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Hey nerds! Did you know that George R. R. Martin has a whole big long writing career outside of A Song of Ice and Fire?
If you're like me, you probably did! But you didn't really care and hadn't arsed yourself to read any of the rest of his stuff, because ASOIAF can keep you occupied for years if you are a big enough dork about it (especially since learning Dothraki is now an option!).
However, I also really like vampires, and I must read a vampire story every few months or else I will start wandering the streets of Boston biting people. Or something. And since through my semi-magical ability to acquire lots of free books (by which I mean I have a network of indulgent older adults who send them to me) I had received a copy of Fevre Dream, I decided to change that.
Fevre Dream is unlike many of the other vampire novels I have read in that (a) it was not a romance, (b) it was not goofy as shit, and (c) I did not spend most if it going "Oooooooof course." Except a little at the beginning when I realized we were going to be spending part of the story in New Orleans. But it is not really a New Orleans story; this is a Mississippi River story, and particularly a story about Mark Twain's sort of Mississippi River--a Civil War-era one populated by colorfully batshit grouchy dudes who yell a lot, and a ton of steamboats.
Our human protagonist is Abner Marsh, a fat ugly steamboat captain, who you can tell is probably going to be awesome from the way GRRM goes on about how fat and ugly he is, which is different from the way he goes on about how ugly Sour Billy Tipton is (when his characters are awesome, he goes on about how ugly they are; when they are not awesome, he goes on about how angry and bitter they are that people dared find them ugly, how dare they have opinions).
There are two main vampire dudes: Joshua York, who co-owns the steamboat Fevre Dream with Abner, is the Good Vampire, the one who wants to live in harmony with humans and not kill them and all that stuff. Damon Julian is the Batshit Crazy Vampire, who dithers on about beauty and strength and the Natural Order Of Things and other social Darwinist bullshit and likes to buy really expensive slaves and eat them. In a bizarre twist on the usual vampire story, York is blond and Julian is brunet.
Things I like about this book that other people might not: actually, these are basically the same things that are why I really like Martin's writing in general and lots of other people do not. The story isn't very fast-paced, moving along at the slow, rich, detail-filled, thought-by-thought pace that modern readers think is slow and people with degrees in slogging through Victorian literature think is a nice middling sort of walking speed. The other is that Martin writes in the first person, and frequently from the POV of characters who are, quite simply, terrible people. For some people, being in the heads of murderers and rapists and slave-buyers and all sorts of generally despicable bigoted fucksticks is just way too disturbing for leisure reading, which I quite understand. Other people seem to have some issues with the idea that terrible people are simultaneously both terrible and people, which is a widespread cultural delusion that I think requires stamping out ASAP, particularly since in its worst incarnations it leads to those sorts of "So-and-so couldn't have committed that terrible crime; s/he has a family and a dog and goes grocery shopping like a normal person" attitudes that occasionally clog up our already dysfunctional justice system. (Sorry for the digression; I'm having opinions all over the place today.)
I, personally, love books with terrible people in them where you get to see that the terrible people are both terrible and real people, instead of cartoony black-hat-wearing cat-stroking villains who exist just to fuck the hero's shit up because every story needs an antagonist (I AM LOOKING AT YOU, MRS. BATES FROM DOWNTON ABBEY). I particularly love books where there are some morally ambiguous people and some terrible people and very few good people and the good people are still petty and stupid sometimes, because let's face it, people are very complicated and also we kind of suck. I also like it when the good and bad people do not sort themselves into good and bad factions on opposing sides of the plot, which is part of why ASOIAF is so brilliant, but this does not really apply here. Fevre Dream sorts itself into "good" and "bad" characters and social groupings pretty clearly, partly because it is way the fuck shorter then ASOIAF so we really only have time to tell the story of Joshua/humans/"good" vamps versus Damion/Sour Billy/'bad" vamps. Although there are a requisite number of fractures and betrayals within both of these coalitions, so that is fun.
ASOIAF fans will also find Fevre Dream noticeably lacking in those WTF moments that make you go back and reread things to make sure that really just happened, but again I think this is largely due to it being a three-hundred-page story instead of a seven-thousand-page one. There are still things that happened in it that surprised me, which is quite impressive, because either the vampire novel has become the tropiest and most predictable genre ever, or I am way, way, way too familiar with it. For example: in the obligatory Our Vampires Are Different scene, Martin's vampires are actually different! And in plot-specific ways, not just in superficial ways about skin and hair and nails that make you roll your eyes at how hard the author is angling for a movie and/or how much this is clearly important because someone is going to be banging the vampire later. Also: I don't know shit about steamboats, so all the stuff about steamboats was new and informative. (I'm sure steamboats are less esoteric than the stuff that showed up in the last vampire book I read that I did know, but I'm a strange person.) Also also: while there is an obligatory Our Vampires Are Different discussion, there are also other incarnations of that discussion where various characters (both human and vampire) deliberately lie about the ways in which the vampires are different (or, I suppose, that they are the same) in order to further their own ends. It is awesome.
I don't want to spoil anything, so I'm going to end here.
