Deep Vellum published Ito Romo’s new novel *Filth Eaters* on May 19, 2026. About a week later, I finally mustered up the courage to brave the notoriously hellacious traffic of the major US city in which I currently reside in order to drive across town to my favorite local bookstore where prior I had preordered *Filth Eaters* on something of a whim. Once I got the novel home, I sat on it for a couple weeks, then finally read it over the course of three days (way more than needed), finishing last Monday, June 8. Accordingly, I’ve had a week to mull it over, and now must be frank, I didn’t love *Filth Eaters*.

Has anyone else here yet had a chance to read Ito Romo’s *Filth Eaters*? If so, would you care to chime in?

Not that it really matters, but the aforementioned whim I experienced was algorithm-induced no doubt, as I follow Deep Vellum on Instagram, which is how I first became aware of Ito Romo and his new novel. Here’s some biographical information on the author taken straight from Deep Vellum’s website (and also included at the end of *Filth Eaters)*:

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

I decided to read *Filth Eaters* based primarily on its synopsis (see below) as well as Deep Vellum’s reputation for putting out high-quality works of literary fiction and classics written by Mexican and Chicano/a authors (I own Carmen Boullosa’s *Texas: The Great Theft* and Juan Rulfo’s *The Golden Cockerel* from Deep Vellum too). Candidly, I was also quite intrigued to see what “Chicano Gothic-Noir” is all about, and furthermore, must admit that I’ve always been a bit of a sucker for vampire narratives. Now that I think of it, I suppose it’s worth mentioning as well that I was sort of “glamoured” by the startling yet alluring image jumping out from the novel’s front cover.

In order to get everyone in the loop, here’s a synopsis of the novel also excerpted from Deep Vellum’s website (and found on the back cover of the book):

>“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 Radamés 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, Radamés glamours and schemes his way onto a ship headed for Mexico. There, in the underbelly of the forgotten city of Teotihuacán, 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.”

I had never heard of Stephen Graham Jones before encountering Deep vellum’s description of *Filth Eaters*; nevertheless, I looked up some of his books (e.g. *The Buffalo Hunter Hunter*, 2025), and have to say that they strike me, at least on the surface, as rather interesting. On the other hand, I have read some of Mariana Enriquez’s work, but only *The Dangers of Smoking Bed*. I would be curious to know if anyone has read *Our Share of Night* as well as *Filth Eaters* (looking at you u/workisheat), and in that case, if they happened to notice any parallels between the two novels, aside from the obvious, general horror connection.

My favorite part about *Filth Eaters* is its incredibly expansive scope (take a look at the second picture for a chapter breakdown illustrating how much time and historical ground Romo’s brief, 130ish-page novel truly covers). Moreover, I greatly appreciated the speculative, sci-fi, and futuristic aspects of the narrative as well as Romo’s dialogues with world history, as he interweaves myriad historical threads with various vampire legends, and a number of different mythological traditions, including Aztec, Romani, Christian, and more. Beyond all this, Romo also plays with the national mythologies of México, and in particular, the notion of mestizaje.

Although Romo deals with some really fascinating ideas in *Filth Eaters*, I am sorry to say that while reading the book I often felt the caliber of his writing did not live up to the creativity of his imaginative ideas nor the weighty themes with which he wrangled. In other words, there are moments in Romo’s novel that feel like literary fiction, and they are pretty great in my view, however, I believe those moments of greatness are overshadowed by the rest of the books which reads more like genre fiction, namely of the horror variety. 

With that out of the way, it should also be said that perhaps my distaste for genre fiction has more to do with my expectations as a reader than it does with the quality of writing in *Filth Eaters* considering that I normally do not read much straight-up horror fiction (I know, I’m a super pretentious POS!). Then again, there were some sentences I came across in *Filth Eaters* that had me questioning the editing process of the novel; that is to say, whether certain sentences merely contained typographical errors, or were simply poorly constructed. To be blunt, occasion, I even found Romo’s word choice to be somewhat juvenile and repetitive.

Beyond the sentence level, I also believe that the narrative as a whole leaves a lot to be explained, and not in a way that reads like a sly stylistic choice meant to be thought-provoking, but rather, in a way that, to me, felt undeveloped or not fully conceived. For instance, though I won’t explain in concrete detail in order to avoid spoilers, I found the ending in particular to be especially disappointing, largely due to the fact that I do not think Romo sufficiently illustrates the main characters’s primary motivations behind their actions. For me, most all the characters feel like flimsily formed foils who are motivated by such vague, yet easily summed-up, universal notions as “love” and “hate” (Romo employs these very terms in numerous instances throughout the text).

In spite of my general disappointment with the overall narrative of *Filth Eaters*, both in regards to plot as well as to style, the most fascinating aspects of Romo’s novel had to do with his speculative envisioning of the future. Romo’s vision of the future, is certainly a bleak one, >!as New York City (and in my interpretation, by extension the world) have undergone an environmental disaster that has culminated in the form of a dystopian (global) society. However, in said society, Doro, one of the novel’s vampire protagonists, has made a fortune by creating video-drone technology that he uses to record his kills and then post the clips of himself feeding on human blood to his dark-web website, “VamPorn.”!< Although I was intrigued by these ideas while reading the narrative, again I believe that Romo could have explored such themes with much more breadth and profundity. To this end, I honestly believe that *Filth Eaters* could (and should) be at least 100 pages longer.

Anyway, all of this is to say, then, that I think you should read *Filth Eaters* if you are a steadfast fan of horror genre fiction, and vampire narratives in particular. I also think you should read *Filth Eaters* if you are interested in Aztec mythology and/or discourses related to Mexico’s national myth of mestizaje. In this vein, I believe Romo’s novel is ripe for serious critical analysis by a grad student or professor, rather than a failed academic like myself, so if you’re in academia, you also might want to give this book a look.

Conversely, if you are searching for your next life-changing “latamlit” read, this most likely isn’t it. As much as it pains me to say—as I truly wanted to enjoy *Filth Eaters* a whole lot more than I actually did—I do not believe Romo’s writing is on par with the greats of Latin American literature. Frankly, even aside from the indisputable “greats,” I do not think Romo’s writing matches up with the likes of many Latin American authors writing literary fiction today. To reiterate, perhaps this again has more to do with my tastes and expectations as a reader, however, I believe *Filth Eaters* is a work of genre fiction with flashes of high literature, but in my opinion those flashes are few and far between.

If you’ve read *Filth Eaters* and/or any of Ito Romo’s other books, would you please be so kind as to share your thoughts in the comments below? (Much appreciated!)

As always, thank you for reading… Peace!

Filth Eaters by Ito Romo