Literature / Necroscope

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Necroscope is a series of Cold War/Espionage/ESP/vampire novels by Brian Lumley.

It is the 1970s, and the Cold War is at its height. Twitchy superpowers are poised to annihilate the other paranoid and twitchy superpower, and take the world with them. You can't get much more screwed than that... oh wait, there are also vampires, necromancers and werewolves waiting in the wings to enslave or annihilate humanity (and willing to manipulate those governments to do it). Welcome to the world of Necroscope. From the height of the cold war, into the future the world will be caught a long and drawn out conflict fought by government-sponsored psychics, espers, and oddly powered individuals. The opposition, pretty much the same, but you can also throw in the aforementioned supernatural creatures, a generous selection of mobsters, corrupt politicians, and traitors.

Tropes:

• Action Survivor: The vast majority of E-Branch, since most Psychic Powers in this series don't have direct combat applications.
• Aerith and Bob: The Whampyri lords of Starside include Shaithis, Fess Ferenc, Lesk the Glut, Menor Maimbite, and Karen.
• Affably Evil:
  • Max Batu is a jolly, almost monk-like figure; he is polite, genuinely friendly, and the last person in the world to be suspected of murder. However, Max earns a living as a psychic assassin with the power of the Evil Eye, putting his victims through the most agonising pain of their lives before their deaths. On no account call the man a liar.
  • Faethor Ferenczy shows particular Affably Evil traits: despite spending most of his existence as an Evil Overlord and Psycho for Hire, slaughtering and raping countless thousands of people, out of all the vampires in the series, he appears to be the only one that could be remotely described as charismatic, in both life and death. Most notably, however, Faethor accepts his death and the sentence of eternal isolation from the rest of the dead where other vampires chose to bemoan their fate for the rest of existence.
• Always Chaotic Evil: Vampires = bad guys, always. Here, vampires arise because an alien parasite attacks and converts human bodies — and this parasite causes its host to get evil over time, even if particularly strong-willed people can resist it for a while, but not permanently. Lady Karen is largely an exception due to her underdeveloped leech, and so is Harry later in the series.
• Always Someone Better: Necromancers can plumb the dead's mind for their secrets, but they must be on-site to manually torture the information out of their target. Necroscopes can simply ask for the information at vast distances, and almost always successfully since they don't require torture to interact with the dead.
• Anatomically Impossible Sex: Between Vampirized Harry Keogh and Lady Karen. Justified because Wamphyri aren't subject to normal human limitations.
• And Then John Was a Zombie: Vampirisation happens to the good guys every now and again. Eventually, Harry Keogh is subject to this as well.
• Another Dimension: Sunside/Starside is a parallel version of Earth, and a profoundly alien and hostile version at that.
• Anyone Can Die: And how. In this series named characters may die, characters may die to be brought back from the dead only to die again, and even dead characters can experience Cessation of Existence.
• Apocalypse How: Not Earth for once, but the Vampire World through the wormhole was hit with a white hole, causing a Class 2. The impact knocked the moon into a closer orbit and tilted the planet's axis almost completely sideways, violently and dramatically remaking its terrain into the Sunside/Starside divide of the present day. Of the planet's original 250 million inhabitants, only a few thousand survived. Afterward, the altered day-night cycle allowed the Wamphyri to emerge and become dominant, permanently squelching the return of human civilization.
• Attempted Rape: The villain in the first book is almost raped by his female cousins at their aunt's bidding. It kind of messes him up, and the trauma of the experience leads directly to his Start of Darkness. They might have thought they were doing him a favour ("We told you we had a surprise for you!"), but it's very quickly obvious that he doesn't share their enthusiasm for this plan.
• Bad Powers, Bad People: The necromancers are a particularly unpleasant bunch, especially the ones who learned to use their powers at an early age: this is because their abilities involve stealing the knowledge and strengths a dead body has gained during life, via dissection, dismemberment, cannibalism, and occasional necrophilia. Ouch. However, this is clearly meant to set up the necromancer Boris Dragosani as a dark counterpart to Harry.
• Bad Powers, Good People: Protagonist Harry Keogh learns as a child that he can speak to the dead telepathically. He eventually uses this ability to fight vampires and necromancers (and vampire necromancers).
• Beauty Equals Goodness:
  • Max Batu (ugly and evil), Ivan Gerenko (ugly and evil), Zek Föener (beautiful and good).
  • Averted in the case of Boris Dragosani, who is described as a very handsome young man. Then zigzagged when he turns into a vampire. He becomes notably more ugly in his vampiric state but can change back to his human form at will.
  • Also averted by Lady Karen of the Wamphyri, who is described Zek to be the most beautiful woman she ever saw.
• Big Bad Duumvirate: Triumvirate. In the E-Branch Trilogy, a trio of extremely powerful vampires sneak out through the gates and immediately begin plans to start a Broken Masquerade scenario, and succeed with flying colors despite dying in the process.
• Body Horror: Oh God, where do we start?
  • The natural creation of Whampyri is pure body horror. A Whampyri is a result of a human being infected by a parasitic leech, which changes their body structure and heightens their lust and power over remorse. To create offspring, the vampire leeches of the Wamphyri create a single egg, which is then put into a potential host, called an egg son or egg daughter. The egg children usually lose consciousness during the transformation due to the pain of the egg merging with their bodies. Should a Whampyri die, the leech will try to abandon its host and search for a new one. An exception to the single egg-laying Whampyri, are the "mothers" whom all Whamypri fear due to their ability to lay countless leech eggs (but not before being drained into a lifeless husk).
  • The Vampire World trilogy has the Wamphyri modify creatures into warbeasts to suit their needs. One Wamphyri died and made the Necroscope call him back in exchange for the power to kill by sight; the Wamphyri in question had figured out how to assimilate people and meld them into part of his body, which he proceeded to do to a Wamphyri upon his return from death. He'd become most of the inside of the building the vampire had run to hide in.
• Boring, but Practical: Out of the three Wamphryi to come to Earth, the most successful one in infecting the local population en masse is none other than Lord Szwart. His brilliant plan? Hiding his vampiric spore production gardens in London's sewers right beneath a ventilation flue. This gives the deadspawn garden enough time to mature and contaminate London.
