The only thing that stopped me joining the carnage was Christina's hand on my shoulder. I know she is as bloodthirsty as the rest of us... but she has control. An iron will I hadn't appreciated.
'We can't,' she said to me. 'This is beneath us.'
I agreed with her, but finer feelings were asleep, like the upper head of Ryomen. The conscienceless, appetite-driven monster in my chest took charge. Open a vein in the next room and I cease to be Dr Dieudonné. I am Grendel, I am Cronus. I am a berserker.
I am – hateful to think it – Dracula.

A ship-full of vampires who have been exiled from England finally finds a port that will accept them. Although the Japanese emperor says that vampires do not exist, vampires and other monsters are allowed to live in a ghetto called Yokai Town.

The refugees led by vampire elder Geneviève Dieudonné, Kostaki a former officer in Dracula's Carpathian Guard, and newly turned Christina Light, Princess Casamassima, take up residence in a
temple although a lot of the vampires are still asleep so their coffins are stored in a warehouse. The story of their first few weeks in Japan is narrated by Geneviève and Kostaki as they try to work out how Yokai Town works and how they can fit in and prosper.

Unfortunately, I found this the dullest story I have read in this series so far. I felt that the author was desperate to cram as many creatures from Asian folklore into the stories as possible - from Ninja Turtles to a monster who looks like an inside-out umbrella - at the expense of the plot.

Geneviève has good intentions and understands both spoken and written Japanese, but she blunders her way though, misunderstanding the society and underestimating the other leaders of their group. I think the story could have been improved by having some of it narrated by Christina. ( )

The usual mash-up from Kim Newman, this instalment in the Anno Dracula series is set in Yokohama in the last few weeks of the 19th century. I do like this series, but it can be rather hard going - it could really benefit from a concordance; I recognised many characters, but missed as many.

Exiled from England, the vampire Genevieve is escorting a boat-load of other exiled vampires to Japan, where they are confined in a sort of no-man's land in the treaty port of Yokohama ("The Emperor has decreed there are no vampires in Japan. Therefore, this is not Japan."). Here they are interacting with a nationalist secret society who wish to wake a giant monster... Enough said.

I’ve enjoyed Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula series since the first came out a decade or two ago. The premise is simple: Bram Stoker’s Dracula, written in the 1890s, was real and the real Dracula arrived in England, after which he married Queen Victoria and began an era known as Dracula Ascendent. Later books carry the story through to (almost) the present day, with fairly good success throughout. The latest in the series, "One Thousand Monsters," is set in 1899 and has one of the oldest of the vampires, Genevieve Dieudonne (who looks 16 but was actually born in the 1400s), sent by Dracula to a kind of prison island in Japan, where Japanese monsters and many Western vampires are being detained. It soon becomes clear that there are political intrigues, interspecies warfare and all sorts of nefarious things going on, and Genevieve is, of course, right in the thick of it…. As I said, I’ve enjoyed this series, but this particular novel fell flat for me. I have studied some Japanese history and have seen lots of Japanese fantastical films (courtesy Montreal’s own FantAsia Festival, the best genre fest anywhere), so I’m familiar with some of the monsters Mr. Newman embodies in this book. But in general, it felt to me that he was more or less showing off his knowledge of such arcane creatures, throwing in everything he could think of and ending up with more of a “look how much I know” snark rather than an evolving story. Don’t get me wrong: Mr. Newman is a very talented writer and I’ve liked lots of his stuff beyond the Anno Dracula series, but this one just didn’t do it for me. A pity. ( )