The Route of Ice and Salt – review

Author: José Luis Zárate

Translation: David Bowles

First published: 1998 (2021, English translation)

Contains spoilers

The Blurb: 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 review: We have looked at vehicles focused entirely on the doomed voyage of the Demeter before. There has been the novel Dracula’s Demeter by Doug Lamoreux and, in graphic form, Bram Stoker’s Death Ship. On the small screen the second (feature length) episode of Dracula (2020) was entirely about the voyage and, of course, the voyage finally got feature film treatment with the Last Voyage of the Demeter. This is another recounting of the fateful voyage, but one that actually pre-dates all the above (in the original Spanish), and can I just say wow.

The book is in three parts. Firstly, and noted immediately in the blurb, this is a retelling through a queer lens, entitled Before the Storm and the largest section of the novel. The Captain is gay, closeted from his crew (and haunted by the death of a lover). This section explores this and the view of the voyage as things begin to go wrong, with beautifully composed, evocative prose. It is a queer fever dream, both a distraction from and communication of the evil taking the ship. The book then moves into the Log of the Demeter, taking Stoker and expanding upon the original logs in the novel, and, finally, the catastrophic denouement.

There are several vampire descriptions used, names from around the globe as befits a ship where crews come and go from an international pool. Mention is made of the vrykolakas from Thera, delicately hanging above their victim, causing a deep sleep as they steal their breath. His Romanian mate has told the Captain of strigoi, described as demonic birds in the night – which brought the idea of the deathbird from Nosferatu to mind. The wieszcy are mentioned, dead devouring themselves in Wallachia (Bane associates them with Poland and auto-vampirism is not mentioned in her description). The book also mentions the Indian rakshasa, Ghanian monsters and Bulgarian obours. It is a cornucopia of references that works well.

One scene I particularly liked described the dead sailors clinging to the hull of the ship – unable to let go and look for other ships as the water hurts – for a sailor it is a consecrated thing – and yet the pull of blood might be more than the pain of the water. I also liked, in a vampire sense, the way the rats of the Demeter hid, starved and tried to flee the Demeter, replaced by the Count’s familiar rats.

This was a marvellous book, lyrical and haunting. The queer aspect added a layer that was welcomed and added depth to the primary story. 9 out of 10. My thanks to Sarah, who bought me this for Christmas.

In Paperback @ Amazon US

In Paperback @ Amazon UK

With Stake and Spade: Vampiric Diversity in Poland – review

Author: Łukasz Kozak

Translator: Mark Bence

First published: 2020

The blurb: Everyone has heard of vampires, but few know about upiórs, strzygas, strzygońs, and wieszczys. Yet sources from Poland and the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth offer a wealth of fascinating material to discover Slavic beliefs in the living dead, which later became a universal myth known the world over. This book contains a small but representative selection of 80 texts spanning almost 500 years, ranging from scholarly works and religious treatises to official documents, ethnographic essays, and press reports on true events.

The review: I was lucky enough to win this volume in a competition. We are firmly in the realm of the folkloric vampire, and the Polish variants of the restless dead as listed in the blurb. The introduction to the book looks into the four types to offer an overview but the main event is a reproduction of various documents (be it passages from books, manuscripts, newspaper reports etc) which mention the walking dead. Each entry is referenced to the appropriate source document, which is essential, though an index may have been a useful addition.

There are some really interesting moments within the texts. The idea of who might become the restless dead and the aspects and habits are fairly interchangeable between the types but – remembering that I primarily look at the vampire in a media sense – what I found interesting was some of the tropes that came up that are not commonly known as being folkloric and more a media invention.

So, several entries spoke about the vampire returning to the coffin/grave at cock crow and some suggested that at the point of cock crow an exposed corpse would die – not too unusual from a media point of view, the idea that the restless dead return to an inanimate state at daybreak can be found in the Vampire and the Devil’s Son (1852), to offer an early fictional example. However, there were several entries that suggested that the vampire would be reduced to tar on the cock crow – and this brings the trope of death by daylight to mind and is fascinating to find a folkloric variant. Another fascinating entry dating to 1873 highlighted a conflation of vampire (in the form of upiór) and werewolf, to quote: “After his death, he was thought to have become a werewolf, who left his resting place at night to wander about the village, visiting houses and terrifying God’s folk, like an omen of the plague…”

Most fascinating was the following entry from the Gazeta Polska, dated 1871, which said about criminals who are insufficiently punished when alive who will “turn their bodies into so-called “strzygas” or “upiórs” (which the populace imagine in the form of bats) that emerge from their graves at midnight”. This is a pre-Stoker and folkloric association of bat and vampire and is, from my point of view, rather exciting.

The main event is presented as is, and so there is no analysis just presentation of the entries – so for a more casual reader this may make the volume less engaging, though it is an invaluable source for researchers (be that of the vampire or Polish folklore generally). The volume uses high grade, thick paper stock. I will quickly mention the graphic (almost pop) art, in orange, purple and lilac that appears within volume as well as adorning the cover - not my cup of tea, I’m afraid, however it is very striking and makes this volume stand out against its academic fellows. 9 out of 10.