Audiobook Review – The Route of Ice & Salt by Jose Luis Zarate, Narrated by Gabriel De Leon (3/5 stars)

Reading Level: Adult
Genre: Fantasy/Horror
Length: 432 pages
Publisher:‎ Del Rey
Release Date: April 1, 2025
ASIN: B0D4HRSDSJ
Stand Alone or Series: 2nd book in the Shadow of the Leviathen series
Source: eGalley from NetGalley for Review
Rating: 3/5 stars

“A reimagining of Dracula’s voyage to England, filled with Gothic imagery and queer desire.

It’s an ordinary assignment, nothing more. The cargo? Fifty boxes filled with Transylvanian soil. The route? From Varna to Whitby. The Demeter has made many trips like this. The captain has handled dozens of crews.

He dreams familiar dreams: to taste the salt on the skin of his men, to run his hands across their chests. He longs for the warmth of a lover he cannot have, fantasizes about flesh and frenzied embraces. All this he’s done before, it’s routine, a constant, like the tides.

Yet there’s something different, something wrong. There are odd nightmares, unsettling omens and fear. For there is something in the air, something in the night, someone stalking the ship.”

Series Info/Source: This is a stand alone book. I borrowed this from audible on audiobook.

Thoughts: I listened to this on audiobook and the narration started off a bit dry but got better as the story went on. This is strangely lyrical and horrific. It takes a bit to get moving, and I thought the pacing was uneven.

The captain here is picking up a strange cargo of boxes of dirt from Romania along with a crew there. He lusts after the companion-ship of the male crew, but knows that he should be a leader to them and not use his power to coerce them into his bed. However, on their voyage from Romania to England strange horrific things start to happen on the ship. First there are the dreams, then the rats disappear, then the sightings of a strange thin man, then the mice reappearing but as strange creatures, and then the crew disappearing. The captain recites this all through journal entries that get increasingly dreamlike and horrific.

The first part of the book really dwells on the captain’s sensual forbidden thoughts, and he apparently spends a lot of time lusting after the men on his ship. Finally, he does end up taking a lover. This part of the book is a bit slow and mainly just interrupted by the strangely horrific dreams he starts to have. However, as the book continues, you get deeper and deeper into the horrific aspects as more and more odd things start to happen on the ship.

This was okay. I enjoyed the lush gothic descriptions and the premise. I am glad this was a shorter, the writing style is a bit tough to follow at points and rambles. The narration also wasn’t the best for this audiobook; the narrator was a bit flat and not engaging to listen to. I did like how the captain went through the comparison of his need for other men and compares that to a vampire’s need for blood; it was an intriguing look at how these two things (which seem pretty different to me) were so close together in his mind. It was very poetic and gave an interesting look into thought processes of the time.

My Summary (3/5): Overall this was okay. This was written in a beautifully horrific and gothic style. Seeing the captain deal with his position as a good captain who protects his men and fights with, first his personal needs, and then the horror around him was fascinating. I am not unhappy to have read this. However, I did find it a bit hard to follow at times and the narration wasn’t the best. I would have preferred to read this rather than listen to it. It is a short read and a unique one. If you are interested in a gothic horror at sea this is a decent one.