Having read several really good books by Latinx authors set in Mexico in the last year (Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Vampires of El Norte by Isabel Cañas, and Sun of Blood and Ruin, by Mariely Lares, among others), I’ve begun actively looking for and looking forward to reading more in this vein. So I was pleased to sink my teeth into Immortal Pleasures by V. Castro, about an ancient Nahua (from what’s now Mexico) vampire roaming the modern world. Some elements of the book weren’t to my taste, but it was fairly interesting and entertaining.
I tend to prefer books written in third person past tense to first person present, but that’s a matter of taste, and sometimes there are very good structural reasons for it. Here, Castro sets current scenes in present tense and flashbacks in past tense, which makes a lot of sense and helps to distinguish between them.
What I liked best about the book was its focus on righting some of the wrongs of the past. The protagonist, Malinalli, was known as La Malinche, the slave who interpreted for the Spanish conquistador, Hernán Cortés. In this narration, as a living woman she had little reason for loyalty to the people who had sold her off, and rather than being the betrayer and temptress of legend, she was simply doing her best to survive in a hostile world. In the present, she focuses on tracking down looted antiquities and donating them to museums of their former people. Unlike the hero of Wole Talibi’s Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon, she buys them rather than breaking into museums, so it’s a while before there are any action sequences in this book.
“Money is power because it is also freedom. Power is changing your own circumstances so you can change the circumstances of others. And freedom is the power to choose, to say no, to beat the tyrants at their own game.”
At the start, Malinalli is trying to track down a couple of skull artifacts. However, she is delayed when she falls in love/obsession with a horror writer she meets in Ireland. Lots and lots of graphic sex ensues – too much for my preference although others may well enjoy it. When she eventually returns to her quest, she finds out that the situation is much more complicated than she had expected.
Some of the plot elements bothered me, at least initially. Some of them were resolved a bit too easily, and others left me shaking my head. It seemed inevitable that Malinalli would come up against an ancient exploiter who had somehow become a vampire himself, but someone else from history also popped up who had me thinking, “Oh come ON. Really?!?” And yet, for plot reasons I won’t spoil, the woman known as La Malinche or “the twisted grass” turned out to have some good reasons to find a bond of sympathy with this man.
I also kept being bothered by little inconsistencies in the text. For instance, Malinalli says that during the 1960s, “I learned to stay away from anyone very out of it on drugs,” yet two paragraphs later, at Woodstock, “I took small nips of blood here and there of people too high to notice me” and her vision is blurry as she tries to focus on tarot cards. I wasn’t sure whether these bits were carelessnesses by the author or whether Malinalli was so fractured by her ancient traumas and by the vastness of time that she’s a somewhat unreliable narrator in small matters such as these. However, there’s also a moment where someone states an objective fact happened that was not related in the scene referred to, which definitely feels like sloppiness rather than manipulative withholding of facts for reasons of craft.
I can’t whole-heartedly recommend this book. However, the plot is interesting, and some readers will probably find a lot of enjoyment in following Malinalli through her adventures. It’s being published on April 16.
Content warnings: Historical racist/religious atrocities, frequent graphic sex, first person present tense in large sections of the book, and occasional profanity.
Comps: Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon by Wole Talabi, Blood Games by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro.
Disclaimers: I received a free eARC of this book for review.
