Mitch Wagner's Tumblblog

Tor.com looks at George R.R. Martin's vampires-on-the-Mississippi novel, "Fevre Dream"

I would never want to pick a favorite novel out of all the thousands of novels I’d read. That would be silly. But if I had to pick just one, it might well be Fevre Dream, about a vampire on the 1850s Mississippi River who teams up with a hapless riverboat captain to end vampires’ preying on human beings.

The funny thing is I don’t really like vampire stories as a genre, but I love this book, as well as the TV shows Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the first couple of seasons of its spinoff Angel, and True Blood.

Paranormal fantasy that isn’t: George R. R. Martin’s Fevre Dream

The novel also entertains with exciting stories of life on the river. Some of the very things that make Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn so great are resident in this narrative as well. There are steamboat races, night time chases, and hand-to-hand combat to be found here as well. So even as deep thinking is engendered in your mind, the reader is also thoroughly entertained by mystery and adventure.

The Tor.com blogger says that Fevre Dream shows a glimmering of the brilliance that Martin shows in his current medieval-fantasy series. I disagree strongly. I think Fevre Dream is brilliant, and I find Martin’s current series to be unreadable; I worked through about two and a half volumes of it and I just gave up, defeated.