Genevieve Undead is a collection of three novellas by Kim Newman, set in the Warhammer universe and originally published as by Jack Yeovil. All of them continue the story of mostly-Friendly Neighbourhood Vampire Genevieve Dieudonné, who first appeared in Drachenfels.
- "Stage Blood": Genevieve's lover, Detlef Sierck, presents a new adaptation of the famous Kislevite play The Strange History of Dr. Zhiekhill and Mr. Chaida. Despite the success of the play, the production suffers a series of strange and violent events, causing Genevieve to fear that the work's violence may be rubbing off on Detlef a bit too much.
- "The Cold Stark House": The revolutionist Prince Kloszowski, fleeing a vengeful Duce, arrives at the decaying estate of Udolpho, where a deranged and depraved aristocratic family ceaselessly plot against one another for position and fortune.
- "Unicorn Ivory": Genevieve is blackmailed into assassinating a conservative aristocrat, but finds that her target is far more deserving of death, but also more dangerous, than she anticipated.
Genevieve Undead contains examples of the following tropes:
- Age Without Youth: Old Melmoth Udolpho, the patriarch of the Udolphos, is over 120 years old and has spent around the last 30 years confined to his bed, withering away but never dying. He himself describes himself as a spark of life trapped in a near-corpse, too weak to even move, but he refuses to die and is kept alive by dark formulas concocted by the family physician, Dr. Valdemar.
- Ambiguous Ending: The ending of "The Cold Stark House". As Old Melmoth contentedly lays in his bed, reflecting on how he sold his soul and cursed his family to never be bored again, already plotting the next round of chaos, the creepy twins Flora and Young Melmoth creep into his bedroom and start forcing their way through the curtains around Old Melmoth's bed. He notes that he knows their teeth and claws are sharp and skillfully used, then calls their names with love. The final line of the story: "It had been the final curtain." The implication is that the twins are going to kill Old Melmoth, and thus send him onto whatever fate he has been denying for the last thirty years, which in turn will end the Curse of the Udolphos.
- Ambiguously Human: The youngest Udolphos, twins Flora and Melmoth, are stated to be the result of their father Pintaldi having children with a woman of "dubious humanity". One possible interpretation of them is that they are daemons, or at least half-daemon.
- Bad Habits: At the beginning of "The Cold Stark House", self-righteous revolutionary and devoted womanizer Kloszowski is impersonating a priest.
- The Bait: Rudiger uses Magnus as bait for the unicorn mare, leading to Magnus's death and to Doremus finally snapping into You're Not My Father.
- Big, Screwed-Up Family: The Udolphos, to the point that none of them can actually remember how they're all related. Justified in that their memories are constantly being meddled with by Old Melmoth's curse, which can also overwhelm the minds of weak-willed visitors and mentally retcon them into being family members.
- Changing of the Guard: Kloszowski and Rudiger, who were minor characters in Beasts In Velvet, play major roles in these stories.
- Creepy Child: The twins Flora and "Young" Melmoth in "The Cold Stark House" are icy, murderous, torture-obsessed, and very wrapped up in each other.
- Deal with the Devil: Old Melmoth Udolpho sold his soul "to the Dark Powers" to fuel the spell that envelops his estate.
- Descending Ceiling: A trap in one of the hidden passages in Udolpho.
- Destructive Romance: Genevieve breaks up with Detlef at the end of "Stage Blood", believing that their relationship is bringing out the evil in him.
- Dirty Old Monk: Ambrosio Udolpho from "The Cold Stark House", who is such a gluttonous, drunkard lech that he was expelled from his priestly order for excessive vice. And he belongs to the Church of Ranald, the trickster god!
- Evil Is Petty: Old Melmoth cursed his estate and damned his family (and any intruders) to a never-ending gothic melodrama because he thought his life was boring.
- Evil Old Folks: Old Melmoth Udolpho, who sold his soul to the dark powers and damned his family out of pure selfishness.
- Fantasy Counterpart Culture:
- Miragliano is Venice.
- The Drak Wald is pre-1945 East Prussia.
- Gothic Horror: "The Cold Stark House" parodies every single usual element of this.
- The Grotesque: Zigzagged with Malvoisin from "Stage Blood". Whilst he is incredibly horrible to look at, being basically a giant octopus with a semblance of a humanoid torso for a head, Malvoisin has none of the negative characteristics that most "Phantom of the Opera"-type characters have — he's entirely benevolent and his Incorruptible Pure Pureness ends up destroying the Puppeteer Parasite when it tries to take him over.
- Hunting the Most Dangerous Game:
- Rudiger von Unheimlich hunts anybody who offends his sense of honour through the forest around his hunting lodge.
- Flamineo Udolpho, in life, loved to hunt "near-humans" like goblins, elementals, and even werewolves. When his ghost returns, he starts hunting humans.
- Lampshade Hanging: Because Antonia was an actress who specialized in the most lurid of gothic melodrama plays, she constantly hangs lampshades on how much the situations at the Udolphos seem plucked straight out of those melodramas. This is a relatively subtle build-up to The Reveal that the whole family was cursed into a never-ending melodrama by Old Melmoth.
- Lost in Character:
- Detlef becomes dangerously close to this during Zhiekhill and Chaida, developing a dangerously violent temper and tinge of cruelty.
- This is the main reveal of "The Cold Stark House" — a spell created by Old Melmoth forces anyone who enters the house to take on a persona as a member of the family and become trapped in the plot of the never ending-Gothic thriller to entertain him.
- Madwoman in the Attic: "The Cold Stark House" has two of them; a nameless son who is kept locked up in the basement and fed human flesh, and family sub-matriarch Matilda, the wife of sub-patriarch Schedoni. She's saner and less deformed than she's supposed to be, as she was forced into the role and is strong-willed enough to retain a vague but certain knowledge that she is not an Udolpho.
- Mayfly–December Romance: For a given value of "romance". Unicorn mares live much, much longer than their stallions, and so keep replacing them with younger ones as they age and die.
- Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: The reveal of "Unicorn Ivory" — Doremus is the son of Serafina and Magnus, which caused Rudiger to murder Serafina.
- Negative Continuity: Everyone in the Udolpho family returns to life no matter how often they get murdered.
- Old, Dark House: The Udolpho estate in "The Cold Stark House" parodies just about every trope associated with this one.
- Puppeteer Parasite: The Animus is a magical entity created by the late Konstant Drachenfels, which possesses a mask hidden in the ruins of his castle and takes over anyone who wears the mask, to seek vengeance on Detlef and Genevieve.
- Secret Passage: Both the Vargr Bruegel Memorial Theatre and Udolpho estate are honeycombed with them.
- Shout-Out: Overlapping with Meaningful Name; the Udolphos are named after a 1974 Gothic romance novel called "The Mysteries of Udolpho". Old Melmoth, meanwhile, is named after an 1820 Gothic novel called "Melmoth the Wanderer".
- Theatre Phantom: The Trapdoor Demon is strongly inspired by The Phantom of the Opera, being a mysterious entity who lurks in the labyrinthine backstage of a theatre and becomes obsessed by a young actress. However, he's much nicer than most versions of the Phantom, but even uglier — he's been mutated by Chaos into a Cthulhumanoid creature.
- Unicorn: The unicorns in "Unicorn Ivory" are ferocious, highly-intelligent equines who have a matriarchal social structure in which each mare has a harem of stallions; females are far rarer, in part because mother unicorns tend to try and kill their fillies. Mares live considerably longer than stallions, and often take their own colts as lovers once they come of age, leading to increasingly inbred herds as they replace sons with grandsons and great-grandsons. Only the mare's horns can be taken as trophies, as the bodies of the stallions decompose with extreme rapidity after death.
- Unproblematic Prostitution: Antonia in "The Cold Stark House" prefers being a courtesan to any of the other opportunities she has in her society.
- Villain of Another Story: In "Stage Blood", Scheydt is killed by the Warhawk, the serial killer who is hunted by Filthy Harald and Rosanna in the short story "The Warhawk", collected in Silver Nails.
- Whole-Plot Reference:
- All three stories are strongly inspired by inter-war horror films: "Stage Blood" by The Phantom of the Opera (1925), "The Cold Stark House" by The Old Dark House (1932), and "Unicorn Ivory" by The Most Dangerous Game.
- Dr. Ziekhill and Mr. Chaida is a blatant one to "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde".
