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Filth Eaters
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 Aztec city of Teotihuacán, the Andalusian vampire falls in love with a member of this ancient sect of Aztec 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.
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 Aztec city of Teotihuacán, the Andalusian vampire falls in love with a member of this ancient sect of Aztec 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.
144 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 19, 2026
About the author
Ito Romo
5 books19 followersIto 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 includeThe Border is Burning and El Puente / The Bridge, both published by University of New Mexico Press.He lives in San Antonio.
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Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews
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April 3, 2026review of Filth Eaters in Latino Book Review:
https://www.latinobookreview.com/filt...
https://www.latinobookreview.com/filt...
May 28, 2026
They seek out dark and depraved books... they giggle as they read the most heinous scenes... they post the most offensive passages on social media... they are... the Filth Readers!!!
This book marks Deep Vellum's entry into the horror game. It has prose like Eric LaRocca and comes with a blurb from Stephen Graham Jones. If you like historical horror with a fucked up twist, then this should be right up your alley. I defy you to zoom in on the cover and not be tempted to immediately read the whole thing for more context.
This book marks Deep Vellum's entry into the horror game. It has prose like Eric LaRocca and comes with a blurb from Stephen Graham Jones. If you like historical horror with a fucked up twist, then this should be right up your alley. I defy you to zoom in on the cover and not be tempted to immediately read the whole thing for more context.
Review of advance copy received from Edelweiss+
More like a 3.5, rounded up on account of all the torn arteries. Some very cool stuff happening here, but it never really clicked into a higher gear than "mildly interesting" for me.
June 21, 2026
the world building in this is very effective and immersing. it also captures the classic heartbreaking aspects of vampire stories very well, while still having a unique take on the genre.
i think most readers will either love or hate the format of this. its very brief and offers little snapshots into the story, that come together beautifully at the end, but i dont know if im completely on board with the disjointed format for the first half. the second half was definitely stronger for me.
i will also say this book underutilizes the premise of the dystopian flooded new york to the point where im not quite sure why it was thrown in there. it doesnt really detract from the story for me but i do wonder if there originally was some expansion on that aspect. i think you could easily set this in regular new york and it would change essentially nothing about the story.
i think most readers will either love or hate the format of this. its very brief and offers little snapshots into the story, that come together beautifully at the end, but i dont know if im completely on board with the disjointed format for the first half. the second half was definitely stronger for me.
i will also say this book underutilizes the premise of the dystopian flooded new york to the point where im not quite sure why it was thrown in there. it doesnt really detract from the story for me but i do wonder if there originally was some expansion on that aspect. i think you could easily set this in regular new york and it would change essentially nothing about the story.
Did Not Finish
February 7, 2026terrible writing
June 8, 2026
i could’ve read 400 more pages of this. Romo has expertly mixed a classic vampire tale and pre-Columbian myth with a dash of dystopia to carry this bloody saga far past our own time.
June 20, 2026
I didn’t realize this was a novella until I started it. I just would’ve liked more, esp about the Aztecs
May 29, 2026
I liked the premise of the story and a lot of the creative/imaginative aspects of the world of vampires he builds, but overall was left feeling unsatisfied, as if the book was building up to some climax that never came. I felt the book could have gone deeper into its lore or explained a bit more some of the mystical elements. The writing style also was not my favorite. At least it was a quick read.
May 23, 2026
If I could leave 0 stars, I would. I am not sure how this got approved by the proofreaders and copyeditors. There are so many grammatical errors in this book. Further, the writing feels like an edgy teen writing their first vampire book. I finished this one in hopes of seeing the piece as a whole, but I was left utterly disappointed. Save yourself the time and money and skip this one.
Read
June 13, 2026Hernán Cortés Files an Expense Report
BWAF RECOMMENDED READ
TL;DR: Romo makes the vampire mean what it always should have meant: conquest, written into the blood and beating in the chest. Filth Eaters is a thousand years of inherited despair told out of order, and the assembly costs you. But the engine is fierce and the ending earns its light. A strange, bloody, ambitious debut.
