I wanted to like this book but unfortunately it was a DNF for me. It has been sitting on my shelf for so long it’s time to just walk away. Hopefully it is a winner for others!

A copy of this book was provided to me by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Wow. I was soooooo not expecting what I found between these pages. I am still reeling! Also, rats are like my biggest fear, LOL. I have so many feelings but overall, this is something I'm definitely glad I got the chance to checkout. I would have never thought Mexico could produce something so queer and intense! I want to find even more titles like this now!!

If you’ve read Dracula, you have an idea of how this story ends. It’s not precisely happy. As far as vampirism goes, however, there are worse fates than redemption. Though at times heavy-handed in his metaphors and prose, Zárate dares to grab vampire lore by the fangs. His examination of the monstrous queer dismantles Stoker’s longest lasting contribution to the genre: if Dracula frets over the monster within the man, The Route of Ice and Salt insists upon the humanity in perceived monstrosity.

Marisa Mercurio

The Route of Ice and Salt is a lyrical narrative of a sea voyage. Filled with dark desire, David Bowles managed a beautiful translation. Thank you NetGalley for the opportunity to read this book

I dont normally read horror but this was a very unique and spooky retelling of dracula. It was definitely worth reading

Dracula by Bram Stoker is my all time favorite book and when I came across this reimagining of Dracula's voyage, I knew I had to read it. Boy was I in for a treat! I'm ashamed to say that I didn't realize the significance of this novella. Republished and translated to English for the first time, this novella had quite an impact to Latin American literature. I loved the introduction from Silvia Moreno-Garcia as well as the afterward from Poppy Z. Brite.

There's something about being isolated to a ship that I just find horrifying and this novella is no different. The atmosphere on the ship starts to turn and you can just feel the darkness start to close in. The crew mates start to turn on each other, paranoia and fear settle in. There's not a lot of character building but you really don't miss it. The vampire elements are a slow build and aren't quite in your face as other books. It's just a subtle darkness always at the edges.

I've had this book in my possession for quite some time and I'm so glad I picked it up! Thank you to NetGalley and Innsmouth Free Press for a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This novel (with one of the prettiest covers) is based on Bram Stoker's Dracula, the journey of Demeter (Demetrius), the ship in which the count moves from Bulgaria to London. I will admit that this is definitly a slower read as soon as you begin and it doesn't change much in the first half. It's drowned in dreams and memories to build up. The second half is much faster paced since it focuses on what the mystery behind what is written in the ship's log.. Overall an okay experience that I'd recommend to a read who enjoys paranormal mystery and intense detail.
Full review to come on YouTube.

Everyone thinks they know the story of Dracula – and we all do. Sorta/kinda. Not necessarily because we’ve read the original but because we’ve seen one or more variations of it. The Count’s story is part of the cultural zeitgeist. We ALL know who he is.

(If you haven’t read the original, it’s available in ebook free from your local public library AND from a host of online retailers including Amazon. If you want to get the flavor of the story there’s also an excellent full-cast recording by L.A. Theatreworks that I highly recommend – especially for Halloween.)

But one of the things that gets lost in adaptations of the original work is that Dracula is an epistolary novel. It’s a story told in documents – not just letters but also newspaper accounts, diary entries and, as expanded upon in The Route of Ice and Salt, the terse entries in the captain’s log of the ship that brought Dracula’s crates of Transylvanian soil to Britain. And, unbeknownst to the captain and crew of the Demeter, Count Dracula himself.

Not that the captain doesn’t eventually find out about the vampire – just before he dies.

However, The Route of Ice and Salt is not a retelling of the original Dracula story. Rather, it’s an illumination and expansion of a dark and hidden place in that more famous tale. In the original, we read the terse prose of the captain’s official log. We learn that when the ship reached its destination, the crew was missing, presumed dead. And the unnamed captain was discovered lashed to the wheel of his doomed ship with a rosary clutched in his cold, dead hands.

This is his story.

Escape Rating A-: Dracula may be the entry point for this story for many readers, but the Count isn’t exactly THE point of the story. The Route of Ice and Salt is cult classic of Mexican fantasy, first published in 1998 by a small comic book publisher that didn’t survive its attempt to jump from comic books to prose. This is the first translation of the work into English, and it’s a creeping fever dream of a story that picks up on themes that were subtext in Dracula – and other early vampire stories – and moves them from subtext to explicit text.

