His first novel, The Night Mayor, tells the story of a computer-generated dream-world, a film noir virtual reality where two detectives try to track down a Master Criminal while dodging famous characters from movies. His other novels include Bad Dreams, Life's Lottery, Jago, The Quorum and the cult classic Anno Dracula.

A film critic and an English journalist, Kim Newman is well respected in the genres in England and the United States. To learn more about Newman, go to his Web site at www.johnnyalucard.com.Ghastly Beyond Belief, the book you've co-written with Neil Gaiman (which was Gaiman's first book?), is a collection of quotations. Has the book ever been reprinted? Do you think there will be another printing in the future, or is it bound to be a cult classic?

Newman: Actually, Neil wrote one other book before GBB—but you'll have to ask him what it was. The book hasn't been reprinted, and no one has ever seriously asked—it'd probably have to be a facsimile edition, since the original is shot full of the sort of errors and glitches common to reference books of the pre-DVD, pre-Internet era. Though it was well liked, the book didn't exactly sell well in 1985 (most of its tiny print run seems to have been shipped off to Australia like a boatload of convicts). Neil reports that several American publishers who were offered the book then responded along the lines of "I read the book while pissing myself laughing and then handed it around the office to all our other colleagues, who split their sides with hilarity until the paperback fell apart ... but there's no American market for it, so we're not making an offer."Neil Gaiman also wrote the introduction to your short story collection The Original Dr. Shade & Other Stories. Did you know that he was going to become as big as he did?

Newman: I know Neil's been disappointed to have worked so long and hard without any commercial or critical success, but he's a talented writer and I'm sure he'll gain a small devoted audience in the months following his death from starvation and neglect.Why is horror and dark fantasy a good genre for you to write in?

Newman: As a critic, I spend a lot of time pigeonholing films into genres—for instance, the Danish Dogme manifesto rules out making genre movies, but I once went through the official list of Dogme films and pointed out which genre they belong to (Lars von Trier's The Idiots is a biker movie). As a fiction writer, I prefer to straddle genres—Anno Dracula, for instance, is a science fiction horror romantic historical crime mystery satire. I wrote a few more-or-less straight horror novels and stories (Bad Dreams, Jago) but have been doing more mix-and-match general weirdness since then.You've written Doctor Who and the Doctor Who novella Time & Relative. Why do you think this series has been so popular for over four decades?

Newman: Eccentricity, and the amazingly versatile premise—it's a show that can literally go anywhere and encompass anything. Its occasional dips all come about when it becomes too tied up with its own history and continuity. How are American and British horror fiction different? How about American and British horror movies?

Newman: Both countries have rich and varied horror scenes in both media, so it's hard to draw generalizations—you could argue that British horror is more sophisticated and literary and American horror is all guts and splat, but Peter Straub is American and James Herbert is British.Who are some of the rising stars in the U.K. fiction scene these days?

Newman: I'm about seven years behind with my reading of Steve Jones' Best New Horror anthologies, so I've no idea who, if anyone, has crawled out from under the rock since then.

Was your short story collection Famous Monsters a tribute to Forry J. Ackerman and the Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine?

Newman: The reference is obviously there and explicit in the story. Though I wasn't a great FM reader as a kid—by the time I was interested in films, I thought the magazine was too childish and tacky and preferred the books which were starting to appear from critics like Carlos Clarens, David Pirie, John Baxter, Philip Strick and Ivan Butler, which offered more than synopses and illustrations.Your books have been translated into numerous languages—you are read all over the world. Do you need to keep that international audience in mind as you write?

Newman: I barely keep a national audience in mind. I try to write in the interests of the story rather than any notional reader.You are a big fan of H.G. Wells. If Wells was alive today, would he be a science-fiction novelist or a science-fiction screenwriter?