There is a city at the end of this book that has drowned and gone on living. Half of Manhattan stands in saltrotted water the color of an old bruise and the men who decide what gets repaired and what is left to rot ride down out of their boat garages in the gray sky sealed behind tinted glass with perfumed silk held to their noses against the stink of the channel they have learned to call the Deep Lower, and down in the cold beneath them among the noodle carts and the fish stalls and the militarized police a vampire walks with a camera pinned to his lapel and hunts two young men by the heartbeat of the live frogs in their paper bag. He films it. He sells it. The bleeding heart emojis come up out of the bottom of the little screen like flies lifting off a carcass. This is the world Ito Romo hands you first and it is the strongest case the book makes for itself, because long before you are told where these creatures came from you understand exactly what they have been made into.
What they are is the book’s one true invention and it is a good one. These are not Stoker’s pale aristocrats nor Rice’s beautiful mourners. They eat the heart. They take it whole and still beating from the chest and in the blood of it they take the rest, the hate and the cruelty and the long sediment of human sin that a body carries the way a riverbed carries silt, and they name themselves Filth Eaters because that is the accurate word and Romo does not soften it. The conceit holds because it is built into the flesh and not bolted onto it. The European dead are kept off by silver. The older American kind, the Mexica vampires who lived beside their people for a thousand years and let themselves be paid in the hearts of the sacrificed, are held down by nothing but the thorn of the maguey, their own land’s plant turned against them, and they can wear silver as jewelry though it greens their skin. That single reversal does more thematic labor than a hundred pages of argument could. Conquest here is not metaphor laid over the vampire. It is the vampire. The creature that crosses an ocean to feed on a new world and the creature already in that world waiting to be ransomed for its gold are the same animal seen from two ends of the wound.
The structure is the great ambition and it is also the great cost. The book travels from a mangrove delta in 1099 to a Granada bathhouse the year the Moors lose the city to a sacked Tenochtitlán to a forgotten Teotihuacán to the drowned New York of the next century, and it does not travel in order. You assemble the bloodline as you go, maker to made to made again, and the assembly is part of the pleasure, the slow recognition of how one cold figure on a balcony connects to a boy streaming his own damnation seven hundred years on. But the novel is short and the labor it asks is real, and some of the historical chapters land as set pieces more than as load-bearing rooms in the house. Two of them are letters from Cortés rewritten so that the conquistador’s bureaucratic greed makes room for vampires, the friars demanding a full fifth of the looted treasure to silver their doors against the living dead, and the device is clever and quietly savage and very funny in the way the elevated dispatch turns and turns and never once admits what it is admitting. It is also clotted with inventory, the necklaces and the gold wheels and the feathered crowns counted out at length, and it comes back a second time when once would have been enough.
Romo was born and raised in Laredo and his family has held that stretch of border for eleven generations, since before there was a line to be on either side of. He spent two books and the better part of a career writing the dark gritty length of Interstate 35, work that got called Chicano Gothic and Chicano Noir, story cycles published out of New Mexico that critics set beside Carver and Rulfo, and he took a doctorate from Texas Tech and taught Mexican American and multicultural literature at St. Mary’s in San Antonio and was put into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2019. This is his first novel. A man who has written one small violent corner of the map his whole life has here taken that same corner and stretched it across a thousand years and three continents, and the seam shows in places, the way it does when a writer of the compressed and the local reaches for the epic. What does not show as seam is the center. The book is dedicated to the grandmother who took him to Teotihuacán when he was six, and the emotional heart of the whole genealogy is buried in that pyramid, and you feel the difference between the parts he has read about and the parts he has stood inside.
The prose is best when it is closest to the body. A bathhouse seduction that turns to feeding is rendered with a patience that makes the eroticism and the violence the same gesture, which is what the book believes about both. Blood rubies cut from flash frozen blood and served on a gloved hand. Noodles scattered from a tipped cart steaming in grimy snow. Two black hairless dogs that walk a wasted creature home. These are the things that stay. The dread is built less from monsters than from accumulation, the sense that nothing is ever paid for and everything is inherited, that the filth goes down the line and gathers weight and one day arrives whole in someone who did not ask for it.
