, Nezumi is fast even for an elder vampire but that's it.
  • Life Drinker: How Christina feeds, she does this to an expy of Crying Freeman and as further show of power, she animates the tattoos on his withered husk.
  • Locked into Strangeness: After being fed on by a homonculus "clone" of dead vampiress Carmilla in Vampire Romance, Nezumi's hair is stuck at white
  • Mad Scientist: Dr. Pretorius has been working for Christina, while the Key Man of Earthforce turns out to be Dr. Komodo, an infamous scientist who's a protected war criminal for experiments done against humans and vampires in WW2.
  • Made of Iron: Any vampire that has subdermal plating. Invented in the '80s Japan as an avante-garde art project, subdermal plating has made silver a lot less fearsome to vampires. With their regeneration, vampires can handle having strong contoured steel plates (sometimes with spikes and other nasty surprises) embedded under the skin and this greatly improves a vampire's staying power in a fight especially against silver weapons. This mod is common for vampires with the Yakuza.
  • Memory Gambit: In order to survive Christina's test of purity, Jun Zero had a chiropteran drain all but the best parts of his memory and personality to manufacture the Harold Takahama persona. It was the bionic hand, Lefty that contained the uploaded full persona of Jun Zero.
  • Morality Pet: Nezumi is this to Harold. It's her example that pushes him to rebel against Lefty. At the end of story, it's implied Christina will be his new Morality Pet.
  • Named Weapons: Nezumi brought her favourite weapon to the party, the mastercrafted katana that had been silver-plated in England. Turns out she's named it "Good Night Kiss". The EarthGuard vampire, Cottonmouth, names her guns, Simon Smith and Amazing Dancing Bear, and her knives "Captain" and "Tennile".
  • Niche Network: The Christina Light channel is broadcast around the world, it's nothing but a glowing light. But it generates a mild Mind Manipulation effect that makes the viewer feel good and it allows Christina to feed as she can't drain blood.
  • The Older Immortal: Molinar notes the irony of his service to Christina, he's a centuries old elder and she's still a newborn. But he's not the oldest vampire currently active. That goes to Nezumi who's over 1000 years old (her sire Yuki-Onna is mostly sleeping in this novel). After living so long, internally she tut-tuts many of the other vampires and yokai for their bad behaviour - wishing they'd act their age and be a "good egg" or realize that there's more to life than drinking blood, partying and getting rich. She even tut-tuts Jeperson for his penchant for casual sex.
  • Reed Richards Is Useless: Not in this anime-influenced Cyberpunk/superspy story. With all the mad scientists and secret organizations doing research plus "Japanese weirdness", technology has improved well beyond what's available in real-life 1999 and some of it is actually available for public consumption such as low-grade bionics and advanced portable entertainment.
  • Remember the New Guy?: The story debuts Molinar, Light Industries head of security. He was a Vampire Elder born during Cortez's destruction of the Aztecs and former member of the Carpathian Guard. He's also one of the refugees that accompanied Geneviève and Christina during the exile and was Christina's bodyguard with him being spellbound to Christina during the time she was merged with the Tower of London after Kate Reed pushed her in.
  • Renegade Splinter Faction: Barring a few members, the EarthGuard team that was sent to the Bund is one allied to the militant General Gokemidoro, who's connected to the fanatical Black Ocean organization.
  • Sealed Good in a Can: Christina survives the hijacking of her apotheosis by uploading herself into the now-empty Lefty while her comatose quasi-physical body remains in her chamber.
  • Sequel Hook: Nezumi and Harold Takahama save the day, and Jeperson phones up Geneviève to wish her "Happy 2000". Meanwhile in the US, major enemies of Dracula: Angel Investigation (Geneviève, Kate and Penelope), Kostaki, Hamish Bond and the daughter of the Lord of Unusual Deaths plus newcomer Sonja Blaue are trying to puzzle out a mystery manor/deathtrap that involves a sinister person known as the Mad Doll.
    • Richard Jeperson learns that his tattoo "Geist 97" referred to a secret project in psionics and he has two sisters who are wreaking havok in Europe.
