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George R.R. Martin’s Forgotten Vampire Novel Deserves a Second Life
Long before George R.R. Martin began penning his high fantasy powerhouse, A Song of Ice and Fire, he wrote a Southern Gothic, gory standalone vampire book. Fevre Dream, published in 1982, is one of Martin’s earliest novels and has largely slipped under the nose of most Game of Thrones fans. A historical horror story set primarily in 1857 on steamboats cruising the Mississippi River, Fevre Dream is a forgotten classic in the beloved fantasy author’s oeuvre. Martin notably singled out Fevre Dream for a potential movie adaptation, calling it a “dream project” of his.
The plot of Fevre Dream is focalized through Abner Marsh, a down-on-his-luck riverboat captain who accepts an irresistible offer from the mysterious, wealthy, and pale-haired Joshua York. York, the transfixing aristocrat with very Targaryen-esque features, offers to finance a magnificent steamboat for Marsh to oversee. However, there is a nonnegotiable condition: Marsh must not inquire about his strange sun-avoiding sleep schedule or his strange band of equally pale traveling companions. Naturally, Marsh can’t honor that promise for long. He starts to ask questions and does some harmless rummaging through York’s room, setting the stage for a twisty descent into a rather unconventional vampire tale.
George R.R. Martin’s Historical Horror Runs Deep
If there’s one thing that Martin is widely renowned for, it’s world-building. The second is his penchant for brutally memorable character deaths. Fevre Dream upholds both of these author associations and proves that Martin had a gift for bolstering his fantasy with the weight and texture of real historical horrors, long before he created Westeros. Being set in the antebellum South leading up to the Civil War, the horrors of chattel slavery are interwoven into Fevre Dream‘s supernatural premise. Martin recognizes that ships, including steamboats, were vessels of enslavement. The real-life violence of the time period is what really gives the narrative its teeth, horror-wise. Markedly, the introduction of supernatural villains in the Deep South setting is used not just for scares, but as a lens through which the institutionalized evil of the human world is called out.
In other words, Fevre Dream never glamorizes the plantation landscape, the muddy bayous, or the river itself. The pivotal port stop in New Orleans is described at length as a stifling, ill-fated place. Those expecting an Anne Rice-style New Orleans vampire romp will be thrown by Martin’s sobering reading of the city, where yellow fever is a rampant, widely feared foe. The setting is less a Gothic dreamscape and more an intricately researched backdrop befitting a work of historical fiction. Martin certainly doesn’t cut any descriptive corners, so do be warned: the first quarter of the novel is a bit slow, and heavy on steamboat particulars, before the supernatural lore is divulged and kicks the plot into high gear.
‘Fevre Dream’ Reinvented the Vampire Myth
The vampire genre has become increasingly crowded, populating serial television, YA fiction, and horror movies alike. To some degree, each iteration of vampire fiction actively comments on or chides the mythical baggage associated with this supernatural being. There’s always a scene of clarification where the vampire confirms or denies a checklist: coffins, garlic, holy water, mirrors? Comedically, in the popular teen vampire drama series, The Vampire Diaries, Damon Salvatore openly mocks the Twilight novels, asserting “I live in the real world, where vampires burn in the sun.” This self-referential quality of vampire fiction, drawing a line between the real and the fake supernatural, is now a genre convention. In Fevre Dream, Martin uses this convention to truly throw out the vampire rulebook, rather than to tweak its stipulations.
Stripping away the usual mystique of the undead predator, Martin’s vampire characters aren’t particularly troubled with the folkloric checklist because, as far as they’re concerned, that checklist doesn’t apply to them. Martin’s vampires don’t even refer to themselves as vampires; they’re dismissive of the term. In Fevre Dream, the pale band of men and women we meet through the eyes of Abner Marsh aren’t vampires exactly, but a separate species, whose biology gives them superhuman capacities and an appetite for blood (dubbed the “red thirst”). They are not immortal in the way the archetype has been popularized. These “vampires” are humanoids with their own history, legends, customs, and internal divisions, living not as reanimated corpses but as their own increasingly endangered species tracing back to the dawn of time.
George R.R. Martin’s Most Disturbing Villain Isn’t In Westeros
Fevre Dream introduces a truly no-holds-barred villain in Damon Julian, who is the most ancient “vampire” still alive. Damon Julian, which sounds a little too blatant a villain name, is purposefully heavy-handed, as it’s an alias rather satirically donned by a man who has had manifold names: Giles Lamont, Gilben d’Aquin, Philip Caine, Sergei Romanov. As Abner Marsh meets the eyes of the book’s big bad, “a thousand other men fall away, and behind each one was another, older and more horrible, layer on layer of them each more bestial than the last.” It’s an appropriate moniker for a villain whose entire identity is based around concealment and implacability.
Martin wastes little time in establishing Julian’s monstrosity in the novel. He lords over a plantation house, using humans as disposable tools to do his bidding. His big entrance onto the lavish steamboat to meet the idealistic vampire Joshua York is shockingly grotesque as he casually slays an infant at their dinner party. What’s especially distinctive about Julian as a villain is how little Martin tries to complicate or humanize him and his motives. In Game of Thrones, many of the characters who do morally reprehensible things are still offered redemption arcs or some glimpses of humanity and vulnerability. In Fevre Dream, there is no morally gray territory to explore with the antagonist. Martin writes a villain who is not merely mad or a victim of his superhuman inheritance. He is impassive, eerily tranquil, and fully at ease with the system of predation he chooses to operate within.
For all its differences from the world of Westeros, Fevre Dream bears many of the same markers that would eventually make Martin a high-fantasy legend. Power, politicking, fire and blood, morally complicated alliances, and some climactic action sequences all fuel the vampire narrative’s engine. Although Martin has had less luck heretofore with feature film adaptations of his work, Fevre Dream has the clearest potential voyage to the big screen. The project doesn’t need the Game of Thrones legacy to justify its existence, standing on its own as a strange, atmospheric, brutal, and historically grounded reinvention of the vampire story. Part period piece, action-adventure, and horror, Fevre Dream still has plenty of life left in it almost 45 years after its publication, plus a completed screenplay waiting in the wings. And if Martin gets his way, Guillermo Del Toro would be the director steering this dream adaptation to fruition.
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