The Route of Ice and Salt
Ratings17
Average rating3.2
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.
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Artist inspires Artist and media inspires media. The Route of Ice and Salt ( La ruta del hielo y la sal) was originally published in 1998 by a Mexican comic publisher Grupo Editorial VID, it didn't take root and but it became cult classic. It's now in English for the first time through Silvia Moreno-Garcia's efforts.
This novella reimagines Dracula???s voyage to England on The Demeter. The Route of Ice and Salt gives the nameless Captain a voice as gay man in this time period. This book is really about hunger, the captain ‘s hunger for love and physical touch, his sexual fantasies regarding his crewmen and Dracula's hunger where each crewmember is attacked one after an other. The captain realizes that he has a feeling besides hunger for his men, love and he will fight for them. This novella is about the captain ‘s emotional trauma he experienced as a young man, his internalized homophobia and accepting himself. . Z??rate does this by writing poetically , i had to re read sentences more than once because they were beautiful but also because i had to keep track if the captain remembered a memory or if was present time. It felt like a fever dream at times, a beautiful one but still fever dream. The Route of Ice and Salt is horror, poetry and philosophical. The latine SFF community knows of it's existence and I'm happy English readership can experience this emotional weird queer gothic story
Spooky, gloomy, erotic, and emotionally overwrought - just as any classic vampire tale should be. Zarate's novella ties explicitly to the the history of the genre - set between the pages of Dracula - but stakes out its own territory at the same time.
I wasn't expecting that a queer retelling of the doomed voyage of the Demeter from Dracula would be so good, but it is. The kind of book where I pause because I think I should savor it more, then end up going back to.
