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Fevre Dream by George R.R. Martin
01/02/2005 . Source: Jennifer Howell 
pub: Bantam Spectra. 352 page enlarged paperback. Price: $15.00 (US), $21.00 (CAN). ISBN: 0-553-38305-1. Buy from Amazon US - Buy from Amazon UK
nb: US titles may only be available from Amazon US, and UK titles from Amazon UK. check out website: www.bantamdell.com
Having suffered through the latest works of Laurell K Hamilton, who would have thought that the best vampire novel I've read in ages would come from the pen of...George RR Martin. That would be the George RR Martin of all those huge fantasy doorstops I keep meaning to read then coming up with something that can only be described as a Southern gothic historical steamboat vampire horror hybrid, I think. It's kind of hard to pin it down to just the one genre, really.
Kind of hard to put the book down either, once it gets going on its trip down the Mississippi to New Orleans in the long hot summer of 1857. Captain Abner Marsh is a steamboat owner who's just lost nearly all his boats to river ice over a harsh winter. When a tall, pale and ominous stranger named Joshua York offers to pay for a new steamer in an unusual partnership, Marsh agrees against all his better judgement. But he gets the Fevre Dream, the grand kind of boat he's always dreamt of, and a partner who likes to sleep by day and drink an unusual red wine that doesn't exactly taste like wine should.
Meanwhile, downriver, something ancient and terrible that only be described as a vampire is holding court in an old plantation house outside of N'Orleans and feeding on the local population and their slaves. Marsh and York and the Fevre Dream are, of course, headed straight for him.
You can just tell it's not going to end well.
Part of the fun of 'Fevre Dream' is watching Martin take the clichés, wrap them up in a layer of myth and legend and re-deploy them elsewhere to great effect. Yes, you think you know what's going on, what Joshua is and where it's all headed. Trust me, you don't. The rest of the fun is in the gorgeous period detail, the pitch-perfect rhythm of language and dialogue that rocks the plot along and, of course, in Abner Marsh. The man is a self-confessed troll with warts and a squished nose but damn if he isn't one of the more compelling protagonists I've ever run across. He just has character in bucketloads. The genre-savvy reader skips ahead, pitying Marsh and his lack of imagination - until the tables turn and Marsh promptly turns them right back again.
Yes, he's the product of a thousand clichés but you really feel like you know him. And, of course, you like him. He earns it, with his child-like obsession with racing his beautiful boat against its nearest rival, the legendary Eclipse and his dogged loyalty to Joshua York against all the odds. And there are a lot of odds, when York's nemesis, the quite terrifying Damon Julian, appears.
There's almost nothing in it of the current trends in vampire books, post-Buffy (obviously!) and indeed it tends to hark back to a bygone age of writing as much as it does in subject. There's a definite sense of Frankenstein meets Bram Stoker's Dracula, especially in Joshua's experiments conducted in a deserted Scottish castle, but the Mississippi heritage is also strong - you almost expect Mark Twain to pop up in a cameo at some point.
It's fair to say that it's pretty hard to come up with anything fresh in the vampire genre. That 'Fevre Dream', a 23 year-old book equally about the faded opulence of the last of the great riverboats as it is about vampires, can re-write all the myths into a beguiling new version and then subvert that again, really starts to show up how tired and cosy most modern attempts are. And it's well-written in the bargain, piling tension and atmosphere on as much as some genuinely scary/icky horror. Why has this been out of print for so long?!
It's gorgeous, melancholy and I can almost guarantee you the last scene will leave a lump in your throat. It also contains the stuff of some fairly grotesque nightmares, so what's not to like? This had the potential to be a classic and only seems fair that Martin's later success should get this the audience it deserves now, so go read it.
Jennifer Howell
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