Filth Eaters
Ito Romo
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What makes good vampire fiction? Bram Stoker’s Dracula turned the immigrant body into a vessel for the anxieties of empire. Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire made immortality a theater for grief. Octavia Butler’s Fledgling fused the bite with the legacy of chattel slavery. The genre resists generalization, but good vampire fiction shares an ambition of estranging our understanding of humanity. It animates the question of where the human ends and the monster begins.
Ito Romo’s “Filth Eaters” asks this question across nearly a millennium, from the Indus River Delta in 1099 to a flooded New York City in 2071, passing through Granada, Tenochtitlán, the Gulf of Mexico, and Mexico City along the way. The novel is set against the Spanish conquest of Mesoamerica and the toppling of the Aztec empire. At the height of conflict, indigenous and migrant vampires must fight for existence as they are dragged into the battlefields of their human counterparts. Three characters anchor the narrative. Doro, in near-future New York, opens the book by staring into his watch cam and raging that he’d “fucking face the sun tomorrow morning” rather than keep feeding on “rancid human blood so full of fucking human hate.” Radamés, a young Spaniard turned in a Granada bathhouse in 1491, carries the novel’s longest arc. And, Tepín, a Mexica vampire in 1866 Teotihuacán, delivers the book’s political center of gravity. These characters are connected by blood in both senses of the word; the slow discovery of how is one of the novel’s real pleasures. The timeline is deliberately nonlinear. This could be exhausting but it isn’t because each chapter is short and atmospherically distinct enough to earn the reorientation. |
Romo writes the body with meticulous, devotional attention. In the Indus River Delta, Kali the Ascetic watches a young fisherman from a mangrove forest’s edge, “moonlight radiating off his golden-brown skin,” his blood pulsing so hard “she could hear it clearly, though the waves of the delta crashed nearby.” In a Granada bathhouse, the vampire Shandor—that same fisherman, now centuries old—scrubs Radamés with fragranced water, working “one entire leg, buttocks to toe, then the other, with such expertise, one would have thought that in another life, the vampire might have been a tellak himself.” The prose doesn’t separate the erotic from the predatory. When the scene turns violent, Radamés shivers, “his mind vacillating between the terrifying and the carnal.” That fusion is the novel’s thesis about power.
Beyond body horror and sensual pleasure, the historical throughline in “Filth Eaters” satisfies an intellectual hunger. Formally unique, chapter 4 is a letter from Hernán Cortés to his sovereign—Romo’s fictional elaboration of the Cartas de Relación, footnoted to The Intercepted Letters of Hernan Cortes, Vatican Library, Special Collections, “no public access.” Cortés marvels at the “dominions and splendour of Moctezuma” while reporting that soldiers sent up a smoking mountain were “savaged, killed by vampires” in ashfall darkness. Friars demand twice the silver to fortify doorways. The Prior Provincial pledges to convert “the stubborn Mexica who would rather burn at the stake than deny their idols.” The letter tallies looted gold and turquoises with one hand while begging for reinforcements against the undead with the other.
When it comes to emotional payoff, the character Tepín does the heaviest lifting. In an underground chamber at Teotihuacán, she turns away from Radamés and tells her attendant to illuminate her back. He sees scarification covering her neck and shoulders, “as if she’d been branded with a dull ice pick, over and over and over again.” The wounds are from maguey thorns. “This is our silver,” she tells him. She places her hands over his eyes and transmits her memories through what she calls “the celestial tongue,” making him experience her captivity as his own. “He felt the net that caged her body, then felt them grab her helpless arms.” Through this communion, Tepín recounts “the Great Captivity,” in which the church ransomed Indigenous vampires for what they “still called Moctezuma's gold.” She remembers watching the city burn from a distance, every night, for two months. When she lifts her hands from his eyes, the narration reiterates the novel’s quiet premise: “He almost felt human.”
Here is Romo’s gamble. Vampirism, pushed far enough through the machinery of colonial violence, might paradoxically recover a lost humanity rather than destroy it. The gamble is tested in the final act, when the church storms the house at daybreak, takes Tepín and Radamés to a convent, binds them with maguey fiber ropes, and leads them to a window where “they stared from behind a window until the sun was born again. Then there was a great light, then a sudden fire, then smoke that turned to vapor and evaporated like the morning dew into the sky.” The novel earns this ending, but barely. Its compression is both its sharpest virtue and its most visible limitation. Several violent scenes arrive at a remove—as letter, memory, or telepathic transmission. The distancing mirrors how conquest gets remembered, mediated and euphemized and filed away, but it also leaves the reader wanting more time inside the wreckage. Radamés, turning Carlos centuries after his own making, tells him “I didn't want you to forget those feelings so human.” The line doubles as Romo's defense of the novel's insistence on fusing eroticism and violence, even when the frame threatens to buckle.