Where it strains is where it tells. The love that is meant to carry the back half of the book is asserted more than it is earned, consecrated in ceremonies before it is fully lived, and a late chapter downloads centuries of history straight into a character’s mind through a sacred tongue that speaks without speaking, which is a graceful image and also a confession that the book has more past than it has room to dramatize. The thesis, that hate is a thing the body carries and can be made to swallow, is stated outright more than a careful book would let it be stated.
And still the ending works, and it works precisely because the despair is not the character’s alone but the whole bloodline’s, a thing built clause by clause and conquest by conquest until it has nowhere left to go but up into the light. Romo does not earn the close with a trick. He earns it the long way, by making you carry the weight down the centuries until it is yours too. The book reaches for the scale of a creation myth at the last and mostly touches it.
A flawed and ambitious and genuinely strange thing, then, more interesting in its failures than most novels are in their successes. The frogs go on screaming in the bag. The emojis go on rising off the dead like flies, and somewhere up in the gray sky the men who own the water hold their silk to their faces and do not look down.
BWAF RECOMMENDED READ
TL;DR: Romo makes the vampire mean what it always should have meant: conquest, written into the blood and beating in the chest. Filth Eaters is a thousand years of inherited despair told out of order, and the assembly costs you. But the engine is fierce and the ending earns its light. A strange, bloody, ambitious debut.
There is a city at the end of this book that has drowned and gone on living. Half of Manhattan stands in saltrotted water the color of an old bruise and the men who decide what gets repaired and what is left to rot ride down out of their boat garages in the gray sky sealed behind tinted glass with perfumed silk held to their noses against the stink of the channel they have learned to call the Deep Lower, and down in the cold beneath them among the noodle carts and the fish stalls and the militarized police a vampire walks with a camera pinned to his lapel and hunts two young men by the heartbeat of the live frogs in their paper bag. He films it. He sells it. The bleeding heart emojis come up out of the bottom of the little screen like flies lifting off a carcass. This is the world Ito Romo hands you first and it is the strongest case the book makes for itself, because long before you are told where these creatures came from you understand exactly what they have been made into.
What they are is the book’s one true invention and it is a good one. These are not Stoker’s pale aristocrats nor Rice’s beautiful mourners. They eat the heart. They take it whole and still beating from the chest and in the blood of it they take the rest, the hate and the cruelty and the long sediment of human sin that a body carries the way a riverbed carries silt, and they name themselves Filth Eaters because that is the accurate word and Romo does not soften it. The conceit holds because it is built into the flesh and not bolted onto it. The European dead are kept off by silver. The older American kind, the Mexica vampires who lived beside their people for a thousand years and let themselves be paid in the hearts of the sacrificed, are held down by nothing but the thorn of the maguey, their own land’s plant turned against them, and they can wear silver as jewelry though it greens their skin. That single reversal does more thematic labor than a hundred pages of argument could. Conquest here is not metaphor laid over the vampire. It is the vampire. The creature that crosses an ocean to feed on a new world and the creature already in that world waiting to be ransomed for its gold are the same animal seen from two ends of the wound.
The structure is the great ambition and it is also the great cost. The book travels from a mangrove delta in 1099 to a Granada bathhouse the year the Moors lose the city to a sacked Tenochtitlán to a forgotten Teotihuacán to the drowned New York of the next century, and it does not travel in order. You assemble the bloodline as you go, maker to made to made again, and the assembly is part of the pleasure, the slow recognition of how one cold figure on a balcony connects to a boy streaming his own damnation seven hundred years on. But the novel is short and the labor it asks is real, and some of the historical chapters land as set pieces more than as load-bearing rooms in the house. Two of them are letters from Cortés rewritten so that the conquistador’s bureaucratic greed makes room for vampires, the friars demanding a full fifth of the looted treasure to silver their doors against the living dead, and the device is clever and quietly savage and very funny in the way the elevated dispatch turns and turns and never once admits what it is admitting. It is also clotted with inventory, the necklaces and the gold wheels and the feathered crowns counted out at length, and it comes back a second time when once would have been enough.
