Blood for Blood
Ito Romo, Filth Eaters
Deep Vellum Press, 125pp, £18.99, ISBN 9781646054305
reviewed by Luke Shuffield
Just as my Spanish is broken, barely functional, and rather embarrassing in practice, yet somehow better than nothing, my background knowledge applicable to Ito Romo’s new novel, Filth Eaters, would be found wanting. This slender work, published by Deep Vellum, hinges on the intersection of the language of civilisations and body horror, specifically Spanish and vampirism. I’ve stood in the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City and gawked at the Aztec artefacts, but I’ve never truly researched their history. I’ve seen a handful of popular vampire movies, but I’ve never read Stoker’s Dracula. And yet, I’m familiar enough with the material to confirm that Romo succeeds in his primary objective: the depiction of colonialism and anti-colonialism as a struggle fought between shadowy figures with weaponry quieter than steel.
In Filth Eaters, we find that the alienated, the marginalised — the vampire — is capable of violent domination too. Romo calls us to feel sympathetic toward them, even as they suck blood from their victims’ necks, but they are far from perfect — one hesitates to even call them protagonists. What he gives us is a slipstream romp from distant past to dystopian future that’s just a damn good time.
Romo’s style has been described as ‘Chicano Gothic,’ a reflection of his ancestry and Texas border roots, wed to a darkened texture. The prose of Filth Eaters is notably spare, largely straightforward in its intent and light on window-dressing, but the tone feels fresh and vibrant. The violence is vivid without gratuitous gore. The settings are just detailed enough. The character development is quick, while robustly fleshed out. Romo accomplishes his mission in fewer than 200 pages. The novel is technically genre fiction, yet it avoids the curse of trope-ridden cliché. It’s literary with horror elements, rather than the other way around, and the reputation that precedes Deep Vellum publications certainly applies.
One of Romo’s not-so-subtle games is the playful code-switching between languages. Words themselves become characters. There’s untranslated Spanish dialogue throughout, but sometimes characters repeat key phrases in English or revert to it entirely. He writes most of Filth Eaters in English, because that’s what most of his readers speak, but without spoon-feeding us the whole thing. It’s as though Romo is reminding us that colonial linguistic capture never fully triumphs. Furthermore, we encounter a sharp stated distinction between the Spanish of the Spaniards and that of the later Mexica, diverging in accent and verbiage, but we (the outsiders) aren’t truly privy to the difference. We more or less have to take Romo’s word for it. All we get is an old lady in New York City circa 2070 telling a centuries-old vampire, “All Mexicans are thieves. Banditos . . . Mexicans don’t speak proper Spanish.”
The bloodsuckers, however, have a telepathic language all their own, described with effervescence by a patriarch to his progeny:
What we do not meaningfully encounter is Nahuatl, the tongue of the Aztec natives. Though their original script was written primarily in pictographs, the later Latinised phonetics are extant. So why not? I suspect (perhaps without foundation) that Romo feels as removed from that indigenous dialect as I do from Spanish, that to present its words dispassionately (and in the transliterated orthography of the colonists, no less) might evoke a sense of disrespect, even desecration. In any case, the cruelty of forced assimilation runs much deeper than the kind we know so well (Americans and ‘illegals’). Indeed, the Spanish language carries a colonialist burden within itself.
The theme that drives the book is subversion — subversion of attributes, of actions, of power, of ritual, of words. When we think of vampires, we typically imagine pale skin, Transylvanian origin, medieval sensibility. Not so here. We meet the earliest of these creatures-of-the-night in the Indus River Delta and follow their immortal ‘descendants’ (primarily by transmission, once by reproduction) through Granada in varying eras, and the aforementioned speculative NYC. They can ‘glamour’ (hypnotise) humans into eroticised, ecstatic submission. The narrative itself is mostly in intimate third person, but the bits in 16th-century La Nueva España adopt an epistolary structure, elaborations on the real letters of an historical Spanish colonist, Fernando Cortes, to his Emperor Charles V. The vampires live through the evolution of a certain Spanish heritage, hunting human prey and feeding on their blood (bonus points if it’s spiked with opium). Some of their conventional characteristics remain, like vulnerability to silver and holy water, but even these are transformed: a local agave variant called maguey is what’s most deadly to the Mexica vampires. The uprooting of tradition runs deep — one says to the incredulous man he’d ‘made’ (turned), ‘“touch me if you do not believe” . . . then reached out, took Radamés’s hand and placed it on his forearm’ — a bold doubting Thomas callback from Romo.
