James Nicoll Reviews

George R. R. Martin’s 1982 Fevre Dream is a stand-alone (but see footnote one) historical horror novel.

1857: Abner Marsh is a steamboat entrepreneur without steamboats. An unusually cold winter saw the Mississippi freeze solid, crushing all but one of March’s precious riverboats like eggs. His remaining paddle-wheeler, the Eli Renolds, being seven years old and surely on its last legs, Marsh faces the end of his Fevre River Packet Company.

Enter Joshua York, a wealthy man with a need for a steamboat and a partner who understands the Mississippi. York offers to finance a splendid new paddle-wheeler, the Fevre Dream, to Marsh’s specifications. The deal seems too good to turn down. Marsh accepts his new business partner.

Only after the Fevre Dream begins plying the Mississippi does Marsh begin to suspect he should have asked more questions about York.

Why, for example, does York so assiduously avoid daytime and sunlight? How could a man as young as York have possibly known Byron, dead these thirty-three years? And why do violent deaths seem to follow the Fevre Dream up and down the Mississippi?

There is a simple answer: York is hard to kill and far more resistant to time than humans. York is much older than he appears. Joshua York is a vampire.

Happily for Marsh’s peace of mind, York long ago stopped preying on humans. Indeed, York has created a serum that replaces the human blood he would otherwise crave. York’s desire is to lead vampire-kind away from their old, predatory ways towards a future in which vampires are as creative as the humans they ape.

If only York were the only vampire on the antebellum Mississippi. There are others. Not all of them find York’s message inspirational. Damon Julian, for example, has preyed on humans for over a thousand years. Julian is convinced that vampires are the master race, superior in every way that matters and inferior only in details nobody should care about. Humans are mere cattle who should be grateful to be terrorized and eaten.

When York’s path crosses that of Julian’s, conflict is inevitable. Only one can prevail as leader of the vampires. York may have science and lofty goals on his side. Julian has force of will and centuries more experience. A betting man would not favour idealist York.

As for Marsh? What hope for survival has one puny human caught between warring vampires?

~oOo~

The cover featured above is the first page full-color plate in my mass-market edition. The MMPB cover looks like the image on the left, with the plate to the right being what a browser saw if they picked up and opened Fevre Dream.

Publishers don’t go in for fancy cover design like that anymore.

Martin pulled off an interesting narrative trick in Fevre Dream so obvious I don’t know why other horror writers didn’t copy it. Back in 1983, I stayed up into the post-midnight hours reading Fevre Dream. When I finished the book, I glanced out of my apartment living room window to see a shadowy hunched figure, two hornlike structures protruding from the top of its head, its eyes glowing in the dark as it stared at me.

It was, of course, a dog with its front paws on the railing of my ground-level balcony.

A comparison that would never have occurred to me forty-one years ago: Julian isn’t so different from the vampires featured in What We Do in the Shadows. Julian is legitimately dangerous. He’s also wildly incompetent in a wide range of fields, not least money management. If he didn’t have the services of a gullible but competent Renfield named Sour Billy Tipton, Julian might have been reduced to lurking in bushes to pounce on passers-by.

It’s not surprising that Martin tried his hand at a historical: historical novels had been selling well. It’s not surprising that he wrote horror. Horror had also been selling well and Martin’s science fiction often had horror sensibilities. Also not a surprise: Martin frames his vampires in science fictional terms. Folklore to the contrary, there’s nothing magic about vampires. They are just straightforward nigh-invulnerable predators armed with super-human strength and profound mesmerism¹. Julian is not so different from Suzy McKee Charnas’ Edward Weyland.

It is a bit surprising that Martin published a paddle-boat adventure almost simultaneously with John Brunner’s The Great Steamboat Race. That sort of coincidence happens all the time, and I would attribute parallels between the two books to the fact Martin and Brunner were focused on the same period and drawing on the same research material, down to the paddle-boat race that inspired both authors.

The differences between the two books outweigh the similarities. For one thing, Brunner’s novel was set after the American Civil War. Most of Martin’s book is set before the American Civil War, which means that Julian has the American slave markets as his smorgasbord². Brunner’s book is a straight-up historical, whereas Martin’s is horror.

Because his cast is much smaller and his novel is shorter than Brunner’s, Martin gets to the point more quickly than Brunner does. Reaching the conclusion is a different matter. There are a surprising number of final confrontations which only one side can survive that both sides somehow survive. Probably Martin could have cut a hundred pages out of the book without seriously marring the narrative. Nevertheless, Fevre Dream is a competent horror novel, a stand-alone with no need for further volumes.

Fevre Dream is available here (Amazon US), here (Amazon Canada), here (Amazon UK), here (Apple Books), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books). Oddly, not every bookseller seems to offer deadtree versions, although I am pretty sure that version is available.

1: The vampires’ regenerative abilities and hypnotic gaze do seem at least a little supernatural but no more than the psionics featured in Martin’s Thousand Worlds stories. In fact, I can’t rule out that Fevre Dream takes place in the Thousand Worlds timeline, although there is nothing to suggest that it does.

2: It seems a pity Martin didn’t tell his story from an African American perspective. Such black characters as are featured are supporting characters, often without significant lines, mostly there to show how awful Julian is.