Vampire princess Christina Light hosts a New Year's Eve party in Tokyo, where guests are held hostage by yakuza assassins and Transylvanian mercenaries, leading to a showdown with deadly creatures. The novel blends horror, fantasy, and alternate history, featuring a mix of pop culture references and a fast-paced, action-packed narrative set in a world where vampires coexist with humans.

Reader Review Summary

Here is my review of "Anno Dracula 1999: Daikaiju" by Kim Newman:

Newman delivers another wild and imaginative entry in his acclaimed Anno Dracula alternate history/horror series with this novel set on New Year's Eve 1999 in Tokyo. As with past books, Newman masterfully blends vampire lore and mythology with an intricate melding of real historical figures, fictional characters, and pop culture references spanning books, films, TV shows, and more. The result is a deliriously entertaining and unique reading experience.

The story centers around a lavish party being thrown in a gigantic skyscraper shaped like Godzilla by Christina Light, the powerful vampire princess who controls Tokyo's "Bund" vampire district. However, the celebrations are disrupted by warring factions including terrorist groups, yakuza assassins, and Transylvanian mercenaries all vying for control as the new millennium dawns. Amidst the chaos, vampire agent Nezumi and British spy Richard Jeperson (of Newman's Diogenes Club series) find themselves battling deadly creatures and unraveling sinister conspiracies.

While the overall narrative setup echoes Die Hard in a Godzilla tower, as many reviewers have noted, Newman takes the premise into wildly imaginative territory blending horror, cyberpunk, satire, and more. The pace is unrelentingly propulsive, the action aplenty, with each chapter introducing zany new characters and wtf moments. Newman's prose fizzes with humor and ingenious mash-ups like having "John Blutarsky" as a drunken U.S. senator.

For regular readers of the Anno Dracula books, there are numerous rewarding connections to past stories and payoffs for ongoing plot threads. But Daikaiju also works as a delirious standalone adventure for the uninitiated. Those less familiar with Japanese pop culture may miss some references, but there are enough shoutouts to everything from Videodrome to Animal House to keep readers constantly delighted and guessing.

In the end, Anno Dracula 1999: Daikaiju represents Kim Newman at his most exuberantly creative - blending genres, upending narrative conventions, and remixing an incredible tapestry of influences into a wholly unique horror/satire/cyber-fantasy. For fans of wildly original genre mashups, it's an endlessly entertaining must-read. Even those less enamored may have to admire the sheer audacious ambition on display from a writer operating at the height of his powers.