Tyler Dean

Fantastic Victoriana at its Finest

Revisado: 02-04-16

Kim Newman's meticulously researched Anno Dracula is a marvel of plotting and a love letter to the fantastical curios of Victorian fiction. While Dracula is the most extensively referenced text, characters created by Conan Doyle, Wells, Haggard, Kipling, Hodgson, Rohmer, Dickens, Wilde, and Shaw are seamlessly blended with historical figures to create a world that, more than any other attempt (e.g. Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentleman) feels like a distillation of the Victorian era, obsessed with its obsessions and more literal than the historical reality. All of that is without mentioning the wealth of vampire fiction that is drawn in. Nearly every historically appropriate vampire from literature, film, television, comic books, and folktales, no matter how trashy or obscure, finds purchase in this narrative--each a wonderfully accurate representation while still feeling like an authentic part of this narrative.

Unlike the almost overwhelming barrage of referential and nostalgia-based entertainment of the present day, the pleasures of arcana are only a small part of the narrative delight. Much like its source material, Anno Dracula is not a novel about ghoulish delight in blood and death but rather a novel about the horrors of everyday compromise. Vampirism, under Newman's disciplined hand, does not supplant the issues of class and race that so stratified Victorian society, rather it enhances them: forcing its characters to confront uncomfortable truths about their values, the source of their comfort, and their ability to find forward momentum in an age of torpor.

The novel is also beautifully melancholy. It eschews the climactic violence of most horror novels for the kind of quiet grief and creeping existential dread that follows in its wake. Newman writes a world where tragedy does not destroy so much as paralyze--a world that would have been intriguingly, perversely familiar to Ruskin, Gibbon, Arnold and other social critics of the age.

In short, in an era where most of our fantastical Victorian sensibilities are linked to the meritocratic anachronism of Steampunk--more interested in the aesthetic trappings of the century than the moral or philosophical concerns--Anno Dracula is a refreshingly authentic bit of Victoriana written as a companion to the great novels of its setting, rather than the cheap thrills of its own age.

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California Cosmic Horror at its Best!

Revisado: 01-08-16

Would you listen to Interference again? Why?

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Who was your favorite character and why?

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What about Eric Luke’s performance did you like?

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If you could rename Interference, what would you call it?

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Any additional comments?

Eric Luke's Interference is the kind of gem that is all the more bright for its unprepossessing scope. A self-published audio-book singularly obsessed with self-published audiobooks, the fleet, meticulously paced narrative is as much a love letter to the aforementioned form as it is to California and Lovecraftian horror.

Unlike most of the entries in that overstuffed category, Interference throws off the usual crutches of the Cthulhu mythos (save in playful reference), and spends the majority of its pages focused, not on the arcane and interchangeable lore of horrors-from-beyond-the stars, but on our world, lovingly drawing on everything from Marvel comics, to Bollywood, to Norteño music and the most obscure of John Carpenter films (not to mention a significant portion of the novel devoted to Orson Welles broadcast of "War of the Worlds"). Each of these and more is explored with an attention to detail that makes the world of the novel feel grounded, familiar and chock full of little pleasures; all the more distressing then when it is infected by a cruel entity equal parts Nyarlathotep and Mephistopheles.

If there is one subject that unifies Interference, however, it is a sharp and reverent depiction of California. Its intricate sketches of San Francisco, San Diego and (especially) Los Angeles are both affectionate and keenly observant, but it has a special obsession with the Central Valley, here rendered as a post-agricultural wasteland that never truly escaped the Great Depression. It serves as a worthy backdrop to American Gothic in much the way that the rural South served Flannery O'Connor or small town Maine served Stephen King.

The comparison to King is apt, insofar as Luke's prose is simple without being terse or amateurish and finds footholds for its reader in a clear, cinematic style. Where Luke really shines, however, is as an actor. He has a clear talent for voice work, but the most interesting aspects of the performance come in the subtle nuances of his 3rd person prose, where it is never entirely clear if one is hearing an omniscient narrator or the malevolent intelligence that haunts the recordings within the world of the novel.

All in all, Interference is a first novel that shows great promise in the way it economizes its giant scope, and finely-tunes its balance of cosmic horror and California noir.

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