• Broken Ace: Harry Keogh, to an enormous extent. Gaining early access to Necroscopy in his youth was bad enough since it ended up with him resigned to carrying out the last wishes of the dead, but his life ended up a huge Trauma Conga Line that started with his mother dying and escalated above and beyond his own death and Harry being left a shell of a man dedicated only to wiping out vampires and necromancers.
• Can't Act Perverted Toward a Love Interest: Canker Canison, of all people, treats his love with the utmost respect.
• Cessation of Existence: Even in a series where most people continue as disembodied minds after death, this is possible. The most common method is having one's remains scattered to prevent their spirit from being fully embodied in one place, but it is also possible for dead minds to cease existence by completing perceived Unfinished Business.
• Cosmic Horror Story: Oh yeah. Ironically, this series is closer to the trope in spirit than the majority of Lumley's Cthulhu Mythos-related work.
• Cosmic Plaything:
  • Harry, who loses everything and then is ultimately forced to fragment his consciousness into innumerable shards of power to fight infestations of evil throughout time and space at the behest of an entity implied to be an angel or other celestial intermediary.
  • Every other protagonist ends up as one as well since they're only empowered by shards whenever truly horrifying world-ending scenarios are about to go down. And worse still, being empowered in this way can make them a target for the next Arc Villain to come along. Just ask Nathan.
• Crapsack World: Both sides of the Gate. The human world is in the grips of the Cold War and coping with psychic espionage and vampire infiltration, as well as runaway climate change later in the series. The vampire world is a post-apocalyptic ruin laden with some of the most terrifying vampires in fiction.
• Dark World: The Earth from where vampires and Romani originate is a dark version of our Earth — although for their inhabitants, our Earth is the dark version.
• Deadly Gaze: A rare psychic power within the series. When wielded by a human it can incapacitate a healthy person briefly, but can kill individuals with weakened hearts. When wielded by a vampire, however, it grows more powerful with every use until it's reducing Wamphyri Lords to Ludicrous Gibs.
• Dead Person Conversation: This is the protagonist's specific talent — not only to talk to the dead, but to get the dead talking to EACH OTHER, breaking what in some cases is a millennia-long isolation. This puts them heavily in his debt, to the point where they will voluntarily drag themselves out of the grave to fight for him and his cause.
• Death-Activated Superpower: More like Death-Enhanced Superpower. The Great Majority continue doing in death what they did in life, and that includes individuals with Psychic Powers. The most spectacular uses of powers in the series are carried out by corpses reanimated by Necroscopic power.
• Death World: Sunside/Starside, the vampire homeworld, is definitely this. It's Earth, but an alternate version that has its axis of rotation tilted sideways, much like Uranus. What this means is that the southern hemisphere (Sunside) always faces the sun and is mostly scorching desert, while the northern hemisphere (Starside) is mostly frozen. Humans live on Sunside, where they would be safe from the Wamphyri... except that the only livable parts of Sunside are so close to the equatorial mountains that they experience a regular, week-long day-night cycle, allowing the Wamphyri to hunt them at regular intervals. There are swamps along the equator that are not shielded by the mountains and hence safe from Wamphyri, but these are where vampire slugs breed, so anyone living there would become a Wamphyri themselves. The Wamphyri also breed monstrous war beasts on Starside, some of which are powerful enough to take down fighter aircraft. For their part, the vampires assume Earth is this, calling it "the hell-lands" because of its planet-wide day-night cycle.
• Deflector Shields: Never being ones to think small, Russia attempts to blanket the entire (then) Soviet Union with one of these. Sadly, all it does is create an inter-dimensional superhighway to the source world of vampirism. Oops.
• Deus ex Machina:
  • The end of Necroscope II: Wamphyri! where Harry Keogh saves the day.
  • Pretty much any book with a Necroscope in it ends like this. Except maybe in Avengers. Still, everything will turn out for the best even in failure, as seen by the precog. More like manages to salvage some small triumph from the utter wreckage of everything rather than victory in a meaningful sense though, as every book leaves humanity or/and our protagonists in a worse position than before.
• Deus Exit Machina:
  • For most of Necroscope II: Wamphyri!, Harry Keogh (otherwise a God-Mode Sue) is unable to bring his full powers to bear because his spirit is bound to the body of his infant son, Harry Junior.
  • Almost every book with a Necroscope in it uses this trope, since the combination of deadspeak and access to the Möbius Continuum is the very definition of a Story-Breaker Power. As a consequence, most new Necroscopes are denied the full breadth of their powersets until they can manage to unlock it through either the maturation of their powers or tutelage from people actually acquainted with prior Necroscopes, and generally just prior to the climax of the work.
• Diabolus ex Machina: The only reason Earth falls to vampiric corruption is because Nathan was accidentally hit by the blast of a wayward rocket during a post-war celebration. He loses his memories, preventing the most powerful Necroscope in the series from intervening and ending the final trilogy in the space of half a book.
• Dirty Communists: While there are good and bad people on both sides of the Cold War, the Communist side is very notably less virtuous, especially in the first two series.
• Distant Finale: The series as a whole ends with vampires managing to infect a vast proportion of the world's population, including the heroes, but an epilogue shows that after a millennium or so, humanity (specifically England) worked out a genetic cure.
• Doing In the Wizard: Vampires (and werewolves) are the result of alien parasites, and thus not supernatural.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him: Dear God, is it raining bridges. Too many incidences to count. A couple of characters have bridges dropped on them, then are resurrected only to have yet another bridge fall on them.
• Eldritch Location: The vampire world, which is home to a white hole that plunged half the planet into eternal night, and the Möbius Continuum.
• Enemy Civil War: Constantly, and on all antagonistic sides. The Russians are dealing with typical Cold War infighting; the Wamphyri are dealing with constant internal strife brought on by their inborn Chronic Backstabbing Disorder. The book Bloodwar almost entirely deals with one of these on a grand scale, which ends with the death of the old Wamphyri way of life as a whole.
• Enigmatic Empowering Entity: The golden darts that were introduced at the end of the original series, which empower every subsequent protagonist with the Necroscope powerset. They're fragments of Harry Keogh's mind and talent which were deliberately fragmented and scattered across time and space to create Necroscopes in the time of greatest need.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • Exile to Earth is the fate for vampires that are too evil for other vampires. Yeah. And there is even a vampire ice Alcatraz for those that are worse than that. Which our heroes melt.