  • Spanner in the Works: Drusilla Zark foresaw Jun Zero's diabolical plan and she added something that Jun never factored for - getting Nezumi invited as a special guest..
  • Token Good Teammate: Dr. Akiba and his Australian teammate were the only good members of the General Gokemidoro EarthGuard team. That's why the others tried to assasinate them as part of the plan.
  • Too Powerful to Live: Richard Jeperson and a number of other parties feel this about Christina, once they realize her ascension means her joining with the internet and becoming a god there.
  • Unseen No More: Radu Dracul was once mentioned in the first Anno Dracula book. "The Handsome" finally appears.
  • Undying Loyalty: Christina Light had her "hooks" in Molinar ever since she accidentally whammied him in the Tower of London incident. Even after she's removed her power over him and is believed to be reduced to little more than a hologram in Daikaiju Plaza, he still goes back because his "Fairy Princess" needs him. Too bad Christina's actually somewhere else....
  • What Have I Done: Richard Jeperson gets this reaction when he allows Lefty to plug into Christina's console and finds out Lefty is Jun Zero. Yeah he's trying to prevent her ascencion, which would allow her to take over the internet and drain people through almost any electronic medium. But at least she's more or less good if a Well-Intentioned Extremist and there are lines she won't cross. Jun Zero intends to make the planet into a hellhole that was a combination of The Purge and other dystopian movies, simply For the Evulz.
  • Youkai: As a direct sequel to One Thousand Monsters, these beings appear again - some of whom were the ones that took part in the clash between Yokai Town and the Black Ocean.

Other works in the Anno Dracula series provide examples of:

    A-Z 
  • Allohistorical Allusion: All over the place.
    • The novel Dracula exists exactly as it does in our universe, but it's wishful-thinking Alternate History about how the Count could have been stopped before he took the throne.
    • A Dance to the Music of Time also exists exactly as it does in our universe; it's wishful-thinking Alternate History about there not being any vampires at all.
  • Alucard: John/Johnny Alucard.
  • The Bad Guy Wins: The series (at least as of the publication of the various short stories and new material that makes up the book Johnny Alucard), is effectively this.
  • Captain Ersatz: The series mostly prefers the Lawyer-Friendly Cameo, but occasionally resorts to characters who, as the saying goes, resemble but are legally distinct from the Lollipop Guild. These include vampire hunter Barbie Winters in "The Other Side of Midnight".
  • Church of Happyology: "Castle in the Desert" has L. Keith Winton, the vampiric author of Plasmatics: The New Communion, and founder of the Church of Immortology.
  • Creative Sterility:
    • In "Andy Warhol's Dracula", it's widely agreed that the artworks Warhol created after he became a vampire lack an essential spark present in his earlier work. There's a subversion — it turns out at the end that Warhol never actually crossed over, only adopted vampire mannerisms, and remained human his entire life.
    • Also played with in that several other famous people — such as Bob Dylan — are mentioned to have become vampires, and suffer the same lack of creative spark in their later works. However, several of these criticisms have also been raised about the real, non-vampire artists as their careers have progressed and their fields have moved on.
  • Different World, Different Movies: Newman gets a kick out of this trope. He is, after all, a film critic. For example, Francis Ford Coppola's take on the Dracula story in this universe stars Marlon Brando and Martin Sheen.
    • Not limited to films, either. In-universe I Am Legend is treated as an anti-vampire propaganda novel.
  • Dropped a Bridge on Him: Played with in Johnny Alucard. Dracula, who begot the title character, has been living on inside him as a spirit. At the end, he displaces Johnny altogether. Johnny's sudden "death" occurs between paragraphs and is unnoticed by just about everyone.
  • Fantastic Drug: In Johnny Alucard, there's "drac", which is made from powdered vampire blood and temporarily grants superhuman abilities.
  • Fantastic Noir: "Castle in the Desert" has an unnamed private eye, implied to be Philip Marlowe, investigating a missing persons case connected to a vampire cult.
