I’ve often said that the horror novella is the 85-minute movie of the horror lit world. The format, typically resulting in a story between 100 and 200 pages, is the perfect vehicle for compact, tense, brutal little stories that don’t overstay their welcome, and while it can serve many genres, it seems to serve horror especially well.
But this is not the limit of the horror novella, and Ito Romo‘s new book Filth Eaters proves it. A vampire story spanning a full millennium, this is epic horror in a slim volume, a book that pushes the limits of the novella in exciting ways while never losing its propulsive punch.
In a future version of New York City ravaged by floods, when vampires are a known reality and blood drinkers gain followings by broadcasting their kills on untraceable livestreams, Doro is ready for the end. He hasn’t been a vampire that long, but he’s been around long enough to know that he’s weary, that the world is falling apart because of humans who recklessly warped and destroyed it, and that he’d rather go out in a blaze of glory than watch it all fade away. But to understand why Doro feels this way, Filth Eaters has to tell much more than his story.
So, Romo’s narrative goes back, way back, chronicling the descendants in a long vampiric line that runs from the Indus River Valley to the fall of Muslim Granada to the Aztec Empire amid Hernan Cortez’s conquest. Along the way, Romo unspools his vampiric mythology with just enough detail to hook us, and plenty of room left for future explorations. We meet ancient vampires, recent converts, vampires who have evolved to give birth like humans, and much more, all while Romo explores the emotional toll such a legacy could have on a fiery personality like Doro at the edge of a dying world.
Because Romo’s novella only runs roughly 140 pages while covering a full millennium of vampiric history, we get to know these immortals in a form nearing a string of vignettes, catching them at crucial moments in their development, the linchpins around which Doro’s story turns. Because of the nature of his family line, he cannot simply reflect on his own life. He carries centuries of memories and knowledge, filling his mind to bursting, and he must look back on all of it as he contemplates the end.
So we see his recollections in flashes, in vampiric births and deaths and movements across continents, like Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles in miniature. It’s a breathless narrative of big, sweeping brushstrokes across a small canvas, and yet the book retains an arresting sense of intimacy.
That intimacy comes not just from the way Romo paces out this vast narrative, but from the themes with which he’s playing. You cannot dig into the battle over Granada or the fall of the Aztec Empire or the history of New York City as this book does without considering colonialism, and by charting a course for one bloodline over centuries, Romo takes on the issue like he’s weaving a dark fable.
What is colonialism, after all, but the ultimate vampire, a force that sweeps through a populace and drains its life, mutating it into something new or wiping it off the Earth altogether. Ito Romo not only grasps this but wields it like a delicate dagger, making precise cuts in our psyche as the book moves with lightning quickness through centuries of devastation, rebirth, and regret, all leading back to Doro.
Filth Eaters is a highwire act, a magic trick, a novella so rich with detail and lore that you’ll want a five-book series in the same world even as you leave completely satisfied with what it offers. It’s an indie horror triumph, and if you love vampire fiction, it belongs on your shelf.
Filth Eaters is available May 19 from Deep Vellum.
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