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mediaevalmusereads · 3 years ago

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The Route of Ice and Salt. By Jose Luis Zarate. Translated by David Bowles. Vancouver, BC: Innsmouth Free Press, 2021.

Rating: 2/5 stars

Genre: novella, horror

Part of a Series? No.

Summary: 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.

***Full review under the cut.***

Content Warnings: sexual content, dubious consent, allusions to pedophilia/child prostitution, body horror, blood, self-harm, suicide, homophobia

Overview: This novella crossed my recommendations on Tumblr and the subject matter seemed up my alley. A retelling of Dracula’s journey across the ocean from the point of view of the ship’s captain? Some nautical homoeroticism? Sign me up! Unfortunately, I didn’t enjoy this nearly as much as I hoped I would. I struggled with the first section, which felt like 22 chapters of the author trying to be philosophical or poetic while forgetting to write an actual narrative. Section 2 was better, as it had some more concrete plot details, and I was able to finish off the novella after that. So, what’s preventing me from giving this book more than 2 stars is the first section, which took up space that I felt could have been used to enhance sections 2 and 3. While the wandering, lyrical prose might enchant some, it definitely left me feeling lost.

Writing: I can’t comment on whether the lyrical prose is something inherent in the original Spanish and whether the translator is faithful to that. What I can say, however, is that I personally found the first part of this book to be difficult - not because I dislike poetry or sensuous prose, but because it felt like the author was trying too hard to be artistic, to the point where he forgot to actually tell a story. The unnamed captain - our POV character - seems to be constantly horny and his thoughts wander from place to place so much that it’s difficult to follow any given thread. The sentences themselves were also laden with figurative language, and sometimes, the choice of words made for confusing analogies and metaphors. I even had trouble trying to see the connections between thoughts and how they built upon one another. Perhaps this is the purpose; maybe we’re supposed to see the captain as this kind of detached, self-absorbed person. But personally, I found the prose to be too self-indulgent for my tastes.

Something else that bothered me was the use of archaisms throughout the book. There were many instances of “mayhap” and “naught” (to the point where they felt repetitive) and some characters use words like “thee” where others don’t. While archaic language can be used well, I ultimately felt like it was too inconsistent in this book.

Also, because this book is focused more on sensuality than plot, the pace felt a bit off, especially in part 1. I didn’t really feel a sense of dread (that one might expect in a horror), nor did the author seem to build suspense until part 2. Instead, it felt like a weird thing would happen, and instead of exploring how that thing affected the characters, the prose would veer off into more sensual and abstract language. I think I would have liked to see Zarate lean more into the horror and the suspense rather than breaking it up with the captain’s thoughts, and even if he wanted to build up the sensuality, I think he could have done a better job mixing it into the everyday occurrences on the ship.

There were some nice (and by that I mean evocative) images, however. Anything involving the rats elicited a visceral reaction from me, and there were some descriptions that felt like they were trying to make a point. I also really liked the way bodies were described and panic started to rise once crewmembers started disappearing, but I feel like it’s important to point out that most of those moments happened in parts 2 and 3 (with the exception of the rats). Thus, if you can get through part 1, you might find parts 2 and 3 to be a bit easier to understand, and the figurative language more appropriate.

Plot: The plot of this novella seems to be the captain coming to terms with his internalized homophobia while his crew is tormented by Dracula. Personally, I liked the idea of contrasting “good” desire (homoeroticism and homosexual attraction) with “bad” desire (destructiveness, possessiveness). But the fact that this was a queer novella didn’t automatically make this book click for me. I still have trouble trying to explain the events of the plot because the focus is so fixed on the captain’s thoughts.

Not trying to be mean, but the afterword of this book helped me understand the story’s themes and events more than my own academic training. The afterward is written by author Poppy Z. Brite and it clearly communicates the relationship between vampirism and queerness and eroticism while also illuminating the significance of certain images in the novella. If you’re not a stickler about spoilers, I would honestly recommend reading the afterword first, then reading the novella, so that you have something of a guide to help you through the main text.