  • Fantastic Slurs: In "Castle in the Desert", a California diner has a sign saying "No Vipers".
  • Genetic Memory: In Johnny Alucard, Kate Reed is wondering how Dracula is able to return. She meets Dr. Pretorious at the former haunt of Dr. Jekyll. Pretorious tells her that Dracula's blood is seeded with his identity and all his descendants have that connection. Even a vampire like Kate, who's several generations away from Dracula, finds that a sample of his blood reacts to her.
  • Karma Houdini: Lord Ruthven and Caleb Croft, who helped Dracula set up his police state and then ran one of their own for the next 30 years. At last report, Ruthven was Home Secretary in Margaret Thatcher's cabinet (and planning the next in his seemingly endless series of ascents to the big chair), while Croft had retired to become an esteemed sociology professor.
  • I Hate You, Vampire Dad: Turns out Caleb Croft is one of those rare vampires that are capable of siring natural-born children. The American vampire biker who utterly hates him. He signs upt for Croft's classes so that he can eventually have an opportunity to kill him.
  • Lawyer-Friendly Cameo: The series includes a lot of characters who go unnamed but have familiar descriptions.
    • The unnamed gumshoe in "Castles In The Desert", who just happens to have Philip Marlowe's backstory, up to and including Poodle Springs.
    • Detective John Munch makes one of these appearances in the latter half of Johnny Alucard, along with fellow Homicide: Life on the Street character Detective Meldrick Lewis.
    • In "A Concert for Transylvania", the two biggest vampire rock stars are only referred to by their stage names: the Short Lion and Timmy V. "Short Lion" is a literal translation of Lioncourt, as in Lestat de Lioncourt, and Timmy is Timmy Valentine from Vampire Junction by S.P. Somlow.
  • Napoleon Delusion: In Johnny Alucard, there's a discussion of vampires who believe themselves to be Dracula that makes a comparison to humans who believe themselves to be Napoleon.
  • Our Vampires Are Different: Besides the weird vampires that appear, dhampirs are also different from the mainstream depiction. There are vampires that are capable of mating with humans, but the result is just a child that becomes a true vampire. Dracula spawn Johnny Pop is the first to call someone a dhampir. Dhampirs are individuals who are given vampire blood, which temporarily transforms them into vampires and the user permanently retains some residual abilities.
  • Outlaw Couple: Kit and Holly (from the film Badlands), who also go by the names Bonnie and Clyde, Mickey and Mallory, Bart and Laurie and many others.
  • Remember the New Guy?: Anno Dracula 1999: Daikaiju introduces Radu, Dracula's brother as a major antagonist, who everyone knows from some minor crimes he's committed. He hadn't appeared in any books previously, although he was a person in real-life.
  • Screw This, I'm Out of Here!: Penelope was Andy Warhol's "Girl of the Year" receptionist. In their New York scene, Penelope witnesses the explosive growth of Drac addicts. Already suspicious of Johnny Pop, the pedlar of the drug, she leaves New York when she sees desperate Drac addicts tempted to attack her for her blood.
  • Super-Soldier: You Are The Wind Beneath My Wings has the US government trying to make vampire super soldiers. The project ends without a single viable subject. The Bat Soldier project captained by Captain Gardner eventually becomes a success, with the Bat Soldiers playig crucial roles in driving Saddam Hussein from Kuwait and the ouster of the Ceaușescu in Romania.
  • The Spymaster: Mycroft Holmes, Charles Beauregard, Armand Tesla, Dr. Mabuse, Edwin Winthrop, Gregor Brastov, and Caleb Croft (who was "C" at Universal Export and "Control" at the Circus).
  • Stockholm Syndrome: Mentioned during the hostage situation in "Who Dares Wins"; however, since the hostage-takers are vampires, they have more direct and faster acting methods to get the hostages on their side.
  • Troubled Production: "Coppola's Dracula" is an In-Universe example, being the alternate-history version of the making of Apocalypse Now.
  • Van Helsing Hate Crimes: All over the place.

Alternative Title(s): Johnny Alucard

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