Best known as an acerbic film reviewer and specialist of the arcana of exploitation cinema, Newman is also a terribly entertaining novelist. His tongue in cheek, witty contemporary Dracula chronicles (so far ANNO DRACULA, THE BLOODY RED BARON and DRACULA CHA CHA CHA) have been a delight so the arrival after over a decade of a new volume is reason to rejoice. Skewing the pretensions of much of popular culture and its icons, this is another delightful romp through cinematic and horror lore in an alternative world where Dracula reigns and Francis Ford Coppola's APOCALYPSE NOW is revamped into a vampire epic during the heyday of disco and Andy Warhol. A comic souffle of a ripping yarn.
Transylvania 1976 and the vampire Kate Reed is on the set of Francis Ford Coppola's troubled production of Dracula. Fallen from grace and driven from the British Empire, the Count himself seems long gone. A relic of the past. But when Kate helps a young vampire outcast begin a new life in America, a fresh monster is born. He reinvents himself as Johnny Pop and makes his name selling a dangerously addictive drug that confers vampire powers on its users. As Johnny stalks the streets of Manhattan and Hollywood, sinking his fangs ever deeper into the zeitgeist of 1980s America, it seems the past might not be dead after all -
