Kim Newman's cult series is a mashup of vampire legend and alternate history. In the fourth instalment, we are introduced to an undead waif called Ion Popescu, an outcast from Romania's virulently anti-vampire communist regime. Ion infiltrates the filming of Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula (not the version in our timeline, but a vampire-infested burlesque of Apocalypse Now) and follows the film-makers to America, where he's discovered by Andy Warhol in Studio 54. After making a fortune from a blood-based drug that gives its human addicts the powers of the undead, he changes his name to Johnny Alucard, becomes a Hollywood film producer, and vows to inherit the empire of his vampire father-in-blood: Count Dracula.

The aristocratic top predators of the horror genre have evolved considerably from the grotesque monsters of early gothic shockers. There have been outlaw vampires, space vampires, virus-crazed vampires, and (their most popular contemporary incarnation) vampires as tragic romantic heroes. Kim Newman's version of the enduring bloodsuckers is rooted in an ingenious twist to the ending of Bram Stoker's novel, with Dracula defeating Van Helsing and becoming Prince Consort to Queen Victoria. A loose trilogy of novels originally published in the 1990s charted the rise and fall of Dracula, and elaborated a witty and densely imagined alternate history in which ordinary people ("warms") must learn to coexist with long-lived supernatural creatures whose politics are based on rigid hierarchies ordered by age and who-bit-whom lineages. Newman's vampires are out in the open, agents of change who have infiltrated every part of society.

A patchwork of previously published stories and new material, the narrative of Johnny Alucard is episodic, occasionally uneven, but compulsively readable, a bitingly satirical version of the excesses of the 1980s laced with a deft blend of comic irony and Grand Guignol slapstick. Setpieces borrowed from history – Live Aid, the Iranian embassy siege, the fall of the Soviet empire – are given vampiric makeovers; versions of real people jostle with versions of characters borrowed from works of fiction. Newman is a film critic as well as a novelist, and his depiction of a vampire-infested Hollywood is both authentic and imaginatively redrawn.

Alucard's plans to assume the vampire throne intersect with the lives of several undead women who played leading roles in the previous novels. Kate Reed, a leftwing journalist, and Geneviève Dieudonné, a vampire elder "older than the name 'America'", find themselves in direct opposition to Alucard and a colourful cast of minions. While most vampires die and come back "as different people, caricatures of their former selves compelled to extremes by an inner drive", Kate and Geneviève have "turned" without dying inside. Despite being vampires, they are the most fully human characters in the novel.

Serious ideas about the nature of power and evil emerge from the antic blend of postmodern intertexuality, pop culture and pulp fiction. Alucard exploits the dark side of the American dream, but is consumed by something older and deeper. His sleek avatar of the "Greed is Good" decade is really just another aspect of Dracula, who "saw that blood, like life, was not enough. Always, he fed on gold …" It's a testament to Stoker's power of myth-making and Newman's sparkling reinvention that the old monster is still as relevant as ever.

• Paul McAuley's latest book is Evening's Empires (Gollancz).