PS I apologize for the dreadful pun in the subject line.
If you're like me, you probably did! But you didn't really care and hadn't arsed yourself to read any of the rest of his stuff, because ASOIAF can keep you occupied for years if you are a big enough dork about it (especially since learning Dothraki is now an option!).
However, I also really like vampires, and I must read a vampire story every few months or else I will start wandering the streets of Boston biting people. Or something. And since through my semi-magical ability to acquire lots of free books (by which I mean I have a network of indulgent older adults who send them to me) I had received a copy of Fevre Dream, I decided to change that.
Fevre Dream is unlike many of the other vampire novels I have read in that (a) it was not a romance, (b) it was not goofy as shit, and (c) I did not spend most if it going "Oooooooof course." Except a little at the beginning when I realized we were going to be spending part of the story in New Orleans. But it is not really a New Orleans story; this is a Mississippi River story, and particularly a story about Mark Twain's sort of Mississippi River--a Civil War-era one populated by colorfully batshit grouchy dudes who yell a lot, and a ton of steamboats.
Our human protagonist is Abner Marsh, a fat ugly steamboat captain, who you can tell is probably going to be awesome from the way GRRM goes on about how fat and ugly he is, which is different from the way he goes on about how ugly Sour Billy Tipton is (when his characters are awesome, he goes on about how ugly they are; when they are not awesome, he goes on about how angry and bitter they are that people dared find them ugly, how dare they have opinions).
There are two main vampire dudes: Joshua York, who co-owns the steamboat Fevre Dream with Abner, is the Good Vampire, the one who wants to live in harmony with humans and not kill them and all that stuff. Damon Julian is the Batshit Crazy Vampire, who dithers on about beauty and strength and the Natural Order Of Things and other social Darwinist bullshit and likes to buy really expensive slaves and eat them. In a bizarre twist on the usual vampire story, York is blond and Julian is brunet.
Things I like about this book that other people might not: actually, these are basically the same things that are why I really like Martin's writing in general and lots of other people do not. The story isn't very fast-paced, moving along at the slow, rich, detail-filled, thought-by-thought pace that modern readers think is slow and people with degrees in slogging through Victorian literature think is a nice middling sort of walking speed. The other is that Martin writes in the first person, and frequently from the POV of characters who are, quite simply, terrible people. For some people, being in the heads of murderers and rapists and slave-buyers and all sorts of generally despicable bigoted fucksticks is just way too disturbing for leisure reading, which I quite understand. Other people seem to have some issues with the idea that terrible people are simultaneously both terrible and people, which is a widespread cultural delusion that I think requires stamping out ASAP, particularly since in its worst incarnations it leads to those sorts of "So-and-so couldn't have committed that terrible crime; s/he has a family and a dog and goes grocery shopping like a normal person" attitudes that occasionally clog up our already dysfunctional justice system. (Sorry for the digression; I'm having opinions all over the place today.)
I, personally, love books with terrible people in them where you get to see that the terrible people are both terrible and real people, instead of cartoony black-hat-wearing cat-stroking villains who exist just to fuck the hero's shit up because every story needs an antagonist (I AM LOOKING AT YOU, MRS. BATES FROM DOWNTON ABBEY). I particularly love books where there are some morally ambiguous people and some terrible people and very few good people and the good people are still petty and stupid sometimes, because let's face it, people are very complicated and also we kind of suck. I also like it when the good and bad people do not sort themselves into good and bad factions on opposing sides of the plot, which is part of why ASOIAF is so brilliant, but this does not really apply here. Fevre Dream sorts itself into "good" and "bad" characters and social groupings pretty clearly, partly because it is way the fuck shorter then ASOIAF so we really only have time to tell the story of Joshua/humans/"good" vamps versus Damion/Sour Billy/'bad" vamps. Although there are a requisite number of fractures and betrayals within both of these coalitions, so that is fun.
ASOIAF fans will also find Fevre Dream noticeably lacking in those WTF moments that make you go back and reread things to make sure that really just happened, but again I think this is largely due to it being a three-hundred-page story instead of a seven-thousand-page one. There are still things that happened in it that surprised me, which is quite impressive, because either the vampire novel has become the tropiest and most predictable genre ever, or I am way, way, way too familiar with it. For example: in the obligatory Our Vampires Are Different scene, Martin's vampires are actually different! And in plot-specific ways, not just in superficial ways about skin and hair and nails that make you roll your eyes at how hard the author is angling for a movie and/or how much this is clearly important because someone is going to be banging the vampire later. Also: I don't know shit about steamboats, so all the stuff about steamboats was new and informative. (I'm sure steamboats are less esoteric than the stuff that showed up in the last vampire book I read that I did know, but I'm a strange person.) Also also: while there is an obligatory Our Vampires Are Different discussion, there are also other incarnations of that discussion where various characters (both human and vampire) deliberately lie about the ways in which the vampires are different (or, I suppose, that they are the same) in order to further their own ends. It is awesome.
I don't want to spoil anything, so I'm going to end here.
PS I apologize for the dreadful pun in the subject line.