Characters: The only character in this novella that felt developed was the captain, and ultimately, I didn’t enjoy being in his head. While I sympathize with his struggle to come to terms with his sexuality, I didn’t think it was realistic or helpful for the captain to have a boner for every man he sees. Maybe there’s some truth to that if your sexuality is repressed - I can’t speak to that, so if I’m wrong, I’d love to learn. But for me, I found the omnipresent horniness to be a bit much.

The only place where I felt more sympathetic towards him was near the end, when the captain realizes that he is not at fault for what happened to his lover. There was some beauty to that scene, though it was disturbing, and I think it definitely shows some character development, but because I didn’t quite connect with the captain or his goals at the beginning, I felt like I couldn’t get invested in his eventual end.

TL;DR: The Route of Ice and Salt is a welcome original novella by a Mexican author, exploring queer themes within the story of Dracula. However, the density of the prose in the first 22 chapters might put a lot of readers off, and the slow pace may prevent readers from fully connecting with the story.

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brightbeautifulthings · 4 years ago

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Complete Tales & Poems by Edgar Allan Poe

"'For the love of God, Montresor!' 'Yes,' I said, 'for the love of God!'"

Year Read: 2020

Rating: 2/5

Context: Starting two years ago, I’ve picked an intimidatingly long classic to read over the course of a year. I have a problem with trying to read books as fast as I possibly can, so if I set myself a thousand page novel, I’ll try to pound it in a week, and it will just be a miserable experience all around. So, a year is a nice compromise. I’ve hit the major Poe horror stories in the past, and I’ve been thinking about rereading them, but I couldn’t decide where to start. Reread my favorites? Read the ones I’ve heard of? What if I’m missing something awesome? As usual, my go-to answer is to read them ALL. For more thoughts on individual stories, see my monthly blog posts. Trigger warnings: character death, torture, live burial, cannibalism, decapitation, animal abuse, injury, severe illness, racism/xenophobia, anti-Semitism, ableism, slurs, mental illness, bitter ranting from the reviewer.

Thoughts: My edition, with an introduction by Wilbur S. Scott, is probably not the edition I would have picked, since I prefer more notes or even essays to help me out with books that are 100+ years old. Context is helpful. Somehow though, my dad and I ended up with the same edition, so we decided to read it together. My dad loves all things horror (I come by it naturally), and we’re both longtime Poe fans, especially if you happen to put Vincent Price in one of his film adaptations. Scott’s introduction is particularly pretentious for a book we probably found in the bargain bin, and he manages to criticize the horror genre for not being “literary enough”. This is an Edgar Allan Poe collection, right? Way to alienate 90% of your audience right from the start. You can’t snub an entire genre and then attempt to explain why people like it. Like a lot of critical writing, it tells us more about Scott than it does about Poe, and I was circling his typos to entertain myself by the end of the introduction.

It did not get better. In short, I actively hated so much of this collection, and it's my most arduous and least enjoyed year-long read to date. To be even shorter, the only stories I found worth reading for pleasure were the horror ones I had already read and loved, and I'm afraid to examine too closely whether that has more to do with nostalgia and pop culture than the stories themselves. Poe has a way of lingering on pointless descriptions and belaboring a point to its absolute death, alongside an aggressively pretentious tone that suggests the narrator (and, by extension, Poe himself), knows everything there is to know about everything and you're an idiot for even asking. His true talent may not be horror, but in turning what might have been a good story into an intellectual soapbox and hammering it the point of absurdity. It would be different if the stories actually were intelligent instead of ridiculous. I’m happy to talk Aristotelian ethics, but the point is never to intellectually engage the reader–-it’s to show how clever the writer is.

On the whole, it seems like Poe struggles with telling a straightforward story, and I can’t tell if it’s because the short story genre has changed so much since then or because he’s so busy trying to show readers how smart he is that he forgets that stories have very specific components like suspense, exposition, or rising action (or endings). Most of them consist of some narrator speaking the entire time (I have all kinds of problems with this, from, “You just ruined the twist of your own story” to “No human talks for thirty uninterrupted minutes unless some idiot gave them a microphone.”), and few of them have anything resembling action, plot/character development, strong themes, or closure. There’s an essay-like quality to some of them (“The Imp of the Perverse”, “The Premature Burial”) where he seems to be trying to tease out a concept on an intellectual level, sometimes for pages and pages, before he remembers that he’s telling a story with characters and what could loosely be called a plot. I could do without all the intellectualizing, verbal grandstanding, and narrative cartwheels; just tell a good story, please.