Jumping to the future bit of the timeline (where the novel begins), Manhattan has been swallowed by two concurrent forces, cataclysmic flooding due to climate change and an unspecified ‘Great Pestilence.’ These malignant forces call to mind the true events that characters elsewhere proclaim respectively, ‘Nature has helped us conceal [Teotihuacán]’ and '. . . the illness that your people brought with them and spread from loin to loin.’ In this gritty environment, reminiscent of Blade Runner’s Los Angeles, we see livestreaming via autonomous drones and roaming cops armed with AR-15s. The last in the vampiric line participates in the Filth Eaters’ killing of nearly 900 victims in a year, ‘the highest number since the Great Migration’ (again, an echoing event unexplained). Embedded in this context is a diatribe in which Romo nearly jumps the shark with the modern vitriol of its ignorance:
That imperative, ‘Look,’ is the mirror image of the vampires’ common refrain in Spanish to their impending victims. We’ve heard the contemporary conspiracy theory about the “Great Replacement” of white people, but in the history Romo examines, an entire indigenous city was actually replaced — the hundreds of thousands in Teotihuacán into approximately the same number in 19th-century Mexico City. The vampire, therefore, serves as the living conceit of the novel, the embodiment of blood-soaked revenge, transfiguring the very identity of the ostensibly innocent. And yet, the predators’ own inner turmoil never disappears. After becoming a Filth Eater (via devouring the heart of a victim), one of them ‘almost felt human.’
I tend to favour literary fiction of ostentatious maximalism, and Filth Eaters is certainly not that. It makes no attempt to be. Yet its sanguinous plot gets the blood pumping, and it’s poignantly heartfelt in its own way. Romo ‘glamours’ us himself, transforming a foundational myth into something more. In its closing moments, we’re reassured that we can still be capable of love (not just desire), even if we don’t strictly deserve it, and that individual immortality isn’t necessarily all it’s cracked up to be. Romo’s dialogue is where he really shines, where the beauty seeps through:
We Americans know what it is to be both carriers of a burden and the ones who place it on the shoulders of the Other. Romo, perhaps, is simply painting a picture of the everlasting monsters such a burden can ‘make’ us, and how we may attempt to redeem ourselves.
In Filth Eaters, we find that the alienated, the marginalised — the vampire — is capable of violent domination too. Romo calls us to feel sympathetic toward them, even as they suck blood from their victims’ necks, but they are far from perfect — one hesitates to even call them protagonists. What he gives us is a slipstream romp from distant past to dystopian future that’s just a damn good time.
Romo’s style has been described as ‘Chicano Gothic,’ a reflection of his ancestry and Texas border roots, wed to a darkened texture. The prose of Filth Eaters is notably spare, largely straightforward in its intent and light on window-dressing, but the tone feels fresh and vibrant. The violence is vivid without gratuitous gore. The settings are just detailed enough. The character development is quick, while robustly fleshed out. Romo accomplishes his mission in fewer than 200 pages. The novel is technically genre fiction, yet it avoids the curse of trope-ridden cliché. It’s literary with horror elements, rather than the other way around, and the reputation that precedes Deep Vellum publications certainly applies.
One of Romo’s not-so-subtle games is the playful code-switching between languages. Words themselves become characters. There’s untranslated Spanish dialogue throughout, but sometimes characters repeat key phrases in English or revert to it entirely. He writes most of Filth Eaters in English, because that’s what most of his readers speak, but without spoon-feeding us the whole thing. It’s as though Romo is reminding us that colonial linguistic capture never fully triumphs. Furthermore, we encounter a sharp stated distinction between the Spanish of the Spaniards and that of the later Mexica, diverging in accent and verbiage, but we (the outsiders) aren’t truly privy to the difference. We more or less have to take Romo’s word for it. All we get is an old lady in New York City circa 2070 telling a centuries-old vampire, “All Mexicans are thieves. Banditos . . . Mexicans don’t speak proper Spanish.”
The bloodsuckers, however, have a telepathic language all their own, described with effervescence by a patriarch to his progeny:
“I spoke to you in a language from a time before our time. . . . The sacred language, which we call the celestial tongue, allows me to speak all my knowledge, all my experience, in all its complexity, directly into your very being, as if you yourself will have experienced it. . . . With it, I can also speak to you all the experiences of anyone who has shared their lives with me. My mind holds the knowledge of a thousand beings that came before me, the most minute of details, as if I myself had lived them.”
