But the author kept the basic setup alive - sans Dracula - in a series of novellas published in various venues during the late 1990s and early 2000s, which he eventually gathered, along with newly written interstitial material, into an episodic fourth book, set principally in the United States during the 1970s and ’80s, called Johnny Alucard (2013).

Despite this confusion of names, the series seemed to have gelled into a cohesive trilogy, the first volume culminating with Dracula’s violent expulsion from the British throne, the second seeing him lead the German war machine during World War I, and the third chronicling his decadence and death in Italian exile in the 1950s. Three years later, a sequel, The Bloody Red Baron (1995), came out from the same two publishers, with the US edition this time preceding the British, but things started to get tricky with the third installment: Carroll & Graf, when it released the novel in 1998, changed Newman’s preferred title from Dracula Cha Cha Cha to Judgment of Tears: Anno Dracula 1959, with Newman restoring his original moniker for the British edition, published in 2000. Critics were delighted with Newman’s richly imagined alternative history, in which humans coexist uneasily with a vampire elite, whose immortality they envy and whose powers they fear. Later that same year, an expanded version was published, as Anno-Dracula, by Simon & Schuster in the United Kingdom and, the following year, by Carroll & Graf in the United States (the errant hyphen was discarded in subsequent editions), and the novel went on to be nominated for the World Fantasy Award and to win the International Horror Guild Award. The author’s basic concept - that the events narrated in Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel actually occurred, save that Dracula, rather than being bested by Van Helsing and crew, triumphed over his adversaries, married Queen Victoria, and became ruler of England and the Empire - was developed by Newman, in collaboration with his friend Neil Gaiman, during the mid-1980s, its first crystallization in print being the novella “Red Reign” in Stephen Jones’s 1992 anthology The Mammoth Book of Vampires.

BRITISH AUTHOR KIM NEWMAN’S “Anno Dracula” series - the smartest recasting of the vampire mythos, and one of the tastiest pop-cultural confections, of the past three decades - has had a complicated evolution.

Anno dracula 1999 daikaiju