  • When Harry realizes that his vampire parasite will eventually be beyond his control, he takes care to leave Earth. Before doing this, however, he takes the time to hunt down and destroy a necromancer who is also a serial murderer and rapist (in that order) of young women (while reflecting that even Dragosani never sank this low).
• Explosive Breeder: A rare mutation among the Wamphryi produces a vampire with a leech that's capable of producing vast amounts of eggs, which are ordinarily produced only once in a vampire's lifetime. This is not only bad for the vampire since they die after expending all their biomass in the uncontrollable production of eggs, but the sheer number of eggs produced infect everything in the area and produce an unsustainable number of new Wamphryi. Vavara from the E-Branch Trilogy is a massive threat to humanity partially because she is wholly unique in that she's a Mother of Vampires who can actually control her ability to produce eggs.
• Extra-Dimensional Shortcut: Harry Keogh acquires the power to transport himself instantaneously through a subspace-esque location known as the Möbius Continuum, with the only limitations being that a truly exceptional understanding of math and appropriate coordinates are required. Since he has the former and the dead provide the latter, there are very few practical limitations on the power.
• Fan Disservice:
  • Things that would be Anatomically Impossible Sex in most series are just part of the Body Horror in this one, thanks to vampires' shapeshifting abilities. Things usually turn out badly.
  • Johnny Found and his hollow-bladed murder weapon. "Johnny doesn't want your dirty little fucky hole. JOHNNY MAKES HIS OWN HOLES!" A character so vile that even a Wamphyri will go out of their way to dispose of him.
• Festering Fungus: Vampires are created by an alien fungus infecting a human body.
• Fire Keeps It Dead: The books put a new spin on the old stake, beheading, and burning procedure for vampire-killing. The stake pins them to the ground, the beheading removes the sapience from the vampiric "body", but the fire is considered the only sure way of killing one. Sometimes though, in some circumstances, not even that is enough.
• Formulaic Magic: Most psi users' abilities are inborn, but Harry Keogh and his heirs' power to teleport and travel through time has to be learned and expressed mathematically. By calculating the infinite length of a Möbius strip as a finite number, Harry can access and instantaneously transport himself through the "Möbius Continuum". When he is stripped of his ability to do math, he loses this ability.
• Friendly Ghost: The overwhelming majority of spirits are not only friendly but delighted to have someone to talk to in Harry Keogh.
• Friendly Neighborhood Vampire: Inverted. Some of the parasite-infested humans try to fight back for a while, like Turgo Zolte or Lady Karen, but ultimately the vampire parasite is just too strong and overwhelms the human mind. This is discussed in more detail in the volume in which Harry Keogh is obsessed with such a parasite. Mentally he transforms himself more and more into a monster, until he decides to travel to the homeworld of the vampires in order to no longer pose a threat to the humans in his world.
• From Bad to Worse: Basically the entire series can be summed up as the vampire version of Neon Genesis Evangelion.
• Going Cosmic: The first book is a paranormal-flavoured Cold War spy thriller set in the 1970s, with both Great Britain and the USSR having a secret squad of psychic-powered spies. By the third book, a wormhole has transported the hero Harry Keogh to a Death World where he fights alien vampires in eternal twilight, and the original vampire Shaitan is revealed to be the Satan of myth, making Harry into a Messianic Archetype as the story becomes a parable about good vs. evil.
• Gothic Punk: Mixed with a bit of Steampunk, this is the vibe of the architecture and bio-machinery of the Starside Wamphyri, with their giant organ pianos and flyers with elaborate, ornate metal saddles.
• Government Agency of Fiction: Multiple countries in this series have an E-Branch, a secret organization dedicated to locating and nurturing the talents of espers for the purposes of homeland security. Britain and Russia have the most powerful branches. In the case of Russia, had.
• Graceful Loser:
  • When suffering amidst the ruins of his burning house, the vampire Faethor Ferenczy decided to accept a quick death at the hands of a rescuer — even paying him with a gold medallion — rather than fighting desperately to escape. A bombing raid had caused a broken beam to fall and stake him, leaving him with the choice between being beheaded by his rescuer and burning to death.
  • After the vampire Faethor Ferenczy died, he was excluded from the other souls of the dead for being a vampire, and this time, he got to explain himself:
    "Believe me if you like, or disbelieve, but I am at peace — with myself, anyway. I have had my day, and I am satisfied... if you had lived for thirteen-hundred years, perhaps you would understand..."
• Grand Theft Me:
  • The climax of the second book has a twist on this. One of the heroes has had his mind and soul destroyed, leaving him basically a still-breathing corpse. Harry, at this point, is a disembodied soul in search of a body and moves right in.
  • In the fifth book of the saga, Faethor Ferenczy tries this on Harry. It does not end well.
• Grey-and-Gray Morality: Although often veering into outright Black-and-Grey Morality or even Evil Versus Evil, especially when vampires are involved.
• Heart Is an Awesome Power: Intuition is an awesome power. Nestor Kiklu received an empowering shard from Harry Keogh's death that granted him superhuman intuition, and that intuition helped him survive innumerable potentially fatal accidents as a human and allowed him to slide into the life of a Wamphyri/necromancer with terrifying speed.
• Hell: The world of origin of vampires, connected to our world in Russia through a "grey hole", is considered Hell by the Russians — although for the natives of that world, our world is Hell.
• Heroic Willpower: Harry Keogh contains his vampirism until he feels he can do so no more and then leaves Earth. Unfortunately, he continues to try to do so when among his own kind, which ends very badly for him and everyone he cares about.
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: Ben Trask and Ian Goodley.
• Hidden Elf Village: The cave enclaves of the Thyre, a near-human race from the vampire world with racial telepathy and a pacifistic society. They help train Nathan in his burgeoning telepathy and Necroscopy.
• Hope Spot: The last book of the Vampire World trilogy lets the characters and readers believe the vampire threat has been destroyed for good. The fact that it's not the last chronological installment should clue you in on how well that went.
• Humanoid Abomination: The Wamphyri were human beings at some point in the (usually distant) past, but were infested with a vampire symbiote and became something much worse. The resulting thing looks almost like a human being, but has wolflike and batlike facial features, and also has gruesome powers not normally associated with vampires, most notably the power to reshape their own flesh and that of others pretty much on a whim.
• Human Resources: On the world where vampiric beings originated, the various Whamphryi overlords/ladies would stage raids on the human population to collect resources for the "provisioning". They would take captured people and mix them with their own metamorphic flesh, turning them into anything ranging from battle mounts capable of flight to living plumbing systems to pipe water throughout their tower-like homes. It's mentioned in one book how they would even grow stairways for their towers out of the bones and cartilage of hapless captured people, or any underling who managed to displease them enough.
• I Hate You, Vampire Dad:
  • The Wamphyri tend to detest their vampire fathers, because they're sadistic and even incestuous. Not least because the turning process is essentially rape with a side-order of Body Horror, or as the luckless Dragosani finds out: "like sitting on a fountain of acid".
  • Vampires also love eating each other, even more than eating humans, so they tend to keep their progeny around just to feed off them, (and the progeny would feed off their creator if they could, so there's no love lost there).
• I Love the Dead: Johnny Found is a necrophile who is also a Necromancer. What this boils down to is that whatever he's doing to the corpse, the soul or spirit of the dead person feels it as if they were still alive. It's so bad that despite seeing, fighting, and killing some of the foulest abominations ever to walk the cosmos, Harry Keogh "wished he hadn't bothered" to tap the memories of the after-death experience of the latest victim.
• Infinite: Harry Keogh and his heirs gain access to the Möbius Continuum (with its ability to travel through time and teleport) by being able to calculate the infinite length of a Möbius strip as a finite number.
• Inhuman Eye Concealers: The Wamphyri often sport vivid scarlet eyes, though most are able to conceal them while dealing with mortals. In the first book, Boris Dragosani doesn't learn how, and thus spends several of the later chapters concealing his increasingly inhuman eyes behind sunglasses.
• Innate Night Vision: The vampires can not only see well at night, but also in complete darkness. However, when they approach a human, he notices them because their eyes are red.
• Instant People: Just Add Water!: It's possible to raise the dead by first reducing their bodies to dust before doing the magic. Albeit a special mix of chemicals is used, not actual water.
• Interquel: Both volumes of The Lost Years take place during the Time Skip between the second and third Necroscope books. Due to how the series ends, the subsequent short stories and novellas have all been plugging into barely-there gaps too.
• Interrogating the Dead: Harry Keogh can converse with murder victims due to his clairvoyance. There are also various vampire necromancers who bind souls to corpses so they can torture the truth out of them.
• I See Dead People: The pathway to ultimate power in the setting, since the dead hold many secrets. Harry Keogh is the most powerful medium ever to live: his mere presence wakes the souls of the dead from their previously eternal sleep and allows them to communicate not merely with him but with each other, enabling a worldwide post-life society. Don't threaten him — the dead won't appreciate it, and they far outnumber the living. Ironically, he cannot see the dead, only hear them, and yet he calls himself a 'Necroscope' which is combined from the Greek roots for 'seeing death'; he ought to call himself a 'Necrophone'.
• Just Before the End: The final trilogy, which takes place after runaway global warming has devastated portions of the planet. And in a more supernatural sense, just before The Bad Guy Wins and turns the planet into a vampire hive for centuries.
• Living Lie Detector: The British E-Branch eventually gets one of these as their leader. Ben Trask's psychic ability is to instinctively detect lies. The only thing that might foul it up is if the person is telling the truth — as they know it. To him, it comes out as "true... but odd, somehow". Ben has also expressed great disgust with political seasons.
• Looks Like Orlok: A very common affectation among the Wamphryi, given that the infection reshapes the features to be more batlike or wolflike at baseline and some vampires lean into it for aesthetic reasons.
• Lovecraftian Superpower: True Wamphyri can reshape flesh and bones (both theirs and others') like Play-Doh. And they're both very imaginative and very sadistic.
• Magical Eye: In the second half of the first story, Boris Dragonasi gains the power of the Evil Eye. Earlier, there was a legend told of the Evil Eye and how it can backfire on the user with gruesome results if it is used on someone who is already dead. Guess what happens to Dragonasi at the end of the book.
• Magic Is Mental: In order to gain the power to travel through time and teleport, Harry Keogh has to first calculate the infinite length of a Möbius strip in finite terms. He has other innate abilities, and most psi users' abilities are inborn, but this one has to be learned and expressed mathematically.
• Magic Mushroom: The mushrooms growing on a vampire's grave can vampirize you.
• Malevolent Mutilation: Just about every vampire, especially in the "Vampire World" books, deliberately twists and tortures their own flesh to make them as horrific as possible. It is something of competition amongst male vamps to see who can have the worst.
• Masquerade: The vampires generally have a vested interest in maintaining this and even have a proverb that "Anonymity is Synonymous With Longevity" (with a couple of minor exceptions). In the final two books, the Big Bads break this hard.
• Mind Rape: Used liberally by all sides. Virtually every main character gets the treatment at some point, and usually from their own allies.
• Missing Floor: The ESPionage group E-Branch has their base on the top floor of a hotel. Although people working at the hotel — and anyone who cared to count the hotel's floors, go inside, and ask for a room on the top floor, and look at the floor number — know that there is a top floor, it has its own elevator and fire escape, and is stated to belong to a group of "International Entrepreneurs".^note This is a Shout-Out to the James Bond novels where 007 worked for a front company for the UK Government called "Universal Exports".
• Monster Progenitor: Shaitan was the first human (in his home dimension) to be infected with the parasite that causes vampirism, and the progenitor of all later vampires.
• Mundane Boss, Superhuman Dragon: In the first book, Gregor Borowitz is in charge of the Soviet E-Branch, but despite being in charge of an entire organization of psychic prodigies, he has no powers other than cunning and experience. For most of the novel, his right-hand man is the necromancer Boris Dragosani, who has the ability to read the minds of the dead through brutal dissection... up until Boris becomes a vampire, assimilates Max Batu's power of the Evil Eye, and uses his newfound enhancements to murder Borowitz and take over Russia's E-Branch.