Newman: Neither—he'd have hated being categorized as a genre writer, and would have wanted the sort of critical or publicity treatment J.G. Ballard, Martin Amis or Salman Rushdie get rather than being shoved out in paperback with a spaceship on the cover. He was among the first writers seriously to be interested in screenwriting, directed what we might now call underground films (self-financed and experimental) and got the deluxe treatment (with mixed results) on Things to Come. If he were around today, I think he'd want to front those Simon Schama-type 12-part documentary historical-scientific-political TV epics (though his squeaky Cockney voice would still be a handicap). In the 1890s, after The Time Machine was published, he collaborated with a British film pioneer on patents for what we'd now recognize as a theme park ride—patrons would sit in a replica time machine and films would run on the wall and ceiling to simulate traveling through time. He was obsessed with tabletop war games, too—so he might be more interested in designing computer games or interactive media than conventional novel writing (a field he abandoned surprisingly early in his career—the later books are mostly tracts rather than proper fiction). In you short story collection Seven Stars, in the story "Angel Down, Sussex," you have Aleister Crowley and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle mixed up with a UFO sighting and psychic shapeshifters. Why did you pair up Crowley and Doyle for that story, and how much do these characters have in common?

Newman: They were roughly contemporaries, and both interested in what we now call Fortean phenomena—plus they were both big, interesting, blustering characters and great fun to write about. Off the top of my head, I've no idea if they ever met, but they must have known about each other. Crowley actually wrote some detective short stories, so he presumably read his Holmes—it would have been unusual if he hadn't.In your book Apocalypse Movies (also known as Millennium Movies), you wrote about alien invasions, comet impacts, monstrous reptiles, nuclear war, big bug movies, etc. Since the publication, these movies have really have been flourishing. Why do you think these end-of-the-world films are so popular? And any plans to do an updated edition?

Newman: It's surprisingly reassuring to contemplate all the dooms that haven't happened. I'm thinking about doing new editions of some of my nonfiction, but that's not quite out of date enough to be ready for an overhaul.What's next for Kim Newman?

Newman: I'm working on "Cry-Babies," a Radio 4 play due to go out early in 2009, and am about to start a novella (which will probably become a chunk of a book) called The Hound of the d'Urbervilles. I'm committed to doing a third collection in the series which began with The Man From the Diogenes Club and Secret Files of the Diogenes Club.What was your inspiration for Anno Dracula? You have written two other sequels: The Bloody Red Baron and Dracula Cha Cha Cha (published in England as Judgment of Tears). Is there another sequels in the works?

Newman: Here's how Anno Dracula evolved. At Sussex University in 1978, I took a course entitled Late Victorian Revolt, tought by the poet Laurence Lerner and Norman Mackenzie (Wells' biographer), for which I wrote a thesis ("The Secular Apocalypse: The End of the World in Turn of the Century Fictions"), which later cropped up as the work of the main character of my third novel, Jago. For the thesis, I read up on invasion narratives (George Chesney's The Battle of Dorking, Wells' The War in the Air, Saki's "When William Came"), which imagine England overwhelmed by its enemies (usually the Germans). I was already interested in alternate-history science fiction, and recognised in these mostly forgotten stories the precursors of the many 20th-century stories which imagine an alternative outcome to the second world war featuring a Nazi occupation of Britain (Len Deighton's SS/GB, Kevin Brownlow's film It Happened Here). In a footnote to my section on invasions, I described Dracula's campaign of conquest in Stoker's 1897 novel as "a one-man invasion."

I'm not sure when all the connections were made, but at some point in the early '80s it occurred to me that there might be story potential in an alternative outcome in which Dracula defeats his enemies and fulfills his stated intention to conquer Britain. It still seems to me something of a disappointment that Stoker's villain, after all his meticulous planning and with five hundred years of scheming monstrousness under his cloak, has no sooner arrived in Britain than he trips up and sows the seeds of his eventual undoing by an unlikely pursuit of the wife of a provincial solicitor. Van Helsing describes Dracula's project in Britain as to become "the father or furthurer of a new order of beings, whose road must lead through Death, not Life." Yet Stoker allegorizes Dracula's assault on Britain entirely as an attack on the Victorian family, an emblem of all the things he prized and saw as fragile. It just struck me as an interesting avenue to explore the kind of England, the kind of world, that would result if Van Helsing and his family of fearless vampire killers were defeated and Dracula was allowed to father and further his new order.

