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
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