31st July - Kim Newman

July Blog - Kim Newman

Welcome to my blog, Lambeth Fantastical, where I will be writing regularly about Lambeth's connections to all things fantastical in the fields of SciFi, Horror and Fantast - book, authors, movies, TV series. Many of which will be connected, in one way of another to my Lambeth Fantastical Guided Walks.

I'm kicking this off with the fantastic Kim Newman, born in Brixton on 31st July 1959, where he lived with his family until he was seven, attending a progressive kindergarten and primary school. Both of his parents were professional potters, which is very fitting, given Lambeth's historical links with the pottery industry. The family moved to Somerset in 1966, where he attended grammar school and graduated from the University of Sussex with an English degree.

He has written that when he was eleven years old his parents let him stay up late to watch Tod Browning’s 1931 Universal Pictures movie, Dracula, staring Bela Lugosi. It was an event that he says changed the course of his life, instilling in him a lifelong love of the horror genre and also inspiring his most iconic and influential work of fiction, Anno Dracula, an alternative history set in the Victorian era.

For me it was probably Gerry Anderson’s Fireball XL5 that first drew me toward fantastical fiction in all its various mediums. But, like Newman, I stayed up late one night when I was around eleven or twelve to watch Village of the Damned, Wolf Rilla’s 1960 film adaptation of John Wyndham’s Midwich Cuckoos. I remember being terrified and intrigued and, at the same time, hungry for more movies and books of the same ilk.

Newman is a prolific author, cinema critic, and journalist.

His non-fiction works include Nightmare Movies (1988), Wild West Movies (1990), Millennium Movies (1999) and the BFI Companion to Horror (1996)

He has been a contributing editor to the film magazine Empire as well a regular columnist. He we also the chief writer for Mark Kermode’s Secrets of Cinema series on Channel Four.

His published fiction novels include Jago, The Quorum and An English Ghost Story. He’s also the author of a Doctor Who novella, Time and Relative, which is kind of a prequel to the first TV episode aired in 1963, and features the Doctor in his William Hartnel persona along with his granddaughter, Susan, played by Carol Ann Ford in the original TV series

But he is perhaps best known for Anno Dracula and its numerous sequels and spin offs. Said by many to be his love letter to Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the classic vampire movies he has a such a passion for, it was first published in 1992 and is now marking over 30 years in print. The plot is based on the premise that Dracula was not defeated at the end of Bram Stoker’s famous novel. Instead he has become consort to Queen Victoria and Buckingham Palace is now under the firm control of his vicious Carpathian Guard.

The novel weaves in a whole host of real and fictional characters from the Victorian era into its fast moving and exciting narrative. The cast includes cameos from Billy the Kid, Annie Besant, Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll and Beatrix Potter as well as Jekyll and Hyde, Sherlock Holmes, Fu Manchu and Jack the Ripper. The book was a huge success and it is considered to one of the novels that kick-started the now mainstream genre of steampunk.

Anno Dracula gave birth to a number of sequels the form of novels and short story collections, as well as a graphic novel, moving the world created in the first book through the 20^th Century and into the 21^st and taking the location settings from London to places such as Rome, Hollywood and Japan. The first sequel came in 1995. In The Bloody Red Baron Dracula has been expelled from Britain and is now in league with the German Kaiser, with Baron Manfred von Richthofen (The Red Baron) leading an armada of airships and grotesque flying vampires which are heading toward the English Channel to invade Britain. Again, as do all the works in the series, there is a mix of fictional and historical characters.

There has not yet been a film or TV series of Anno Dracula. But I’d say one is long overdue and just begging to be made.

 

Coming soon no less than four Lambeth born people with August birth dates who all have connections to the fantastical.  

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