• My Grandson, Myself: Faethor Ferency was a very territorial vampire who always lived on the outskirts of a certain village. Just before the people realized he was not getting older, he went traveling for a while. After a while, the villagers were informed that he had died during his journey, and that his son would move into his estate, and Faethor returned. The villagers had never seen a woman with him, but the family resemblance was so great that they believed he had to be his son.
• Naked Nutter: Subverted; in his introduction, Boris Dragosani ritualistically prepares for necromantic study by stripping naked and using the corpse as a cushion, then butchering the body while still nude. Though the observers assume that Boris is some kind of lunatic, Gregor Borowitz makes it abundantly clear that the necromancer is perfectly sane, a point he proves when Boris manages to uncover the truth and save Borowitz from a traitor while still without a stich of clothing on him. More to the point, when Boris actually does begin to slip into psychopathy as a result of being impregnated with a vampire symbiote, he remains fully clothed.
• Necromancer: A type of psychic who can commune with the dead... by horribly defiling their corpses and souls. Necroscopes don't need to be horrible to communicate with the dead, and are correspondingly better appreciated by them.
• New Child Left Behind: Harry Keogh's wife falls pregnant at the end of the first book, but he doesn't find out until the sequel (when he's already dead).
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero!: Numerous examples, but the worst incites the ending of the series. The protagonists manage to save the vampire world by realigning its axis via psychic powers into an Earth-like orbit, but this melts the Icelands that were a prison for three extremely powerful Wamphyri who bring their plague to the human world successfully.
• Nothing but Skulls: The cover of every book features a grotesque skull (or pile of skulls).
• Not Too Dead to Save the Day: Taken literally; the dead owe Harry Keogh an enormous debt, to the point that any corpse physically able to do so will lift itself out of the earth, or off the ground, and fight for his cause when required.
• Nuke 'Em: The Russian scientist overseeing the Earth side of the Gate demands to be put through to Mikhail Gorbachev, since "...only he can authorize what must come next!"
• Ominous Hair Loss: Subverted! Boris Dragosani begins exhibiting a receding hairline around the halfway point of the first book, and his boss attributes this to poor health. In the narration, however Boris reveals that his hairline isn't receding at all: his skull is changing shape. As it turns out, he's been infested with a wamphyri symbiote and he's transforming into a vampire.
• Organic Technology: The Wamphyri make extensive use of this, generally using human flesh as building material. They rely on it so much that they don't even really know how to work metal, instead relying on a specific village to supply them with crafted weapons.
• Our Souls Are Different: Harry spends book 2 as a disembodied soul but for some reason is not considered dead.
• Our Vampires Are Different: Vampires are called Wamphyri, and have one of the strangest life cycles imaginable.
  • They start out as mushrooms from a parallel dimension which give off spores which, when inhaled, lay an egg inside the host body. The egg hatches into a leech which adheres to the spinal column and runs tendrils into the brain, causing both mental and biological changes (disturbingly metamorphic flesh, psychic powers, and murderous sociopathy). The leech can, at least for a time, leave its host for a new one (if no humans are accessible, they'll start with something else and work their way up by host-hopping) or to escape if the body is being killed. In this way, the "vampire" is actually the leech and not the host, but the two basically become one. If a vampire truly is killed, more mushrooms come from its body. The hosts can lay eggs which then infest other people, creating a new worm.
  • In addition to the fungal spore and egg infection, Wamphyri can infect anyone with vampirism with even the tiniest amount of blood or... other bodily fluids. The infectee will getting glowing yellow eyes, bloodlust, above-human damage resistance, and total enslavement to the Wamphyri's will. If the newbie vamp is given enough "essence", he can spontaneously develop a slug of his own, becoming a true Wamphyri. The true Wamphyri are distinguished by red eyes and conch-shaped ears.
  • They are still vulnerable to fire, beheading, daylight, garlic and silver (crosses and mirrors only worked because traditionally they were made of silver), and can be killed by bubonic plague and leprosy. Most of it makes fair sense in even how they are killed. The stake through the heart pins the leech so it cannot escape the body once the head has been decapitated. Without the head, the body dies, as does the leech.
  • In some instances, there are nods back to the classic vampire weaknesses, running water, silver, and the like. Some of these are even rather humorous. In one of the later books, one vampire traverses from Sunside/Starside (parallel Earth) to our world, stuck in an underground cave, with only one exit, with running water. Around him are evidence of previous vampire exiles, all of which sat and died, fearing to tread the water to attempt escape.
• Our Werewolves Are Different: Werewolves are vampires, or at least vampires whose leeches are descended from infected wolves. Aside from the usual powersets, they also gain the capacity to assume full lupine forms and increased power during the full moon.
• Our Wormholes Are Different: The Source has "gray holes", essentially wormholes between our world and a parallel Earth inhabited by vampires and Romani.
• Outside-Context Problem: Book 4, Deadspeak, features Janosz Ferenczy. Janosz is distinguished not simply by the fact that he is functionally a Half-Human Hybrid ascended to full vampirism, but he actually possesses necromantic magic rather than the usual psychic necromancy possessed by every other necromantic character in the series. And that magic is derived from Yog-Sothoth, which places the Necroscope universe in the Cthulhu Mythos.
• Parasites Are Evil: The Wamphyri walk a wobbly line between symbiosis and parasitism: essentially a race of alien leeches, they empower their hosts with immortality, inhuman strength, necromancy and the ability to warp flesh at a touch. Unfortunately, being bonded means being painfully and unwillingly impregnated with a fetal vampire symbiote — complete with rape imagery — and subject to its hunger. Regardless of how benevolent they were beforehand, hosts are all gradually corrupted into villainy by their new appetites, to the point that any differences between the parasite and its host vanish: the end result is a sociopathic Humanoid Abomination that will think nothing of committing murder, torture, anatomically-impossible rape, and other crimes too hideous to describe. Vampires are considered so evil in this setting that, upon dying, they're actually excluded by the other dead minds, who want nothing to do with them. Even Harry Keogh isn't immune to this sort of treatment once he gets infected by a vampire symbiote, and it has ramifications for the rest of the series.