The still-unnamed captain of the Demeter is gay, horny and has very explicit thoughts and feelings about his crew that he keeps to himself in the dark of the night but never indulges. For reasons that have explicitly to do with keeping discipline aboard the ship, maintaining the chain of command and the acknowledgement that his crew can’t really give consent because he’s their master while they’re aboard.

And that, if they report him to the ship’s owners when the Demeter is back home, he’ll not just be fired – he’ll be prosecuted, imprisoned and quite possibly killed. Just as his first lover was – something that he is still blaming himself for years if not decades later.

That blame brings up a second theme, the question of what, and who is truly the monster in this or any other monster tale. The captain sees himself as a monster, both for his own part in his lover’s death and for the desires that his society and his church consider monstrous.

It’s only at the end that he comes to the liberating realization, in the face of a literal bloodsucking fiend who has murdered his crew, that he is not a monster at all – no matter what anyone else might say.

But those aren’t reasons to read The Route of Ice and Salt. As much as it has to say in its own subtext, it’s the way that it says it that are the reasons to read the story.

This thing is creepy as hell. If you like horror of the creeping, crawling, looming variety, if you enjoy that sensation of drowning horror as you read deeper into something that you know is going to keep you up half the night, this is an excellent story of that type. I finished at 2 am and I honestly should have waited until morning because it left me seriously creeped out.

The language of the story is beautiful. At times it’s lush and poetic, and then it turns sharp as a knife – or a tooth. I suspect it’s even more lyrical in the original Spanish but the translation is quite lovely. In that aspect it reminds me of Nothing but Blackened Teeth although their language and vernaculars are literally at least a century apart. But still, that same sense of sinking into a pool of beautiful words – only to have the story almost literally jerk you down into its depths of nightmarish horror.

If you’re looking for a truly creepy Halloween read, take The Route of Ice and Salt.

3 Stars!



Dracula has always been one of my favorite novels. I have read it many times since I first picked it up as a teenager and it never fails to inspire terror and awe in me. Whenever I get a chance to pick up a book that draws on the mythos of that novel, I am happy to take a chance on it. This led me to The Route of Ice & Salt by Jose Luis Zarate.



On the surface, there was nothing unusual about this voyage. The Demeter would just be transporting 50 boxes of soil from Transylvania to England. It would be easy. The captain had done this type of voyage numerous times before. Nothing could possibly go wrong. It was about as easy as a voyage could be. Easy, that was, until the dreams started.



The captain is beset by dreams of extreme desire and lust even though he knows, as a gay man, that his desires are not acceptable in society. He almost feels as if there is some force that is intensifying his desires, pushing them past their normal limits, and adding a dark element to them. The captain new something was wrong. There was some that seemed to be infecting his ship with his desire. What should have once been a simple, short voyage has turned into something much darker and dangerous.



The Route of Ice & Salt is not an easy story to read but it does work. Now, it should be noted that this is a novella so it is shorter but that is a good thing because I think a longer version of the story would have been too much. But even though this is a shorter work, there is a lot packed into the story. It takes on the themes of sexuality and social norms, what is accepted by society and why, and the evils that artificial judgements of character place upon people. This is a little story with a huge agenda. Taken along with the fact that the book was written by a gay man and from a gay perspective in Mexico in the 1980's, there is a lot to unpack in this story and it takes some time and effort to work through it all. The reader should plan some time with this story to full understand the nuances of this tale.



The Route of Ice & Salt is ultimately not a story about Dracula. Instead, it uses Dracula as a means to unlock the secret desires that lie in the heart of men juxtaposed against the norms of society. What does it mean to be deviant? That is what the story seems to ask. Is it really Dracula stalking the people on the ship or society lurking in the shadows to punish the captain for being different? I would not call this a horror novella as such although there is some horror in it. It is instead an exploration of the human condition, what makes us who we are, and the way in which society tries to create conformity. Instead of telling a classic horror story, the novella instead asks who is the monster: Dracula or the men who hunt him because he is different?



I would like to thank Innsmouth Free Press and NetGalley for this review copy. The Route of Ice and Salt is available now.

I requested this simply because Silvia Moreno-Garcia is the publisher and I love her work. A horror novella inspired by Dracula, it is bold because of when it was first released and the conservative climate that received it.

