I’m not sure when the first crossover story between the big characters of Gothic and Victorian literature was created, but there have been a lot of them over time - the last big one, perhaps, having been the TV series “Penny Dreadful”. Usually, though, they try to bring together the characters from the novels themselves, the main ones, the title ones, such as Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, Frankenstein, Jekyll and Hyde. But does the story end with those characters? Is there nothing that comes afterwards?
Well, yes, there is, at least in “The Amazing Adventures of the Athena Club” by Theodora Coss, a currently three-part series about those who come after the big male names: their daughters and experiments (usually both). In the first book, “The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter”, the readers meet the members of the club, starting with Mary Jekyll and, soon after, her sister Diana Hyde. They meet up with three more women who have been experimented on: Beatrice Rappaccini, whose father turned her poisonous by exposure to poisonous plants, Catherine Moreau, who was once a puma and turned into a woman by Dr. Moreau (before killing him), and Justine Frankenstein, the female creature Frankenstein officially never finished (and made from the body of the young servant executed wrongly for the murder of his younger brother). Learning about the Society of Alchemists (named French in the novels as Société des Alchimistes), they find a common goal: to prevent more experiments on young girls, just because their bodies are more malleable for biological transmutation.
It’s not an easy goal to reach - the Society isn’t a place you can just walk into to make demands and will not change just because someone says so. While the experiments of Dr. Jekyll (and others) in England destroyed the English chapter, experiments are still going on elsewhere. In Amsterdam and Vienna, Abraham Van Helsing is trying to turn his own daughter into a vampire without the vampire’s weaknesses (after failing with her mother and Lucy Westenra already). Back in London, Mary’s former scullery maid Alice is proving her ability to mesmerize and gets kidnapped by none other than the infamous Professor Moriarty (yes, Sherlock Holmes does also exist in the books - Mary works as his secretary of sorts).
What I love about the series is that the main characters have their strengths and weaknesses, they feel three-dimensional, and they become good friends during the stories. Each of them contributes to their home (in the beginning of the first book, Mary has to bury her mother and is left almost destitute, so they all need to make money to pay their bills), each looks out for the others. Even Diana, who might often pretend she doesn’t care for the others, becomes a vicious enemy when her friends are threatened. Especially the latter books (the first is dedicated to bringing the club together) introduce quite some other female characters who have either been characterized differently before or were only side characters in the stories they come from: Irene Norton (formerly Irene Adler - yes, the Woman), Mina Harker, Carmilla von Karnstein and Laura Jennings (who is not her victim in this story, but her lover), Margaret Trelawney, Queen Tera and others.
The narrative may be seen, to a degree, as a mirror of how society in the 1890s was, especially in England: the men experiment and the women have no say in what happens to them. This also shines through in a major plot point of the second book, where Prof. Van Helsing is trying to unseat the female president of the Society with violent means (a gaggle of vampires), if necessary. He fails, because Madam President is a 2000-year-old priestess of Isis who can electrocute people without even touching them. Men use women, but they better not be around when the women come into their full powers. As Dr. Moreau learned when his only successful try at a beast-woman freed herself and ripped out his throat, not buying his godliness. As Adam (Frankenstein’s first creature) learned when Justine beat him down with a skillet and escaped from him for good. As Van Helsing almost learned the hard way when Lucinda (his daughter, whom he turned into a vampire) almost killed him, stopped only by Justine - for her good, not for his.
This might be a little on the nose, but only on the first glance - all of the mad scientists acted first, none of the girls (except for the priestess in question who chose her fate to a degree) asked for what was done to them. Even Carmilla and her godfather Dracula didn’t become vampires out of their free will, both were changed by others without their consent. So the demand to the Society that such experiments be not allowed or only allowed when the subject of the experiment agrees to it is not that far-fetched for the dawning twentieth century.
Romance, on the other hand, plays a very secondary role. Mary is too rational to easily fall in love (although she has a crush on Sherlock Holmes), Diana is a bit too young and immature at fourteen, Beatrice is reeling from a very sad romance in her past (and can’t touch anyone), Catherine has little interest in romance (but then, she’s a puma), and Justine is still traumatized from Adam’s unwanted advances (she’s also quite shy sometimes). Lucinda, who joins later, doesn’t think about romance since she’s still working on getting her bloodlust under control.
What I love on the side of the writing is how the books pretend to have been written by Catherine Moreau - who adds to the household income by writing pulp novels - and there’s fourth-wall-breaks in the books where some of the characters discuss what has just been written, mostly because they don’t agree with it. In those breaks, Catherine also advertises the other books of the series (not in the first book, obviously, but in the other two), all available at your local bookstore or railway kiosk for two shillings. It’s a nice way to break up the story, to hint at what is to come (such as the kidnapping to Styria in the second book), and to give a deeper look into the characters’ minds without having to change the POV. There are POV changes, sometimes several in the same chapter, but they’re done well and it’s never unclear whose mind the reader occupies.
All in all, I really love the three novels about the Athena Club. The premise is interesting, the characters are diverse, the stories are varied, making use of different skills of the main characters. They’re a good read, keeping me interested throughout, so I can definitely recommend them to others. If the kind of stories I described above interests you, give the books a try - I read the first one, then bought both of the others together, because I knew I would like them.
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