i knew about a bunch of the blood drinking stuff but this bit with kate reed is new to me. it's funny how for as edgy a series as this clearly wants to be, it's too chicken to make any of its vampire protagonists morally gray in regards to blood drinking. like damn, man, if i wanted vampires with nothing i'd go read twilight, and then i wouldn't have to feel my blood pressure rise another two points every time kostaki's name appears on the page attached to a character who is as much his opposite as it is possible to get. but the actual lore around the blood drinking is batshit. apparently copstaki (i refuse to call newman's character anything else) finds out that he actually becomes stronger when he abstains from blood. at the time i learned about this i was like "what is this, some nofap shit?" given the detail about kate reed, apparently yes???

my biggest gripe with all this stupid shit around the blood drinking, though, is the way it evolves throughout the story, because it is initially framed as a physical need—you know, the way it is in 19th century vampire fiction—before copstaki discovers the magic of nofap. hold on where's the quote

As a vampire elder, he discovered he grew stronger through starvation. Dracula's get knew something they never talked of. They drank human blood not because they needed to, but because they wanted to. Needing was no shame. Wanting was weakness.

I HATE THIS FRAMING. SO MUCH. oh my god oh my FUCKING god if you are going to tell a vampire story in which blood drinking is framed as a temptation/addiction rather than a physical need, YOU NEED TO WRITE IT THAT WAY FROM THE START. otherwise, what you have written is a story in which having an eating disorder is framed as the morally correct choice.

also, much smaller gripe, but "needing was no shame" is a stupid cop-out. incredible amounts of privilege and entitlement shining through. plenty of needs are shameful. needing to hurt other human beings in order to survive is shameful. that is, dare i say, The Whole Point. but rather than tackle the moral complexity of that and take all the FREE CHARACTER ANGST that results from having to do something awful in order to survive, he just has his protagonist conveniently discover that the defining feature of vampirism is, in fact, optional, which allows him to sort every character into Morally Pure Abstinent Paragons and Icky Degenerate Blood Perverts and avoid all those nasty moral and ethical quandaries, because god forbid this work of horror vampire fiction have moral grayness in it.

SPEAKING OF "DEGENERACY" kim newman hates eastern europeans so fucking much it's actually insane. Oh your Carpathian characters are all more savage and bestial and prone to "degeneration" while your English and French characters have "purer" bloodlines and stronger minds and greater self-control? Why don't you start comparing their fucking skull shapes while you're at it. Jesus Christ. And of course in this story the Icky Degenerate Easterners stage a violent takeover of England and the Heroic English Resistance must bravely fight back against their savage oppressors. Not only is this story more racist than the original Dracula, it's in direct competition with The Beetle.

oh and don't forget about the misogyny!! welcome to my Dracula fanfic with cameos from other literary vampires where we simply MUST conform 100% to the strict letter of Carmilla canon, no bringing her back from the dead, it is simply impossible, the book said she died so she's dead. Oh Kostaki? Yeah he's 400 years old and a cop. So instead of Carmilla who do we get? Her mother, a formidable, mysterious, and manipulative vampire who was left alive at the end of the book? Lmao no, Random Male Relative. What about Clarimonde? Well, she's not in this series. Kim will reference her name one (1) time in the title of a play, though, just so you know he COULD have put her in and specifically chose not to. Female suffering, framed through a titillating lens, is milked for shock value (it's not just all the violently murdered sex workers, it's shit like dracula parading queen victoria around on a leash like a dog, supposedly treating her like the rest of his vampire "harem" even though that is extremely not how the weird sisters are treated in Dracula proper). But everyone bends over backwards to give him brownie points for including Kate Reed, even though nothing I've heard about her character so far gives me any reason to believe he's taken her in a direction worth reading.

To bring this back around Kim's (lack of) use of literary vampires, he clearly doesn't want to, or at least he doesn't care about them one way or another. Varney doesn't appear; he gets a couple of dismissive offhand mentions and that's it. Kostaki, despite what you've heard, does not appear either. I don't know who the fuck that bootlicking loser is in Newman's book, but it sure isn't Kostaki. Gorcha, Azzo, and Vardalek are all unrecognizable, because Kim assumes no one in his audience will have actually read their stories to call him on his mischaracterization—or else, again, he doesn't care. I will draw and quarter him for what he did to Vardalek. I don't even really want to defend Vardalek but what Kim did with him is beyond the pale. The entire concept of the "Carpathian Guard" is laughable and spits in the face of every character he ropes into it, but especially Vardalek, who is not remotely Carpathian by any stretch of the imagination. Why is he in there, then? Homophobia. Vardalek is the series' only gay character; he's also a child predator (a description which, frankly, does not even begin to describe his portrayal in the series, but I'd really rather not get into that topic). Kim also doesn't care about the lore of ANY of these books, INCLUDING DRACULA ITSELF. We've talked about the blood thing, but you know what else? You know what kills vampires in this worthless hack of a series? SUNLIGHT AND SILVER. Basically the ONLY two things in modern vampire lore that have ZERO basis in ANY literary work. Because fuck you, that's why. The series is also full of references to a bunch of other, more recent pop culture vampires, as well as a bunch of non-vampire literature cameos; it seems like all this shit is only there to score points with readers who get excited every time a story references another story.