Romo was born and raised in Laredo and his family has held that stretch of border for eleven generations, since before there was a line to be on either side of. He spent two books and the better part of a career writing the dark gritty length of Interstate 35, work that got called Chicano Gothic and Chicano Noir, story cycles published out of New Mexico that critics set beside Carver and Rulfo, and he took a doctorate from Texas Tech and taught Mexican American and multicultural literature at St. Mary’s in San Antonio and was put into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2019. This is his first novel. A man who has written one small violent corner of the map his whole life has here taken that same corner and stretched it across a thousand years and three continents, and the seam shows in places, the way it does when a writer of the compressed and the local reaches for the epic. What does not show as seam is the center. The book is dedicated to the grandmother who took him to Teotihuacán when he was six, and the emotional heart of the whole genealogy is buried in that pyramid, and you feel the difference between the parts he has read about and the parts he has stood inside.
The prose is best when it is closest to the body. A bathhouse seduction that turns to feeding is rendered with a patience that makes the eroticism and the violence the same gesture, which is what the book believes about both. Blood rubies cut from flash frozen blood and served on a gloved hand. Noodles scattered from a tipped cart steaming in grimy snow. Two black hairless dogs that walk a wasted creature home. These are the things that stay. The dread is built less from monsters than from accumulation, the sense that nothing is ever paid for and everything is inherited, that the filth goes down the line and gathers weight and one day arrives whole in someone who did not ask for it.
Where it strains is where it tells. The love that is meant to carry the back half of the book is asserted more than it is earned, consecrated in ceremonies before it is fully lived, and a late chapter downloads centuries of history straight into a character’s mind through a sacred tongue that speaks without speaking, which is a graceful image and also a confession that the book has more past than it has room to dramatize. The thesis, that hate is a thing the body carries and can be made to swallow, is stated outright more than a careful book would let it be stated.
And still the ending works, and it works precisely because the despair is not the character’s alone but the whole bloodline’s, a thing built clause by clause and conquest by conquest until it has nowhere left to go but up into the light. Romo does not earn the close with a trick. He earns it the long way, by making you carry the weight down the centuries until it is yours too. The book reaches for the scale of a creation myth at the last and mostly touches it.
A flawed and ambitious and genuinely strange thing, then, more interesting in its failures than most novels are in their successes. The frogs go on screaming in the bag. The emojis go on rising off the dead like flies, and somewhere up in the gray sky the men who own the water hold their silk to their faces and do not look down.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
"Everything in this book is historically accurate—except, of course, the vampires. Oh, and what happens in the future. But almost everything else is historically accurate." - Ito Romo
Filth Eaters takes a genre that’s been done to death (and undeath, lol) and manages to carve out something genuinely new. Ito Romo introduces a fresh breed of vampire — one that can reproduce, that doesn’t crumble under the usual folkloric tricks, and that feels more like an evolving species than a static monster.
Told in a nonlinear structure, the novel traces a thousand‑year bloodline beginning with Shandor in 1099, moving through the turning of the young Spaniard Radames in a 1400s bathhouse, and landing in 2069, where Radames’s son Doro livestreams his kills on the streets of a drowned, neon‑soaked New York City. It’s ambitious, sweeping, and often fascinating.
Romo uses this multi-century timeline to explore survival in all of its physical, emotional, and generational forms... where his characters wrestle with identity, the exhaustion of existence, and the deeply human hunger to love and be loved, even when your species is dependent on taking life in order to sustain your own.
The structure is bold, the ideas are fresh, but the emotional impact didn’t land firmly for me, and I found that I admired the concept more than I connected with the characters.
In the end, though Filth Eaters breaks new ground in the vampire genre and was a solid, intriguing read, it failed to fully sink its teeth into me.
Filth Eaters takes a genre that’s been done to death (and undeath, lol) and manages to carve out something genuinely new. Ito Romo introduces a fresh breed of vampire — one that can reproduce, that doesn’t crumble under the usual folkloric tricks, and that feels more like an evolving species than a static monster.
Told in a nonlinear structure, the novel traces a thousand‑year bloodline beginning with Shandor in 1099, moving through the turning of the young Spaniard Radames in a 1400s bathhouse, and landing in 2069, where Radames’s son Doro livestreams his kills on the streets of a drowned, neon‑soaked New York City. It’s ambitious, sweeping, and often fascinating.
Romo uses this multi-century timeline to explore survival in all of its physical, emotional, and generational forms... where his characters wrestle with identity, the exhaustion of existence, and the deeply human hunger to love and be loved, even when your species is dependent on taking life in order to sustain your own.
