Full Disclosure: This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on January 19, 2021 in exchange for a potential review. I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.
The Route of Ice and Salt by José Luis Zárate (translated by David Bowles)
The Route of Ice and Salt is a novella originally published in 1998 in Mexico by a small press trying to break into the local Science Fiction and Fantasy market with Mexican authors. The novella was an adaptation of a small part of Bram Stoker's Dracula, namely the shipment of Dracula to England on the doomed ship Demeter, with the story being told from the point of view of its ill fated captain, now reimagined as a gay man in the homophobic world of 1897. The novella apparently became a cult hit in Mexico (even though its publisher failed) and was translated into French at one point, but only now is being translated into English for English-speaking audiences.
It's an impressive work, especially when given the context in which it was produced, in presenting a gay man in a homophobic time, confronted with horror and finding it in himself to proclaim his own value at the end in the face of that horror. I should add that this edition of the work comes backed with not one but three explanations of this context - a foreword by Silvia Moreno-Garcia explaining the context of its publication, a new foreword by the author as to why he would write a story about a Vampire and monsters, and an afterword by Poppy Z Brite on the literary connections between vampires and homosexuality and how that history applies to the novella. So it's kind of hard to miss what this novella is doing in this package given all that comes with it, but fortunately, what it's doing is fairly well done.
Quick Plot Summary: The Captain of the Demeter has a secret: he's a homosexual, in a world and time (1987) that hates and murders men for the mere idea of love of another man. Indeed, the Captain believes his own desires to be almost monstrous, desires that have gotten another man killed in the past, and works his best to hide them from his crew.
But when they take a commission to transport boxes of soil from Transylvania to England, the Captain and his crew of 9 begins to feel something strange and wrong on the journey - something dark and wrong. And when crew members begin to disappear, fear and terror will spread among the crew, until the Captain is left to faceoff with the nightmare himself, and to deal with a monster as it truly is.
Thoughts: Those familiar with Stoker's Dracula will have an idea of where this novella is going and who is going to survive, but Zárate changes things up tremendously by making the unnamed captain a gay man in a world where that carries a punishment of death. This is a man who has gone as far as to choose a crew and shipping route that will result in them wearing plenty of clothes, so that he won't be tempted by the sight of their sweaty skin. He doesn't just fear that he will be killed for acting on his desires, but that he might actually deserve to - that his own desires make him nothing more than a monster, no better than the terrifying rats that Dracula (unnamed here, but well you know) brings with him on the journey.
And so, even as the men die around him, even as the Captain's fate is sealed by Stoker's story, the Captain here still has his own journey that results in a triumph Stoker could never have given him. Zárate uses the horror of Dracula's actions, the creation of his hungry thralls, to create a contrast between what is and what isn't monstrous, and how it isn't desire itself that is monstrous, but what some people may do to feed it. I don't want to say more because summarizing this further will only ruin the impact of the revelation, one which arguably is not as necessary anymore in much of the world....and yet still is in others. And that makes this novella well worth reading, as an excellently crafted work with this message, which can reach more people now that it has been translated into English.
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