This is what the drowned hear

[bloodygranuaile]

 While I generally consider my fanfiction days to be behind me, I cannot avoid periodically dipping my toes into the world of reimagined 19th century Gothic classics, although as I get older and crankier I am finding myself with less and less patience for the ones that I think are done poorly or betray a shallow understanding of their source material. That does still leave me plenty to work with, though, whether it’s sensationalistic TV mashups like Penny Dreadful (minus the last two episodes of Season 2, which we will pretend never happened) or experimental niche content like that Carmilla webseries I totally intend to watch one of these days. So when I saw Silvia Moreno-Garcia posting on Twitter about publishing an English translation of a cult Mexican queer horror novella about the voyage of the Demeter, The Route of Ice and Salt, I had one moment of “Am I really going to pay twenty whole US dollars for gay Dracula fanfiction?” and then promptly answered myself “Yes.”

 

The Route of Ice and Salt is a strange little book, largely about dreams and in a self-consciously literary style that is probably going to read as a bit pretentious if you’re not in the mood for it, especially in the beginning when it’s not clear what’s actually going on yet other than that the captain is extremely horny and also having weird dreams about ship’s rats and the two are uncomfortably closely related. After the first third or so of the book, things take a little bit more of a discernable shape than “Gothic means mucking about with a bunch of taboo stuff” as the horrors of the Demeter’s voyage unfold outside the captain’s imagination as well as within it. The men go mad in various ways and disappear as the ship fills with fog, and white rats that fight the usual gray ship’s rats, and assorted types of bad weather, and other things that variously distract from or exacerbate the captain’s generally tortured emotional state. Ultimately, the captain has to deal with the demons from his past--here the trauma of his first lover, Mikhail, being killed by a mob and his corpse subjected to the sort of degradations that Eastern European folk beliefs demanded to make “safe” the burials of “unnatural” people--in order to deal with the demon in his present, i.e., the vampire in the cargo hold, and thus sailing us into his brief cameo in the pages of Dracula, lashed to the wheel of an empty ship, with only his ship’s log to tell what happened.

 

Overall: Very creepy, very horny, to the point where there’s an afterword by Poppy Z. Brite even though he retired from horror like 20 years ago. I have only read one Poppy Z. Brite book but I feel like you either understand what I mean by “Poppy Z. Brite levels of creepy + horny + gay” or you don’t, but anyway, this book is that. 

 

Also, the actual book itself is lovely, with big fancy chapter headings and the obligatory “this is a book about ships” sort of fonts, and claustrophobically wide margins. 

 

Comments

[cupcake_goth]

1. I will add The Route of Ice and Salt to my reading list immediately.

2. "I feel like you either understand what I mean by “Poppy Z. Brite levels of creepy + horny + gay” or you don’t, but anyway, this book is that." AHAHAHAHAHA I know *exactly* what that means. Oh Poppy.