The idea lay about in my head gathering dust, and the odd character, until Stephen Jones asked me to write something for an anthology project he was working on in 1991, The Mammoth Book of Vampires. Steve's request prompted me finally to set down the parameters for Anno Dracula, in that I felt a mammoth book of vampires should have some showing from the king of the undead. The result was Red Reign, which first appeared in Steve's book and is the bare skeleton of Anno Dracula. Meanwhile I'd already been drawn to vampires in my work under the name of Jack Yeovil for GW Books' tie-ins to their wholly-owned Warhammer fantasy universe. As Jack, I developed not only a system of vampirism that, crossbred with Bram Stoker's, survives in the Anno Dracula novels, but also the creature who became their most popular character. For the record, the Genevieve of Yeovil's Drachenfels and Genevieve Undead (now collected with other material as The Vampire Genevieve) is not the same character as the Geneviève of Anno Dracula, but she is her trans-continual cousin.

For me, book ideas are like coral reefs, built up as bits and pieces stick together over years. With Anno Dracula, I had the background and the two lead characters—Charles Beauregard, who was intended as a dashing Victorian hero along the lines of Rudolph Rassendyll in The Prisoner of Zenda or Gerald Harper in the old TV series Adam Adamant Lives!, and the vampire girl Geneviève—plus the notion (probably inspired by Philip José Farmer) of a large cast list which would include not only real Victorians (Oscar Wilde, Gilbert and Sullivan, Swinburne) but famous characters from the fiction of the period (Raffles, Fu Manchu, various Holmesian hangers-on, Dr. Moreau, Dr. Jekyll). In The Night Mayor, my first novel, I had explored the idea of a consensus genre world, whereby all the faces and figures from 1940s films noirs hung out in the same city, and it was an obvious step to make the London of Anno Dracula a similar site, where the criss-crossing stories of all the great late Victorian horror, crime and social melodramas were being played out at the same time. This adds to a certain spot-the-reference feel some readers have found annoying but which others really enjoy—I admit to getting a tiny thrill when I can borrow a character from E.M. Forster (Henry Wilcox, from Howard's End) or resurrect someone as forgotten as Guy Boothby's Moriarty-esque mastermind Dr. Nikola. This also allows me to make the novel as much a playground as a minefield, and to go beyond historical accuracy to evoke all those gaslit, fogbound London romances.

One of the things my plot needed was a plethora of vampires, since Dracula would have turned a great many Britishers into his get, starting with a couple of Stoker's characters (Arthur Holmwood, Mina Harker) and extending to a lot of real people from Queen Victoria to a horde of walk-on prostitutes and policemen. I decided that if Dracula were to replace Prince Albert as Victoria's consort, then all the other vampires of literature would come out of hiding and flock to his court in the hope of advancement. After Dracula, the best-known vampire in literature is Dr. Polidori's Byronesque Lord Ruthven, and so he came forward to take the job of Dracula's prime minister and stick around for the rest of the Lord Ruthven. I decided to let Le Fanu's Carmilla stay dead, but at least gave her a mention, and thought it obligatory to have some fun at the expense of the real-life Elizabeth Bathory (my version owes more to Delphine Seyrig in Le Rouge aux levres than history) and Anne Rice's Lestat (a fashion leader for clothes-conscious vampires). I enjoyed cramming in as many previous vampires as possible, to the extent of writing a speech which finds Ruthven nastily listing all his peers and being rude about them. In the follow-up novels, I have enjoyed working a bit more with Les Daniels' Don Sebastian de Villanueva and Barbara Steele's Princess Asa Vajda, but I am wary of doing too much with other people's characters when the original creators might not yet be finished with them.