And he does, sometimes. It's clear why Poe remains an essential part of the horror canon because those are easily the best stories in the collection, and I don't think that's just because I'm a horror fan. Horror seems to age better than some other genres because certain things remain consistently scary over decades or even centuries--being buried alive, for example. “The Fall of the House of Usher” is permeated by a feeling of bleak foreboding, culminating in some truly terrifying images, and “The Tell-tale Heart” is one of the better examples of Poe’s rambling narrator who thinks a lot of his own intelligence and slowly unravels over guilt. Both scared me to death when I was a kid, and I’m happy to see that they still maintain a high creep factor as an adult. (I also had the Great Illustrated Classics Tales of Mystery and Terror as a kid, because all a story about being buried alive needs is an illustration!) “The Cask of Amontillado” has long been one of my favorites (because there is something deeply wrong with me, probably), and “The Pit and the Pendulum” and “The Masque of the Red Death” are both top-notch horrifying, the latter a classic plague story that's a little *too* relevant to the times just now (but, you know, also one of my favorites). The clock symbolism is some of the best in the entire collection. Why, pray tell, would you be afraid of time?

The tolerable stories are the detective ones and the adventure ones, in that order. I can see why Poe’s detective stories like “The Gold Bug” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” spawned a genre. I was getting clear Sherlock Holmes vibes from his character, Dupin. However, it reaffirms that something is a classic because of its effects on literature as a whole and not because it’s still all that accessible. Just because something is the first of its kind doesn’t mean it’s the best of its kind; in fact, it usually isn’t because that was only a starting place. I can’t help feeling “Murders” would have been more compelling as a horror story than a detective story. Murdering gorillas are cool; listening to someone talk about murdering gorillas, much less cool. I was extremely irritated by his hot air balloon stories ("The Balloon Hoax", "The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall"), but apparently Jules Verne loved them, which makes a lot of sense. I was getting a lot of Verne vibes from things like "A Descent Into the Maelstrom" and even the utterly long, boring, and racist "Narrative of A. Gordon Pym." It's clear they had influence on other writers, even if they're not the best examples of their genres.

Which brings us back around to the bad. It's not worth my time or yours to list all the terrible stories in this collection, but I can briefly summarize what I found so terrible about them. First, Poe is tragically, emphatically unfunny. The things he seems to find humorous are either in very poor taste now (his tasteless descriptions of mental patients in “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether”), or they’re outright ridiculous, almost slapstick, like the woman who gets her head stuck in a clock and is subsequently decapitated by it in “A Predicament,” which is an odd sequel to “How to Write a Blackwood Article.” I’m sensing that Poe is making fun of intellectuals or would-be intellectuals here, but with so much time and cultural distance, it’s hard to tell. In any case, it led to a running joke (“I’m going out for groceries!” “Don’t stick your head in any clocks!”). Somehow, I doubt this is the major takeaway Poe was hoping for.

Worst of all, they don't age well on representation either. Poe seems at pains to offend every single minority he possibly can throughout his oeuvre. There are a lot of horribly racist depictions of African Americans, snide comments about Jewish people (or the much more obvious anti-Semitism in “Four Beasts In One” where a mad king has a thousand Jews killed--really?), and blatant ableism (“Hop-Frog”). It's at its worst in "Narrative of A. Gordon Pym," a novella that spans over a hundred pages, that is basically a tedious, xenophobic setup to paint the native population of an island as the most horrific and duplicitous monsters imaginable. (The narrator previously ate one of his shipmates, so can he really afford to throw stones here?) For inexplicable reasons, that story isn't finished, and by that point, I was grateful.