• Pay Evil unto Evil: A mantra of Harry Keogh to the point of being Arc Words, and an attitude held by most in the series since only truly inhumane measures can keep Wamphryi dead.
• Phantasy Spelling: With regard to vampires, the series features the classic Romanian mythological variant "Wamphyri".
• Planet Heck: The third book shows that vampires come from a hellish planet connected to Earth by a "gray hole". Albeit for the natives of that planet, Earth is hell.
• Polymorphic Plummet: Attempted in Wamphyri; during Thibor's flashbacks to his early days as a vampire, he manages to knock Faethor Ferenczy off the battlements of his own castle, sending him on a four-hundred-foot drop into the forested gorge below. On the way down, Faethor uses his shapeshifting powers to conjure up a set of glider wings, but unfortunately for him, his timing's off: he smacks into a tree branch in mid-glide and falls the rest of the way. However, because vampires are incredibly difficult to kill, Faethor resorts to wall-crawling all the way back up to the battlements — only for Thibor to dump a cauldron of burning oil all over him. Faethor has to pull the same glider wing trick as before, this time while on fire. Unfortunately for Thibor, he survives this as well.
• Portal Cut: An application of Möbius Continuum doors that only starts receiving use later in the series when the users start getting more creative with their power than simply teleporting a bomb into an enemy stronghold.
• Powered by a Forsaken Child: The Wamphyri use humans to build their warships, chthuluesque warbeasts, homes, plumbing, et cetera.
• Power Fist: The preferred weapon of Wamphryi on their homeworld is the battle gauntlet, a gigantic armored fist loaded with nasty extendable blades and other instruments of rending flesh. The Wamphryi have no skill in metalworking, so these gauntlets are made for them by supplicant tribes of Szgany.
• Powerful, but Incompetent: The majority of the vampires in the Vampire World trilogy, as a consequence of having spent their time in a land filled with supplicant tribes and thus having no experience with open warfare or prey that can fight back.
• Power Incontinence: A problem possessed by many vampires in the series, but most profoundly expressed by the Francezci family and the Lord Szwart. Both of their respectively families have an inherited tendency to lose control of their metamorphic powers. Angelo Francezci is reduced to a Blob Monster in the Lost Years duology, his son Francesco isn't far behind, and Szwart is terrified of light since it reveals that he's a small Eldritch Abomination at the time of the series.
• Power Parasite:
  • Harry Keogh, or Deadspawn, spends the entire book taking other people's powers (to be fair most of them weren't needing them since they were dead at the time) for the final confrontation with the Big Bad in the alternate universe. It Makes Sense in Context.
  • Boris Dragosani did the same thing in the first book, but was less successful since he had to actually be on-site to torture the secrets of psychic powers out of his victims.
• Power Perversion Potential: Vampires demonstrate that while going One-Winged Angel may look unpleasant, a writhing mass of holes and parts can give exquisite sensations to its sexual partners. Of course, since this is a horror series, Vagina Dentata and similar applications are more common.
• Powers as Programs:
  • The villain, Boris Dragosani, has the ability to read the memories of the dead. This also allows him to steal and learn the powers of the super-powered dead, which means that he gets pretty badass by the end of the book.
  • The protagonist, Harry Keogh, also has this ability. Unlike Dragosani, Keogh learns from the dead by asking nicely. This also gives him the "power" of having the nearby dead rise from their graves to serve up a Deus ex Machina with cheese.
• Pre-Sacrifice Final Goodbye: Lady Karen says goodbye to Harry before she blows herself up with Shaithis.
• The Pretty Guys Are Stronger: It is lampshaded in Invaders that historically the more hideously deformed Wamphryi in the series are at best cannon fodder compensating for weakness with external monstrosity. Naturally, most of the vampires out of Turgosheim in the Vampire World trilogy are portrayed as both extremely distinctively deformed... and die in droves even before the climax of the final Bloodwar.
• Psychic Operative:
  • In the first book, Russia's E-Branch acquires Max Batu, a psychic with the power of the Evil Eye; essentially, he can induce heart attacks just by making eye contact and concentrating, making him an ideal assassin for targets who can't be eliminated in private. For good measure, when he's sent after the head of Britain's E-Branch, Sir Keenan Gormley, Batu is partnered with the necromancer Boris Dragosani so that Gormley's secrets can still be extracted post-mortem.
  • One notable psychic ability is the power to detect other psychics. Britain's E-Branch commonly uses these "spotters" to covertly identify potential recruits. Russia's E-Branch does much the same thing, but it also uses spotters to capture or (if necessary) assassinate enemy psychics. In one memorable case, Viktor Shukshin was a Soviet spotter who was planted in England as a sleeper agent to be used against the British E-Branch. Unfortunately, Shukshin also possessed a psychotic compulsion to kill psychics — hence why he went off the rails and murdered Harry Keogh's mother.
  • As a Necroscope, Harry Keogh's psychic power allows him instant communication with any dead soul within range and the ability to channel their knowledge, from fighting skills to priceless covert data. As such, Sir Keenan is very eager to acquire Harry as an agent, especially after he nearly throws him off the scent by channeling the charisma of a dead confidence trickster.
• Psychic Radar: People who have this "talent" are called spotters, and are rarer even than regular talents.
• Puppeteer Parasite: The vampires are really nothing more than parasites which look like leeches and occupy human bodies. When they control a human, they give powers that are typical of vampires, but the humans controlled by the parasites are almost always corrupted to evil.
• Randomly Gifted: This is how talents are handed out — you are just randomly born with powers. Admittedly, people whose parents had a talent are more likely to get one, but talents mostly come from random members of the population born with one.
• Red Scare: This series takes place during the Cold War, after all. Unusually for the genre, a number of sympathetic Communist characters are included that assist the protagonists with their efforts to wipe out vampirism. They're loyal to their own country, after all, and they realize that an unchecked Wamphyri infestation will do it no good at all.
• The Renfield:
  • Boris Dragonsani plays this role for Tibor Ferency during the first book. However, he hates him, and just wants his knowledge and power. In fact, he even kills Tibor shortly after he turned him into a vampire against his will.
  • Later books show that it is not all that unusual for vampires in Starside to keep humans as servants because they can also act during the day.