By the final chapter, Doro’s suicidal livestream, the mangrove forest, and the sacking of Tenochtitlán resolve into a single genealogy of despair. Doro’s threat to face the sun echoes Shandor's confession, centuries earlier, of thinking about “facing Surya myself . . . finally freeing me from this darkness.” The despair is inherited, passed through blood like the trauma of conquest itself. Romo has written a novel that asks what it means to be human, but also what it costs to remember.
Ito Romo was born and raised on the border in Laredo, Texas. His work, dubbed “Chicano Gothic” and “Chicano Noir,” shows the dark and gritty life along Interstate 35 through South Texas, where his family has lived for 11 generations. A former Professor of English Language and Literature, Romo was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2019. His books include The Border is Burning and El Puente / The Bridge, both published by University of New Mexico Press. He lives in San Antonio.
Beyond body horror and sensual pleasure, the historical throughline in “Filth Eaters” satisfies an intellectual hunger. Formally unique, chapter 4 is a letter from Hernán Cortés to his sovereign—Romo’s fictional elaboration of the Cartas de Relación, footnoted to The Intercepted Letters of Hernan Cortes, Vatican Library, Special Collections, “no public access.” Cortés marvels at the “dominions and splendour of Moctezuma” while reporting that soldiers sent up a smoking mountain were “savaged, killed by vampires” in ashfall darkness. Friars demand twice the silver to fortify doorways. The Prior Provincial pledges to convert “the stubborn Mexica who would rather burn at the stake than deny their idols.” The letter tallies looted gold and turquoises with one hand while begging for reinforcements against the undead with the other.
When it comes to emotional payoff, the character Tepín does the heaviest lifting. In an underground chamber at Teotihuacán, she turns away from Radamés and tells her attendant to illuminate her back. He sees scarification covering her neck and shoulders, “as if she’d been branded with a dull ice pick, over and over and over again.” The wounds are from maguey thorns. “This is our silver,” she tells him. She places her hands over his eyes and transmits her memories through what she calls “the celestial tongue,” making him experience her captivity as his own. “He felt the net that caged her body, then felt them grab her helpless arms.” Through this communion, Tepín recounts “the Great Captivity,” in which the church ransomed Indigenous vampires for what they “still called Moctezuma's gold.” She remembers watching the city burn from a distance, every night, for two months. When she lifts her hands from his eyes, the narration reiterates the novel’s quiet premise: “He almost felt human.”
Here is Romo’s gamble. Vampirism, pushed far enough through the machinery of colonial violence, might paradoxically recover a lost humanity rather than destroy it. The gamble is tested in the final act, when the church storms the house at daybreak, takes Tepín and Radamés to a convent, binds them with maguey fiber ropes, and leads them to a window where “they stared from behind a window until the sun was born again. Then there was a great light, then a sudden fire, then smoke that turned to vapor and evaporated like the morning dew into the sky.” The novel earns this ending, but barely. Its compression is both its sharpest virtue and its most visible limitation. Several violent scenes arrive at a remove—as letter, memory, or telepathic transmission. The distancing mirrors how conquest gets remembered, mediated and euphemized and filed away, but it also leaves the reader wanting more time inside the wreckage. Radamés, turning Carlos centuries after his own making, tells him “I didn't want you to forget those feelings so human.” The line doubles as Romo's defense of the novel's insistence on fusing eroticism and violence, even when the frame threatens to buckle.
By the final chapter, Doro’s suicidal livestream, the mangrove forest, and the sacking of Tenochtitlán resolve into a single genealogy of despair. Doro’s threat to face the sun echoes Shandor's confession, centuries earlier, of thinking about “facing Surya myself . . . finally freeing me from this darkness.” The despair is inherited, passed through blood like the trauma of conquest itself. Romo has written a novel that asks what it means to be human, but also what it costs to remember.
Ito Romo was born and raised on the border in Laredo, Texas. His work, dubbed “Chicano Gothic” and “Chicano Noir,” shows the dark and gritty life along Interstate 35 through South Texas, where his family has lived for 11 generations. A former Professor of English Language and Literature, Romo was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2019. His books include The Border is Burning and El Puente / The Bridge, both published by University of New Mexico Press. He lives in San Antonio.
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