The structure is bold, the ideas are fresh, but the emotional impact didn’t land firmly for me, and I found that I admired the concept more than I connected with the characters.
In the end, though Filth Eaters breaks new ground in the vampire genre and was a solid, intriguing read, it failed to fully sink its teeth into me.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
This story is vast in its representation of time. It spans, jumping back and forth from 1491-2071 and in between. As the story unfolds we are introduced to a specific type of vampire called Filth Eaters. They consume all of the hate and filth of humanity. I found myself sympathetic for Doro and the pain he experiences as well as inflicts. The novel is about love, hate and how we pass on our generational trauma, most importantly, the trauma of those who were colonized. Ito’s writing was a good break from the dense and heavy novels I’ve been reading, and this book has me interested in checking out his other “Chicano Gothic” stories. Filth Eaters is a quick and engaging vampire story. If you’re interested in vampires I recommend taking a bite of this fresh take on the genre.
June 13, 2026
FULL 5 STARS. i feel like i just attended a seminar about the effects of colonisation and brutal imperialism by the conquistadors on the aztec triple alliance, leading to the fall of the ancient mexica vampires, and how the endured brutality affected the future bloodlines of the mestizo vampires.
like i'm not kidding i feel like i just took the best history course of my life. it wasn't a long book, just 125-ish pages, but it felt like i finished a 300 page novel. it was such a rich story & tbh it felt so real i forgot a few times i was reading a vampire novel LOL. highly recommend!!
like i'm not kidding i feel like i just took the best history course of my life. it wasn't a long book, just 125-ish pages, but it felt like i finished a 300 page novel. it was such a rich story & tbh it felt so real i forgot a few times i was reading a vampire novel LOL. highly recommend!!
June 7, 2026
Really didn't know what to expect from this novella, though was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed it.
The writing is good, though at times I did find myself re-reading sections as it didn't flow quite so well for me. It gets pretty bloody gnarly and I loved the mixing of Spanish into the dialogue.
A reflection on colonisation and generational trauma, the mixed timelines start out a little puzzling but piece together really well by the book's end.
The writing is good, though at times I did find myself re-reading sections as it didn't flow quite so well for me. It gets pretty bloody gnarly and I loved the mixing of Spanish into the dialogue.
A reflection on colonisation and generational trauma, the mixed timelines start out a little puzzling but piece together really well by the book's end.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
Ryan Coogler is the person I credit with giving me any interest in vampires, and enough confidence to tell myself I could survive whatever was in this book.
Intriguing ideas, great historical details, and lots of anguish, but it never coalesced into something with emotional resonance. Give me more! Even more gore, if it comes with more stakes — ha ha.
Intriguing ideas, great historical details, and lots of anguish, but it never coalesced into something with emotional resonance. Give me more! Even more gore, if it comes with more stakes — ha ha.
Review of advance copy
A vampire novel that explores the weight of colonialism, hate, and the trauma that gets passed down. I don’t know how I got it early — I guess the bookstore messed up and put it out too soon lol. I wish it would’ve been longer and explored the future setting
June 16, 2026
It was a unique story, I liked the historical facts. At first, it was a bit weird to undestans why the story kept going back to the past and to the future but at the end it made sense. I did enjoy the whole book and was a quick read, however I wish it would've had more gore.
June 24, 2026
3 - I adored the premise of this book, but I felt like it could have benefitted from being longer rather than being a novella. There was so much complex world building that felt rushed in under 200 pages.
Review of advance copy received from Edelweiss+
It took me a bit to get into it, right around the point where the chapters got longer. A very interesting spin on the vampire formula.
May 17, 2026
I only wish i had more 🔥
June 10, 2026
Friend’s Uncle Wrote this, very interesting and entertaining concept, made it a part our book club! Looking forward to his next installment if he decides to expand on this universe
June 27, 2026
Good, with a lot to say, but I think hurt by the short length. I loved our characters and loved the lore and history. 3.5 stars
June 27, 2026
At the heart of this book is a love story. The language is beautiful and it really makes you think about what being a filth eater can do to the soul.
Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews