Department 19

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Battling vampires since 1892. Now it's time to raise the stakes.

Department 19 is a novel by Will Hill.

The plot is as follows: Jamie Carpenter's life will never be the same. His father is dead, his mother is missing, and he was just rescued by an enormous man named Frankenstein. Jamie is brought to Department 19, where he is pulled into a secret organization responsible for policing the supernatural, founded more than a century ago by Abraham Van Helsing and the other survivors of Dracula. Aided by Frankenstein's monster, a beautiful vampire girl with her own agenda, and the members of the agency, Jamie must attempt to save his mother from a terrifyingly powerful vampire.

Tropes used in Department 19 include:
  • Alternate Reality Game: A goods portion of the marketing campaign and website is done in this style. There are conspiracy videos on the book's website, showing strange sightings and things that are chalk full of Fridge Brilliance. Bonus if you're logged onto Facebook as you check out the main video. It's a mock news report of several children in the area vanishing after "beings with red eyes" were spotted during the night. The site will take your profile picture and those of two friends and place them on the pictures of the missing people. (Can be unintentionally hilarious if you or one of your friends happen to be using a gag image and not an actual picture of him or herself.)
  • Badass - Many of the characters, especially Frankenstein
  • Big Badass Wolf - The werewolves
  • Bittersweet Ending - In the first novel Jamie's mother is safe, but she's now a vampire. Alexandru is seemingly dead but Frankenstein most likely didn't survive the fall in his fight with a werewolf. And Dracula's remains have also been stolen and he has been brought back to life.
  • Dark Action Girl - Larissa
  • Foreshadowing - There's quite a bit of foreshadowing from the novel. A minor example is werewolves are mentioned quite early in the novel before they actually make an appearance.
  • Government Conspiracy: Up to eleven. Other nations' equivalents to Department 19 are mentioned more than once.
  • Gorn - For a young adult novel, the book itself becomes fairly violent and gruesome as it goes along. One character has a fountain of blood explode from him as his neck is slashed open and vampires exploding into showers of gore and blood when killed are just some examples. And it keeps getting gorier and gorier and bloodier and bloodier as it goes along.
  • The Mole - Thomas Morris
  • Monster Mash - From the get-go, we're giving vampires and Frankenstein. By the end of the novel werewolves join into the fray.
    • zombies are also mentioned but not seen, yet. . .
  • Nightmare Fuel - Tons.
  • Not-So-Harmless Villain - Just because Larissa never killed a human being doesn't mean she can't rip vampires apart.
  • Our Monsters Are Different
  • Shout-Out - Many due to the novel following elements from both Dracula and Frankenstein.
    • The book features a list of different departments of the English government. Department 19 is listed as CLASSIFIED, while MI 6 is also on the list.. Possibly unintentional, but that's what came to this troper's mind.
  • X Meets Y - Van Helsing meets Hellboy meets Underworld meets Men in Black meets Percy Jackson and The Olympians .