Since Dracula is one of my all-time favourite stories, I was happy to read that this novella was going to fill such a vital detail in the original story that could never have been filled by the story itself. And I liked how it turned out well enough, though I was relieved that it was just a novella. I think, I wouldn't have appreciated it the way I did if the captain's monologues went on for a book's length.
I enjoyed the transcendence of the book, that you never knew what was actually happening and what was just the captain's imagination fueled by repressed desire and longing for something, someone he can never have (again). And, I liked how the story of his past got a sudden turn concerning guilt and punishment.
The book was very dense with emotion and feeling, and thought and desire and atmosphere - and it was good, I liked it. Nothing more, nothing less.

Awesome, atmospheric vingette on Dracula and specifically his trip across the ocean. I loved the care taken with the ship, and the descroptions of the characters and the sense of time passing so slowly.;

As a huge fan of Dracula and Dracula adaptations, I wanted The Route of Ice and Salt to be perfection, and it absolutely was. It's beautiful, haunting, and a real gem in the history of queer horror that has finally been translated (gorgeously) to English by David Bowles, thanks to Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Innsmouth Press.

Zárate’s cult vampire novella is a queer retelling of a small portion of the plot of Bram Stoker’s Dracula: the journey of the doomed Demeter. Varna to Whitby is a route the steadfast captain of the Demeter has traveled many times, alone among his men, dreams full of longings and pleasures he cannot permit himself. But something about this journey is different. Wrong. Rumors spread that something evil is stalking the captain’s ship and the crew are uneasy, looking to their captain to protect them.

I don’t have words for how much I loved this book. The prose is perfection. There are scenes that will stick with me forever. It’s like someone handed me a part of Stoker’s novel that was missing, and I can never unread this now. Not that I’d ever want to.

I discovered this book as Silvia Moreno-Garcia talked about it on Twitter.
It's a fascinating story, the struggle of a gay man with his internal homophobia and with a a vampire on his ship.
The style of writing is fascinating, a bit baroque and may it won't appeal if you want something simpler, and the characters are well developed.
It's a fascinating and enthralling read, a small gem I'm happy was rediscovered.
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine

I was stopping after every chapter because it was leading to nowhere. Too much philosophy about anything the captian saw, felt, did, thought about, and more, but there was no story after I read almost the first half of the book. I think the author wanted to honor the original style of Dracula, but he just overused flowery language.

This was incredibly weird and dark, but I sort of liked it. I thought the setting was incredible eerie which matched the tone of the writing. While the writing was quite lyrical and at times repetitive, every sentence felt ominous, like something would happen after every sentence. I appreciated the homage to vampirism and how it's been queer coded throughout history and literature, and I think that Zarate explored those themes really well. While the novella was fairly short, there were passages that felt very repetitive and overly wordy, which took me out of the story a few times. Overall, I really enjoyed this novella and I definitely recommend it if you are a fan of gothic horror or vampire stories.

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 (NOT Poppy Brite – Poppy Brite is his deadname, Martin is a trans man, I need people to stop being gross about this) 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.

The book was not at all what I had expected.
As a Dracula fan, I was particularly curious, especially after reading the foreword by one of my favourite authors.
I had not been aware of the historical significance of this book for the LGBTQ scene in Mexico, but this point is important to understand the book better.
The story is not so much a narrative as a dark metaphor for hunger and desire, sometimes indirect, sometimes very explicit. The omnipresence of sexual content may disturb some readers.

The Route of Ice and Salt by José Luis Zárate is dark and full of intense, creeping dread. It was completely unexpected and hauntingly beautiful. Zárate takes readers on a journey through the eyes of the Demeter’s captain, a homosexual man struggling to survive in a world that would destroy him and battling his own internalized homophobia. The tense psychological war that’s waged in the captain’s mind as his ship is isolated at sea is breathtaking. Zárate blends and parallels that internal struggle with the monstrous urges of the vampire hidden aboard the ship. As strange things continue to happen onboard and as crew members begin to disappear, the horror of the story only deepens. Readers are treated to some of the classic vampire lore, like the creeping fog, the sense of some unseen observer, and creatures lurking in the dark. The novella also includes a wonderful intro that discusses the connection between homosexuality and vampirism and should not be missed. Overall, this book was brilliant, beautifully written, and perfect for fans of Gothic horror.

2 stars. Interesting concept and I appreciate what this books has done at time when it was dangerous to do so, but I didn't always care for the writing and the main character was disgusting (which generally doesn't bother me I love books like Exquisite Corpse). Something just didn't click for me like everyone else. Review to come.

Due to being a high school English teacher, I am often behind on writing reviews. Here is a summary of my initial thoughts.