The final element that dropped into place, enabling me to write a draft of Red Reign very quickly, was the actual plot. I needed a genuine spine for the story, which would enable me to explore the world I had created, and I wanted something that would take the readers on a tour of my London that would include the slums and the palaces. The story of Jack the Ripper would have been hard to keep out of Anno Dracula, but I got the idea that the unknown serial killer was a vampire (a theme Robert Bloch made his own in "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper" and which has been rehashed several times since) not only struck me as old hat but also not quite right for a story in which vampires were out in the open rather than cowering in the fog. So, with the world turned upside down, it became clear that Jack the Ripper should be a vampire killer, and Stoker had obligingly called one of Van Helsing's disciples Jack, made him a doctor and indicated that his experiences in the novel were pretty much pushing him over the edge. Therefore, Stoker's Dr. Seward became my Jack the Ripper, driven mad by the staking of Lucy Westenra, with whom he was in love, and stalking vampire whores in Whitechapel (to make his situation more complex, I made Mary Kelly, the Ripper's last victim, the get of the vampire Lucy and also her near-lookalike).

The Ripper story is nowadays almost as big a favourite with the conspiracy theorists as the Kennedy assassination, and so it became quite natural to depict the effects of a series of sex crimes on a volatile society. With a killer on the loose, my other characters had all sorts of reasons—self-serving or noble—to find out who he was, to hinder or help his crimes or to make propagandist use of him. I was trying, without being too solemn, to mix things I felt about the 1980s, when the British government made "Victorian Values" a slogan, with the real and imagined 1880s, when blood was flowing in the fog and there was widespread social unrest. The Ripper murders also gave the novel a structure: the real dates of the killings—I couldn't resist adding the Ripper's most famous fictional victim, Wedekind's Lulu, to his historical list—became pegs for the plot, and other actual events like a Bernard Shaw speech, the bogus letters from the Ripper to the press or an inquest also fit surprisingly well into the fantasy. In reworking history, I took as a starting point Stoker's imagined world rather than our own, even to the extent of finally presenting to the public Kate Reed, a character conceived by Stoker for Dracula but omitted from the novel (and who has become more important in the sequels). I realized early on that there was enough in the world to merit return visits. I didn't especially want to do a direct sequel, since the last chapter of Anno Dracula more or less indicates what is about to happen in the country and how our main characters will be involved in it. However, vampires live long lifetimes and it was clear that the events of Anno Dracula would resonate well into the 20th century, which gave me room for more stories.

I've written two further novels—The Bloody Red Baron, set during the first world war, and Dracula Cha Cha Cha, set in Rome in 1959. I've also done a series of novellas set from 1945 to 1989 (so far), which will eventually become a fourth book, Johnny Alucard, and maybe even a fifth. I once planned to do a side story about a vampire Billy the Kid, spinning off from a brief mention in Anno Dracula, but I'm less inclined to do that since the idea was usurped by the schlock filmmaker Uwe Boll for BloodRayne 2.You also wrote Andy Warhol's Dracula. Why do you think the count is still going strong after over a century?

Newman: Dracula is—all round—the best-ever monster character. Of the major monsters, he's unquestionably the most evil—none of that torn duality of Dr. Jekyll or the Wolf Man or the pathetic sufferings of the Frankenstein monster, he's just an arrogant bastard with great dress sense, sexual charisma, enormous wealth, a castle (how cool is that?) and big plans. It helps in movies that he's the only monster who traditionally can hold a conversation with you as well as rip your throat out. The vampire myth is also open to all manner of varying interpretations that provide fertile material to the author or filmmaker, and so there's no end to ways of viewing the character.What are some of your favorite vampire books and movies?

Newman: Books—Dracula, I Am Legend, Doctors Wear Scarlet, Throat Sprockets, The Empire of Fear, Carmilla, The Black Castle, The Golden. Movies—Nosferatu (1922, 1979), Dracula (1931, 1958), Let's Scare Jessica to Death, The Mask of Satan, Daughters of Darkness, Let the Right One In, The Addiction, Vampire Circus (and most other Hammer vampire films), The Night Stalker, Near Dark, Mr. Vampire.If you could be any monster, which monster would you be and why?

Newman: Dracula—see above. Not that keen on killing people, though.Last words?

Newman: Th-th-that's all, folks?