• Resist the Beast: Harry Keogh manages to do this once he gets infected so that he can get back into the vampire world without engineering the fall of the human race. Much later the entirety of E-Branch's heads and the Necroscope Jake Cutter are infected and end up holding off their vampiric urges with Heroic Willpower long enough to build a means for society to continue post-vampire apocalypse.
• Retired Monster: Faethor Ferenczy, retired due to death. In this series, that is no bar to being an active participant, of course. His one attempt to come out of retirement does not go well for him.
• Sanity Has Advantages: The Wamphyri parasite enhances everything about a human physically and mentally to extreme levels. Unfortunately for them, that includes existing mental instability and makes emotions incredibly intense. The end result is that vampires functionally lack free will since they're by and large beholden to their whims and their parasite, and this species-wide insanity is the only reason they haven't taken over both worlds centuries ago. When some sane and effective vampires show up, it spells the end for the human world.
• Satan: Possibly appearing under the name Shaitan, who happens to be the first vampire rather than a devil/fallen angel.
• Science Fantasy: Of the paranormal variety. Multiple countries (principally the UK and the USSR) have secret government organizations dedicated to locating people with Psychic Powers, which range from the apparently mystical (communing with the dead via necroscopy or necromancy), to the more science-flavored (calculating the infinite length of a Möbius strip in finite terms to access a "Möbius Continuum"), to everything in between (bog-standard telepathy, precognition and Psychic Radar). Most people continue as disembodied minds after death, but what's known as Hell is really a parallel version of Earth accessible via a wormhole (or "gray hole"). Then there are the vampires, essentially a race of alien fungus-leeches which take human hosts. The final trilogy takes place after runaway global warming has devastated portions of the planet, and ends with vampires managing to infect a vast proportion of the world's population until a genetic cure is found centuries later, while protagonist Harry Keogh fragments his consciousness into innumerable shards of power scattered across time and space, at the behest of an entity implied to be an angel or other celestial intermediary.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: Once per book. From a werewolf encased in amber and resin for hundreds of years, to a Vampire Ice-Alcatraz (which the heroes melt^note They do this to kill off one Vampire menace, and by doing so release a whole new one of even more evil, and worse, competent ones; Nice Job Melting It).
• Shout-Out:
  • "Enter freely, and of your own will" is a phrase with significance in the classic vampire novel Dracula.
  • The method of raising the dead by first reducing their bodies to dust before doing the magic seems to be a Shout-Out to H. P. Lovecraft, who had a similar plot device in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.
• Silver Bullet: Silver is deadly to vampires, and the historical use of silver as a backing for mirrors is considered to be the origin of the whole vampires afraid of mirrors in folklore.
• Sliding Scale of Vampire Friendliness: Vampires are decidedly unfriendly due to a) being extremely easy to propagate (it's very hard for a vampire to feed and not infect the corpse, and since they Always Chaotic Evil, vampire progeny are usually hostile to their progenitor, who will probably eat them in self-defense) b) invariably amoral/evil after conversion c) basically impossible to kill (fire comes the closest, but they can still be reconstituted from ashes, and their psychic energy can continue to infect the living after their apparent destruction) and d) hideous (they look human if they infect a human corpse, but as the human component gets consumed, they become proportionally more parasite and look like it). Vampirism itself is essentially a fungal/cancerous parasite that can exist independent of a body, so on top of all that it's also generally physically gross.
• Soviet Superscience: The USSR have an advanced psychic intelligence service (almost as advanced as the UK's one; the US doesn't get a look in). They also try to put a Deflector Shield over the entire country to protect it from nuclear attack, which doesn't go well and in fact accidentally rips space-time a new arsehole, turning the small, hard-to-reach wormhole to the Vampire World into the equivalent of an expressway.
• Spy Fiction: The early works smell very much of stale beer, but get steadily classier as the series progresses.
• Squishy Wizard: The few psychics in the series with direct offensive powers, i.e. Necroscopes are firmly this. Extremely potent psychic powers, still completely human in body so a bullet or physical blow can stop them. Not so much post-Wamphryi infection, with Harry Keogh and Jake Cutter becoming nightmarishly powerful as a result.
• Stable Time Loop: Possibly the origin of the Wamphyri, as detailed in the fifth and sixth books. Shaitan, the first vampire, falls into the Vampire World after a great unspecified battle and breathes in vampire spores from a hideous corpse he finds in a swamp. As it turns out, the corpse is that of the vampirized Harry Keogh, which got blown back in time due to a nuclear explosion near a wormhole... that also killed Shaitan's future self. It Makes Sense in Context.
• Story-Breaker Power: Harry Keogh has virtually unlimited teleportation power, which makes the climaxes of his stories anticlimactic, especially combined with the near omniscience his ability to talk to the dead grants. Basically, he knows all about you if you've killed people, and can drop a bomb on your head no matter how heavy your defenses.
• Sucksessor: Harry's son Nestor proved in short order to be far less morally pure than his father or brothers even before suffering a bout of amnesia and winding up a necromantic Lord of the Wamphryi.
• Superbeing Soldier of Fortune: Faethor Ferenczy, a very old and powerful Wamphyri (rare on Earth thanks to their specific breeding habits), spent many centuries operating as a mercenary warrior in various mortal conflicts for both amusement and enrichment. As he relates to Harry Keogh in the second novel, he joined the Fourth Crusade, gleefully participated in the sack of Constantinople, changed his appearance and moved east to join Genghis Khan, fought for various other Mongol leaders for a century, before joining the Ottoman Turks in their conquest of Byzantium and beyond. Thanks to the Wamphyri Masquerade, none of his clients ever became aware of what Faethor really was, and his final downfall is just straight-up bad luck.
• Superior Successor: Both of Harry's Necroscope sons are this in theory. Harry Junior has his father's Necroscopy from birth and an even greater grasp of Möbius math that allows interuniversal travel, and Nathan inherits Necroscopy along with extremely powerful telepathy and his own means of achieving interuniversal travel. As with their father, they are subject to conditions that hinder their effectiveness. Harry Junior ends up vampirized and scorched into a bestial state by the sun, and Nathan has his memories temporarily destroyed by a Tap on the Head so he can't interfere with their plan to infect Earth.
