Genres: Queer Protagonists, Historical Fantasy
Representation: Gay MC
ISBN: 1927990297
Goodreads
A reimagining of Dracula’s voyage to England, filled with Gothic imagery and queer desire.
It’s an ordinary assignment, nothing more. The cargo? Fifty boxes filled with Transylvanian soil. The route? From Varna to Whitby. The Demeter has made many trips like this. The captain has handled dozens of crews.
He dreams familiar dreams: to taste the salt on the skin of his men, to run his hands across their chests. He longs for the warmth of a lover he cannot have, fantasizes about flesh and frenzied embraces. All this he’s done before, it’s routine, a constant, like the tides.
Yet there’s something different, something wrong. There are odd nightmares, unsettling omens and fear. For there is something in the air, something in the night, someone stalking the ship.
The cult vampire novella by Mexican author José Luis Zárate is available for the first time in English. Translated by David Bowles and with an accompanying essay by noted horror author Poppy Z. Brite, it reveals an unknown corner of Latin American literature.
I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
Highlights
~Lick it or fantasise about licking it, I guess
~suckerfish vampires
~don’t trust your dreams
~Dracula is a dick
Head’s up: minor spoilers ahead. Major spoilers for anyone who hasn’t read Dracula.
Well, I wish I hadn’t read that.
In a way, I guess that’s kind of a back-handed compliment: this is a horror novella, I generally avoid horror because I’m a wimp, and I found this utterly horrifying. That’s what a horror novella is supposed to be, right? Horrifying?
So.
The Route of Ice & Salt is the untold story of the doomed ship captain – and his crew – who, in the original novel, are hired to transport crates of the dirt of Transylvania to England for Dracula. In Dracula, the crew go unnamed and are discovered dead, their ship adrift, by the heroes; here, they get to be full characters, which of course makes their deaths even more tragic. It’s hard to feel real grief for the unnamed bystanders who are killed by the villain, but give them names and a chance to connect to them, and their deaths become much more powerful.
I absolutely hated it.
Critique the first: by all the gods, shut the fuck up already. The novella is first-person from the perspective of, you guessed it, the captain, and he is the most…pretentiously miserable/philosophical wretch. Every other sentence leads us into a paragraph of overly flowery prose (I’m not sure I have ever called prose too flowery in my life, I love purple prose, but this – just no) meditating on…anything his gaze lands on, I guess. The waves, the sky, the ways of rats. Pages and pages of this nonsense
The cold suffices until itself; the heat demands that we partake.
We can take refuge from the frost. It does not belong to us. We can cover ourselves with furs and approach the fire.
But what to do when the heat comes from within?
In the dead of night, our blood is like a sweat inside the body, warm sea nestled within our flesh, skin feverish and throbbing.
How to seek shelter from that which runs through our very veins?
That is one passage. From chapter one.
I will absolutely grant that there are some great images in there – I like ‘warm sea nestled within our flesh’, more or less – but the good gets drowned in the mess. Piled on top of each other, it crushes the whole. Sinks the ship. Whichever metaphor you prefer, the point is, it doesn’t work. Not for me.
Critique the second: I see what you tried to do there, but you fucked up.
In the afterword essay written by Billy Martin/Poppy Brite, it’s explained/pointed out that while, traditionally, vampirism is a metaphor or stand-in for sex and sexuality, Zárate deliberately places queerness and vampirism in opposition. The novella is, in a way, meant as a rebuke and critique of the perception of queerness, particularly the queerness of gay men, as being predatory and perverted and generally monstrous. Zárate makes it very clear: that (Dracula) is a monster. This (the captain) is a gay man. They are not interchangeable; they do not overlap. To be gay is not to be a monster, which is a concept pretty radical for the captain himself, seeing as the story is set in the late 1800s.
(The Route of Ice & Salt was first published in 1998. Given that there are still people who think gay = monster, it was probably a fairly radical concept in 1998, too.)
However.
This message is pretty severely undermined by the fact that the entire novella preceding it has portrayed the captain as a seriously, seriously gross human being. Up until quite near the end, he does almost nothing except obsessively fantasise about every member of his crew, in excessive and graphic detail (I mean, that’s a given, everything about this novella is done in excessive and graphic detail). He thinks about having sex with them constantly – basically embodying the fear so many straight men have about queer men, ie that queer men are fantasising about them constantly.
With his dying breaths (or rather, thoughts) the captain basically says that because he didn’t act on those thoughts, he is not a predator like Dracula. Which is correct!
However.
In chapter two, before the ship sets sail? He goes up to the men who have delivered the grave-dirt – ‘wild servants of some noble boyar’ – and first touches him fairly intimately (laying his hand on the man’s neck), and then LICKS AND SUCKS ON HIS NECK.
If I am a boyar, they should be instruments. I watch them as if they were things.
They are not. They are living flesh, movement, warm sweat…
But their decisions are no longer theirs. Puppets of firm faces, of naked necks that tense while they work, highlighting their skin, which invites me…
HEY ASSHOLE, HAVING SKIN IS NOT ANY KIND OF INVITATION.
Bear in mind, by the way, that these men, Tziganes, don’t share a language with the captain. They can’t communicate with him. I feel like that makes it worse.
I bring my lips to his neck and touch his salt.
My tongue a blade, a short finger that digs into his skin. Rough, earthy, bitter. And at that moment, mine. I surround it with my mouth, savoring that flesh intimately before slowly pulling away, letting my lips caress it, spiraling upon those muscles in smaller and smaller circles, until I withdraw, leaving a small trace of saliva.
HI.
YEAH.
NO.
So basically – yay, you don’t use your power over your crew to force them to have sex with you, or something. But you’re apparently perfectly happy to force yourself on someone who literally can’t tell you the word ‘no’. That makes it look a lot more like you’re ‘behaving’ with your crew because they could actually tell you what they think of you – and wouldn’t hesitate to hurt you for it – than it makes you look like a person who cares about consent.
What I’m saying is, I find the captain mostly gross as a person. That’s not bad writing. What is bad writing is building your entire story up to the revelation that gay men are not predators…using a character who has already revealed himself to be a predator.
It’s a stake to the heart of your message.
Proper horror fans (which I am not, I guess) will hopefully be happy to learn that there is so much horror to be found here. Most of it is sexual – the captain has sex with a rat in a dream (almost certainly Dracula’s influence), and later with the ship (definitely under Dracula’s influence). There’s mindfuckery galore, in a very traditional Dracula vein (yes, I went there, I will get some joy out of the trainwreck that was reading this book). There’s one particularly great image just before the climax, which would definitely make the movie posters if this were ever adapted for the screen, and sends chills down your spine in a genuinely impressive way.
But…I really wish I hadn’t read this. I feel like I need a gazillion baths after being in the captain’s head. It was a gross place to be in before Dracula started fucking with him. I need so much brain bleach.
My rating isn’t based on my being squicked out, but on the ridiculous prose and the undermining of the central message.
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