Fevre Dream

Fevre Dream is a vampire novel by the American writer George R. R. Martin, published in 1982 and set on the Mississippi River in the years before the Civil War.

Abner Marsh is an ugly, loud, enormously experienced river captain whose company has been ruined by a winter of ice, and Joshua York is the pale, courteous gentleman who wants a partner and will not explain why he travels at night. The boat they build is called Fevre Dream, and its maiden voyages take the pair down a river where slavery is legal, where every landing has its own rules, and where Marsh slowly works out what his partner is. York's purpose turns out to be larger and stranger than Marsh's profit: he is looking for others of his kind and for a way to end the hold that the oldest and cruellest of them has over the rest. Martin has described the novel as a meeting of Bram Stoker and Mark Twain, and its river detail comes from his time in Iowa, where steamboats were built. The book was nominated for the Locus Award and the World Fantasy Award in 1983.