Reviewed by David Brizer
The Voice of Blood
by Gabriela Rábago Palafox
translated by M. Elizabeth Ginway & Enrique Muñoz Mantas
University of Tampa Press
Oct 2025, 175 pp, ISBN: 9781597322232, $18usd
Nosferatu, Le Stat, and Dracula came to me in a dream. They said, in a very broken English,
“You’ve simply got to read La Voz de la Sangre by Rábago Palafox. The book is a killer.”
“No doubt,” I said. “But another vampire book? We’re already drowning in that trope.”
Nosferatu bared his long rat-like teeth at me. “A drowning man gets no wetter,” he said. “Listen to your elders.”
I’m glad I did. Because The Voice of Blood, ostensibly a collection of vampire tales by one of Mexico’s foremost fabulists, is so much more. Rábago Palafox’s book is a portal beyond compare. Like Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent-god of Mesoamerica, the book speaks to the morning and evening star, to creation, to knowledge, to the wind.
And it reeks of blood.
The book, a collection of tales written in 1990, is the author’s signal attempt (which roundly succeeds) to transcend Mexican ‘literary nationalism’ by combining horror with high art. What follows is a condensation of the excellent scholarly introduction, replete with footnotes and bibliography, by the translators.
Gabriela Rábago Palafox (1948 – 1995) died at age 47. She was the second of eight children. Following a five-year stint as teacher, she worked as a journalist, translator, playwright, and activist. For a time, she led a literary workshop for orphaned girls maintained by the legendary Mexican priest and wrestler known as Fray Tormenta. (Rábago Palafox also wrote children’s books.)
Her influences were far-ranging, from Lorca to zarzuela, a variety of Spanish light opera. Rábago Palafox transfuses the gothic with feminism, with HIV-awareness, with strains of LGTBQ. Rábago Palafox’s gothic, above and beyond its inherent magical realism, is truly inclusive — it includes the teeming livid whole wide world.
In the first story, ‘The Physician’ treats his patients through bloodletting and the application of leeches. The blood is then sold to a wealthy nobleman who can then have his way with his female servants. In ‘Creatures of the Night,’ the good people of Momoxpan suffer from bite marks, believed to have been inflicted by Pablito, a local boy considered the offspring of a woman and a demon. Later in the story, he dies; his body disappears from the tomb; the townspeople find him in a tree, now with matted hair, sharp teeth, and translucent wings. Luisito, in ‘The Boy With Red Hair,’ believes his parents died in a car crash caused by a red-headed boy who flew around the car, inciting the accident. Needless to say, Luisito becomes preoccupied with blood.
‘The Fondness for Hell’, in my view one of the best in the collection, dissects emotional vampirism, in the form of a not-so-well-meaning landlord whose presence becomes intolerable, repugnant, and unearthly to a young couple. They experience him as “…a shadow, a thing, an animal, perhaps a rat.”
(Are we taking notes, Nosferatu?) ‘The Woman Who Buys Children’ further explores the psychological and economic underpinnings of vampirism. A witch known as Desolación buys young children from their parents and sells them to infertile couples. And so on, to round out this anthology of the fantastic, of the super-lyrical. Rábago Palafox’s stories are long form poems, dripping with sangre.
And why vampirism? Vampires are a legacy from Romanticism, they are a sanguinary metaphor for the throes of artistic creation, for romantic entanglements, for the predations of capitalism. (The vampire’s ability to reproduce quickly and efficiently, at a single bite, so closely resembling the metastatic profit motive in capitalism.) Rábago Palafox’s brood of vampires is unique: these creatures resist patriarchal oppression, stand up for benighted homosexuality, and portray, convincingly, the extremes of emotional vampirism. (Many of us know an emotional vampire or two.)
The Voice of Blood is an eye opener. (A vein opener, too.) Read this book and you will fly with Quetzalcoatl, in a Cinco de Mayo replete with myth, fable, monsters, and current events. The illustrations by José Guadalupe Posada accompanying each story, are nothing short of outstanding: stark engravings, appropriately stylized, of winged creatures, witches at the stake, demons.
About the reviewer: David Brizer is a Bronx-based book critic and author, His most recent novel, The Secret Doctrine of V.H. Rand, was published by Fomite in 2024.