The project
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Originally published in 1998, The Road of Ice and Salt is an award-winning, cult horror novella by Mexican author José Luis Zárate. Although Zárate is one of the most important speculative fiction writers of his generation, his work has not been translated into English. Innsmouth Free Press will produce an English-language, print and digital edition (translated by David Bowles) of The Road of Ice and Salt, with an accompanying essay and afterword.
The book will be commercially available to the public on April 20, 2020. Backers of this campaign will receive their copies on March 20, 2020.
Why translate this book?
The Road of Ice and Salt is told from the point of view of the captain of a ship headed from Varna to Whitby with an unusual cargo: fifty boxes filled with Transylvanian soil. The name of this ill-fated ship is the Demeter. Yes, that Demeter which brings Dracula to England. Like Mary Reilly and Pym, The Road of Ice and Salt is a re-exploration of the Gothic. It provides an important and unusual look at speculative fiction in Latin America outside of the category of the magic realist.
It is also a heady, gloriously ornate work of vampire fiction that tackles homosexual desire, Victorian repression and traditional horror fixtures. Click on the image below to read a sample or follow this link.
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The team behind the book
The novella will be published by Innsmouth Free Press, a Canadian micro-press owned and operated by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, who together with Paula R. Stiles, won a World Fantasy Award for the anthology She Walks in Shadows. She Walks in Shadows was also a crowd-funded project. Rest assured, we know what we are doing.
David Bowles is a Mexican-American author and translator from south Texas, where he teaches at the University of Texas Río Grande Valley. He has written several books, most notably They Call Me Güero: A Border Kid's Poems (Tomás Rivera Mexican American Children's Book Award, Claudia Lewis Award for Excellence in Poetry, Pura Belpré Honor Book, Walter Dean Myers Honor Book). In 2017, Bowles was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters.
Silvia Moreno-Garcia has edited and published many anthologies, including the World Fantasy Award-winning She Walks in Shadows (a.k.a. Cthulhu's Daughters). She is a co-editor at the horror magazine The Dark. She is also the author of several novels, including the Jazz Age fantasy Gods of Jade and Shadow.
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The author
José Luis Zárate is a key figure of the Mexican fantastic literature of the 1980s. Together with Gerardo Porcayo, he created the first online Mexican science fiction magazine, La Langosta se ha Posado, in 1992. He is a winner of the Premio Internacional de Novela de Ciencia Ficción y Fantasía MECyF and Premio Kalpa. Zárate is best-known for a trilogy of short novels centred around key popular culture figures – Dracula, Superman and El Santo. He studied Linguistics and Literature and now teaches a course on fantastic literature in his native city of Puebla.
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The perks
Get The Road of Ice and Salt or opt for one of our packages containing other Innsmouth Free Press titles, including:
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Prime Meridian: An introspective, near-future novella about a young Mexican woman who wants to go to Mars. Locus magazine called it one of the best novellas of 2017.
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She Walks in Shadows: Winner of the World Fantasy Award, this all-woman anthology collects stories inspired by the work of H.P. Lovecraft.
- And for the dedicated collector there's a paperback, Turkish edition of She Walks in Shadows.
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Originally published in 1998, The Road of Ice and Salt is an award-winning, cult horror novella by Mexican author José Luis Zárate. Although Zárate is one of the most important speculative fiction writers of his generation, his work has not been translated into English. Innsmouth Free Press will produce an English-language, print and digital edition (translated by David Bowles) of The Road of Ice and Salt, with an accompanying essay and afterword.