What we do not meaningfully encounter is Nahuatl, the tongue of the Aztec natives. Though their original script was written primarily in pictographs, the later Latinised phonetics are extant. So why not? I suspect (perhaps without foundation) that Romo feels as removed from that indigenous dialect as I do from Spanish, that to present its words dispassionately (and in the transliterated orthography of the colonists, no less) might evoke a sense of disrespect, even desecration. In any case, the cruelty of forced assimilation runs much deeper than the kind we know so well (Americans and ‘illegals’). Indeed, the Spanish language carries a colonialist burden within itself.
The theme that drives the book is subversion — subversion of attributes, of actions, of power, of ritual, of words. When we think of vampires, we typically imagine pale skin, Transylvanian origin, medieval sensibility. Not so here. We meet the earliest of these creatures-of-the-night in the Indus River Delta and follow their immortal ‘descendants’ (primarily by transmission, once by reproduction) through Granada in varying eras, and the aforementioned speculative NYC. They can ‘glamour’ (hypnotise) humans into eroticised, ecstatic submission. The narrative itself is mostly in intimate third person, but the bits in 16th-century La Nueva España adopt an epistolary structure, elaborations on the real letters of an historical Spanish colonist, Fernando Cortes, to his Emperor Charles V. The vampires live through the evolution of a certain Spanish heritage, hunting human prey and feeding on their blood (bonus points if it’s spiked with opium). Some of their conventional characteristics remain, like vulnerability to silver and holy water, but even these are transformed: a local agave variant called maguey is what’s most deadly to the Mexica vampires. The uprooting of tradition runs deep — one says to the incredulous man he’d ‘made’ (turned), ‘“touch me if you do not believe” . . . then reached out, took Radamés’s hand and placed it on his forearm’ — a bold doubting Thomas callback from Romo.
Jumping to the future bit of the timeline (where the novel begins), Manhattan has been swallowed by two concurrent forces, cataclysmic flooding due to climate change and an unspecified ‘Great Pestilence.’ These malignant forces call to mind the true events that characters elsewhere proclaim respectively, ‘Nature has helped us conceal [Teotihuacán]’ and '. . . the illness that your people brought with them and spread from loin to loin.’ In this gritty environment, reminiscent of Blade Runner’s Los Angeles, we see livestreaming via autonomous drones and roaming cops armed with AR-15s. The last in the vampiric line participates in the Filth Eaters’ killing of nearly 900 victims in a year, ‘the highest number since the Great Migration’ (again, an echoing event unexplained). Embedded in this context is a diatribe in which Romo nearly jumps the shark with the modern vitriol of its ignorance:
“I should’ve known you were an illegal. Get away from me, you filthy Mexican. You all poisoned the blood of our country. Look at what you fucking immigrants did to us. Look!” . . . Despite the darkness, he knew exactly the filth that surrounded them. It had nothing to do with illegals.
That imperative, ‘Look,’ is the mirror image of the vampires’ common refrain in Spanish to their impending victims. We’ve heard the contemporary conspiracy theory about the “Great Replacement” of white people, but in the history Romo examines, an entire indigenous city was actually replaced — the hundreds of thousands in Teotihuacán into approximately the same number in 19th-century Mexico City. The vampire, therefore, serves as the living conceit of the novel, the embodiment of blood-soaked revenge, transfiguring the very identity of the ostensibly innocent. And yet, the predators’ own inner turmoil never disappears. After becoming a Filth Eater (via devouring the heart of a victim), one of them ‘almost felt human.’
I tend to favour literary fiction of ostentatious maximalism, and Filth Eaters is certainly not that. It makes no attempt to be. Yet its sanguinous plot gets the blood pumping, and it’s poignantly heartfelt in its own way. Romo ‘glamours’ us himself, transforming a foundational myth into something more. In its closing moments, we’re reassured that we can still be capable of love (not just desire), even if we don’t strictly deserve it, and that individual immortality isn’t necessarily all it’s cracked up to be. Romo’s dialogue is where he really shines, where the beauty seeps through:
“I’ve now seen the thousands of years that love has lived within you and within your people, people whose lives are also my life now . . . But what comes with that love, what else I saw, that too is a heavy burden to bear, but indeed, well worth it, a beautiful, beautiful burden.”
We Americans know what it is to be both carriers of a burden and the ones who place it on the shoulders of the Other. Romo, perhaps, is simply painting a picture of the everlasting monsters such a burden can ‘make’ us, and how we may attempt to redeem ourselves.