Filth Eaters Ito Romo 9781646054305

A high-strung and inventive literary horror that will delight fans of Stephen Graham Jones and Mariana Enriquez, Ito Romo's debut novel traces the thousand-year lineage of a new kind of vampire-the mestizo Filth Eater.

Granada, 1849. After centuries of scrounging in the shadows, the vampire Radames discovers an ancient Aztec codex that reveals the vampires of the "New World" live a more "human" life-they marry, they give birth. Spurred on by tantalizing promise of a fuller existence, Radames glamours and schemes his way onto a ship headed for Mexico. There, in the underbelly of the forgotten city of Teotihuacan, the Andalusian vampire falls in love with a member of this ancient sect of vampires who call themselves Filth Eaters. From their union, the mestizo vampire Doro is born.

Hopping back and forth in time from the Indus River Delta in 1099 to the Muslim Spanish empire of the 1400s to a flooded cyberpunk New York City of the future, Filth Eaters pulls at the threads of empire, greed, and climate collapse, but the beating, bloody heart of the story is our very human desire for the love that gives life meaning. The debut novel from a celebrated writer of "Chicano Gothic" stories, this surprising, gory saga turns a new page for a centuries-old genre.

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 includeThe Border is Burning and El Puente / The Bridge, both published by University of New Mexico Press.He lives in San Antonio.

"Ito Romo's vampires step across centuries with dignity, but with desperation, too-you don't want to get close to them, but you can't look away." -Stephen Graham Jones, author of My Heart is a Chainsaw