Customer Reviews

Bad Dreams

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Although this is a 'vampire' story by the same guy who gave us _Anno Dracula_, the tone is very different. _AD_ was action/intrigue, with some horrific elements, but _Bad Dreams_ is out-and-out horror. The story centers on the Neilson family, all of whom are victims of 'Mr. Skinner' at one time or another; this vampire enjoys ruining lives as much as he enjoys taking them. In the search for the killer of her sister Judi, Anne Neilson enters a subculture of sex and drugs that would be nasty enough _without_ a supernatural evil hiding in it. Somewhere along the way, she gets drawn into the vampire's dreamworld; unlike a lot of stories that have used similar devices, this one manages to make the dreamworld convincing. It's not for the squeamish, but it's a good horror novel.

Kim Newman trivia: this book may be unique among Newman's novels in that - as far as I can tell - it's the _only_ one in which the characters are all his own creations.

A big fan of Kim Newman's "Anno Dracula" series, I thought this book would be worth a read. It's much more of a straight horror novel than AD is, without the whimsical use of characters and real-life figures from throughout history. I didn't expect to see that, but I didn't expect the book to be quite as dark as it is either.

Newman doesn't completely abandon his tendency to use real people and events in this book -- he delves heavily into the spectre of the McCarthy anti-communism hearings and Marlon Brando and Martin Landau both make appearances of a sort, but for the most part this story is very much of his own creation. An American journalist in London finds her sister murdered and dessicated and seeks out the strange culture that led to her death.

The book is much darker, gorier and more explicit than I've come to expect from Newman, and while I don't fault him for trying something different (no writer wants to be pigeonholed, after all), it's not really my kind of book either. So it's well written, well done, just not really for me.