• Supernatural Gold Eyes: Weaker vampires have yellow eyes. Of course, weak vampires are still a real danger to ordinary humans, too. However, this shows that these vampires are not very powerful compared to those who have red eyes.
• Superpowerful Genetics: All of Harry Keogh's sons gain his talents in speaking with the dead, and have the capacity to learn how to use math-based teleport skills. It's implied that Harry himself inherited at least his "Deadspeak" from his own mother. The Distant Finale of the series implies that all Espers eventually pass their abilities on to their descendants.
• The Symbiote: The vampire-fungi technically fit here. The fungal leech gets a host with sentience and opposable thumbs; the host gets shapeshifting, enhanced psychic powers, enhanced strength, enhanced senses, and a craving for fresh blood and human flesh...
• Tailor-Made Prison: The USSR treat the vampire world of Sunside/Starside as this while Sunside/Starside reciprocates. When the two sides work out it isn't...
• Telepathy: Vampires have telepathic powers, as do humans to varying degrees. The humans also occasionally sport other powers, such as locating someone from a distance, clouding someone else's telepathy, or precognition. The telepathy of the titular Necroscope^note as in "microscope" or "telescope", a person who can "see" or focus on the dead extends even to the dead.
• Teleport Spam: Harry Keogh tends to do this once he's learned now to access the Möbius Continuum.
• Tidally Locked Planet: The world where the Wamphyri originate is such a world. Life exists almost entirely on the narrow habitable band.
• Trilogy Creep: Started as a trilogy, now up to eighteen books and short story collections.
• Undying Warrior: The Wamphyri indulge heavily in violent lifestyles, having been gradually corrupted into enjoying bloodshed and rape by the eldritch parasites within them. In particular, those on Earth have exhibited a very rich military history: Thibor Ferenczy committed so many war crimes in the service of his mortal monarch that he accidentally gave Vlad the Impaler his title in the process, while his sire Faethor gleefully helped sack Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade, rode with Genghis Khan in the unification of Mongolia, and even served in the Ottoman Empire's conquest of Byzantium.
• Unseen True Form: In Wamphyri, after seeing Faethor Ferenczy's shapeshifting powers in action, Thibor reflects that he still doesn't actually know what Faethor's true form looks like. The same goes for the audience, for in sharp contrast to Thibor's extended flashback sequence, we never see what Faethor was like prior to becoming Wamphyri and never get any idea of what he looks like beyond whatever appearance he's chosen for the moment.
• Vagina Dentata: Vampires are capable of this (among many other bodily modifications) and have been known to use the other modifications to enhance sex before using this one to put an end to the whole thing. In particular, Vasagi the Gape's (new) moniker comes from the fact that he turned his entire torso into one.
• Vampire Bites Suck: The vampires are all savage and vicious, even to each other. More to the point, due to the fact that they can reshape their bodies, their feeding habits range from using oversized jaws to tear open human torsos, to forming tentacular siphons and draining their victims dry. A prime example is Vasagi the Suck, a vampire who shaped his mouth into a fly-like proboscis he uses to drain blood from his victims. After being horribly maimed in one novel, he reshapes himself into Vasagi the Gape; see Vagina Dentata above.
• Vampire Hunter: Harry Keogh. The British E-Branch organization has a wider scope, but provides Harry with support and takes over the role after his death, along with Harry's sons and his successors.
• Vampires Are Sex Gods: Vampires have impressive shapeshifting capabilities, which, though unpleasant to look at, can greatly enhance sex. Then, when it's time to feed, the unlucky victim goes Out with a Bang. Newly-turned Harry Keogh and the Lady Karen, being both vampires, in alliance and mutually attracted to each other, are somewhat of an exception to this rule. Their orgy is mostly comprehensible in human terms, merely with amplification of human anatomy to ridiculous proportions (her being able to suck endless gallons of semen from him, the force of their humping reducing their stone bed to gravel, etc.), although it slides away from the mundane when she uses her shapeshifting abilities to penetrate him for the greatest orgasm he's ever had (how and where he is penetrated are left to the imagination).
• Vegetarian Vampire: When Harry Keogh is finally turned, he settles for near-raw steak until his hunger for blood threatens to become insatiable, at which point he leaves Earth for the vampire world. There, among others of his kind, he makes the fatal mistake of still trying to restrain his vampire nature. It doesn't end well for him; he is crucified and is forced to watch as his son is shot dead and his vampire girlfriend is raped repeatedly, the agony only ending for her when she coughs up and arms the grenade she was holding in her throat and bites her rapist's head to stop him from escaping (yes, explosive decapitation works) and for him in nuclear obliteration.
• Villain Protagonist: Dragosani is this in the first book, which is at least half devoted to him.
• Visionary Villain:
  • Devetaki Skullguise counts, given her grand aims of invading Earth and co-opting our weapons technology and vast numbers to ensure eternal Wamphyri supremacy. She gets leprosy and a fatal dose of sunlight for her efforts.
  • The trio of vampires from the E-Branch trilogy, who successfully execute a plan to infect all of Earth with a plague of vampirism, which results in centuries of horrifying bloodshed until a cure for vampirism is discovered.
• Who Needs Their Whole Body?: Harry Keogh can call the dead out of the ground to fight for him, and does so on several occasions. When the dead are destroyed, even the blown-off arms try to crawl into the enemy positions and strangle the gunners.
• Writers Cannot Do Math: The math problems used to establish that young Harry is a genius are accurate enough, they're just not really impressive to actual mathematicians.
• Wrong Context Magic: Necroscopy itself. Necroscopes can communicate with the dead via the medium of Deadspeak, which cannot be detected by espers except as a large disturbance in the psychic aether. And the dead will rise from the graves to fight for Necroscopes willingly out of sheer love, animated by the weird talent in question.
• You Can't Fight Fate:
  • The future is fixed; anything a prognosticator foresees will happen. The best you can hope for is that you misinterpreted the vision, resulting in a Prophecy Twist. Not only that, if you try to peek at your own future you are guaranteed to discover that you'll be dead in less than a day.
  • Not literally, though it happens the first time we see it done, but when Harry does it he finds out that his life-ribbon is tinged red, and everything he's done to rid himself of vampiric taint is doomed to fail.