Poe's poetry is a little easier to work through than his prose. I love "The Raven" with its lilting rhymes and dark message, and "Annabel Lee" is very pretty, both ubiquitous in popular culture. I also liked "Dream-Land," "Al Aaraaf" (where Ligeia makes another appearance), and "Alone." Most of the poetry has pretty simple rhyme schemes, the subjects mainly love and loss. There's an excerpt of an unfinished play, "Politian," included as well, but it didn't make much of an impression on me. TL;DR: I stand by my initial opinion, which is to read his horror stories for pleasure and, possibly, his detective and adventure stories for genre purposes, and to skip the rest. I'll probably be looking for a smaller edition of the stories I like. This one is a massive hardcover, more like a book you put on your coffee table to look impressive than a book you actually read (but I don’t have a coffee table, so it’s actually just taking up more room on the shelf than any one book has a right to).

#book review #complete tales and poems #Edgar Allan Poe #horror fiction #poe readalong #2/5 #rating: 2/5 #2020 #bookoween

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pllsetskyonice · 7 years ago

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@yuriplisetsky is a size queen

Otabek Altin/Yuri Plisetsky

2,900 words

“What are you talking about?”

“Your Twitter? Your thread that spends about ten tweets waxing poetry about the size of my dick? Everyone’s talking about it, the fans are going crazy, I had Victor ringing me up half an hour ago to ask if it was true and if I really had deflowered Russia’s Fairy like that, and I just – what the hell were you thinking, Yuri?”

In which Yuri gets drunk and Tweets some things he probably shouldn't have.

AO3 link

So @94mercy made this post that headcanoned that Yuri gets drunk one night and talks about the size of Otabek’s dick on social media, and I immediately knew I had to write it. Otherwise known as me just wanting to join in with all the hung!Otabek content that’s been coming out of this fandom in recent weeks.

(Also tagging @daddybek because that’s where this all started back in February)

They’ve been dating for a few months when it happens.

Yuri goes round to Mila’s for a few drinks after practice one day, and they steadily make their way through a bottle of vodka, laughing and talking about their respective partners. The music is loud and Yuri feels all loose and giggly as he reaches for his phone, taking selfies and documenting their escapades on Snapchat. He’s never been this drunk before, so drunk he’s not even sure what order his memories from the last few hours go in, so drunk that he can barely stand, so drunk that the room is spinning.

He sits down and opens Twitter, starting to type. He doesn’t even think about what he’s Tweeting, just starts a thread and keeps on going until he gets it all off his chest. Mila is grabbing at his hands and pulling him up so they can dance together again, and Yuri’s phone lies on the couch, forgotten.

So he doesn’t see what he’s done until morning.

It’s the sound of his phone vibrating loudly on the bedside table that wakes him up. He’s in Mila’s spare bedroom, a small sized room with what feels like the most uncomfortable bed he’s ever slept on, but it evidently didn’t bother him at whatever time he collapsed onto last night. At least he made it into bed, he supposes. That’s an achievement, even if he’s still wearing yesterday’s clothes.

He grabs at his phone, squinting at the screen. It reads 6 AM, and is somehow fully charged, even though he has doesn’t remember plugging it in last night. It’s far too early. Yuri wants nothing more at this particular moment in time than to roll over and go back to sleep to avoid dealing with this hangover from hell, but it’s Otabek that’s calling him, so he supposes that he’d better answer.

“Hello?” he says, his voice sounding all croaky as he unplugs his phone and rolls back onto his back. There’s light streaming in through a gap in the curtains, and Yuri would get up and close them properly, but they’re too far away to deal with right now. Instead, he opts for the easier option: pulling his blankets over his head.

“Yuri, what the fuck?” Otabek asks on the other end of the line. Even in this still half drunk, hungover state, Yuri can tell that this is Not Good. “What were you thinking?”

“What are you talking about?” Yuri replies. He wonders if it’s about his and Mila’s Snapchat stories, but from what he can remember there’s nothing too outrageous on them, just some really bad singing in questionable English to pop songs neither of them like.

Yuri fumbles with his phone, opening Twitter with his phone call with Otabek still active in the background. He doesn’t even need to go onto his profile to see it, it’s all over his timeline. “Oh, shit,” he swears as he scrolls through the Tweets. “I don’t even remember posting any of this. I was so drunk, Beka. So drunk. I’m sorry.”