Vampires came of age a few years after I did with the publication of Twilight, and the world in one sense has never been the same. Gone were the pure evil creatures of Bram Stoker, or the adult mixed bag of Anne Rice. Instead, vampires are now for Young Adults and adult explorations like Del Toro’s The Strain feel like oddities. Which might make Isabel Canes’s Vampires of El Norte an oddity, but it is a fascinating and well-written one.
Don’t get me wrong, Vampires of El Norte is a bit too “he loves me/I hate him: he hates me/I love him” for my general tastes, but there’s not as much of that as there could have been. More interesting is the tension between loyalty to the land and personal love, which of course is a time-honored trope in fiction. The author handles it carefully and well, and comes up with a solution that is reasonable for the time and setting, and consistent with the plot.
The plot is straightforward: Nena and Nestor are childhood sweethearts, but they know that their respective stations in life will never let them be married. When a vampire attacks, Nestor leaves thinking Nena is dead. When he returns to serve in the Mexican Army during the Mexican-American War, the two are reunited and maybe sparks will fly. Also, the American army is unleashing vampires on the Mexican ranchos to weaken their difference. Will Nena and Nestor survive and find love? Read the book to find out.
The fact that vampires are involved helps this not just be a south-of-the-border bodice ripper. (Pro-tip: whenever you’ve got a plot problem, just throw a vampire at it.) More important in some ways is the solution the author avoids. Nena and Nestor are going to have to choose between their obligations to the land, the family, and the rancho, and their love. They could have had both by simply moving a day’s walk/ride to the northwest, and in the United States the protagonists could have had everything they wanted with no further difficulties. The author is right not to take that easy out, even if there is some appeal to it for me as someone who believes in the American dream (and of course, it’s not like America was a bastion of socio-economic equality in the 1840s, so there’s that too). But doing so would cheapen the devotion to the land so much under consideration in the book.
Instead the needle is threaded and Nena and Nestor pursue a third option that no one had thought of.
Also, despite the title, the vampires are not quite as central to the plot as you would expect. That said, if there were vampires, there is a 100% chance that the US military would weaponize them.
Overall, this is a clever little book and one that’s worth picking up and reading. Certainly as Christians we should be thinking about the balance between our inner desires and our social obligations. If you’ve never encountered a conflict between those, well, you have. Everybody does. Navigating this balance is never just a question of listening to your heart, and never just a question of going with the crowd. Instead, it is a careful navigating of the social landscape as we are guided by God’s Word and Spirit. This book is not explicitly a Christian book (though any good vampire book will have Christian themes), but it identifies the challenge well and offers a creative solution.
Dr. Coyle Neal is co-host of the City of Man Podcast an Amazon Associate (which is linked in this blog), and teaches Political Science and History in Southwest Missouri.
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