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Urrrrrgh. I read this via Dracula Daily, which reorganised the text into daily emails of the journal entries as they occurred in real time (May to Nov), so perhaps my view of the story is coloured by that. But my gosh this was a dull read.

It did show promise at the start, and I was intrigued and somewhat excited to be finally reading one of the most famous vampire stories of note, but as time moved forward, it got less and less interesting and more and more of a chore to get through.

Dear friends, this book, this book right here, is a great example of why some people don't like reading classics. Perhaps in its day (1897) it was considered well written and fraught with terror, but reading it today in 2022, it a slog and honestly, not worth your time.

Really long journal entries (which were doubly long in the format Dracula Daily was using) where nothing of note happened, men (of the time of course) being overbearing about their women folk, the women being the perfect example of why some men think women are emotional creatures who need to be sheltered. Dracula himself, barely makes an appearance in the entire novel. It is centred wholly around Mina and the men who apparently loved her so much that they "did dare much for her sake." Ugh.

I was very tempted to DNF this when it got mid way through the October chapters. But I persisted, even when my eyes started glazing over from boredom, because this is a beloved classic. It had to get better right? almost half a million people rated this 5 stars, so there must be something that redeems it, right? Right???

But, no. There was nothing. I'm giving it 1 star because of the all the vampire works it somehow inspired, and an additional 1 star out of 5 for the story itself because all this book did was convince me that Bram Stoker is an energy vampire because reading this book sucked the life right out me.

Disappointing.

The story starts off ok, we learn about Martin and his mother, who have an odd relationship revolving around horror as Martin's mother is a makeup artist specialising in horror effects. She takes a job and Martin decides to go to Bible Camp near his grandparents house.

The action shifts to the Bible Camp and thats where the story really starts to go downhill in my opinion. Father Tony, the camp leader just randomly decides to start killing 12 year olds in increasingly violent ways. This starts almost right away, within days of them arriving. We don't really get to know any of these kids - it happens so quickly - so while it was awful that they were killed, the impact wasn't as great as it might have been had we grown to like any of the kids.

The carnage at the camp is interspersed with letters to Martin from his mother, talking about her job and some strange things that are going on. It seems clear that the mother has some mental health issues. But the letters never seem to have anything to do with the story and the last letter doesn't really make sense in the context of what has happened in the story at that point.

But the biggest issues are that there was no character growth, the main character doesn't overcome any obstacles, the story itself didn't really seem to follow any kind of story structure, it just meanders along. I can think of many, many ways that this story could have been improved, if only this, if only that. At least it was a quick read.

I've really enjoyed the entire Jack West Jr series, but for this one, I didn't enjoy it as much as others.

I'm spoiler cutting a couple of things as I don't want to hide the entire review.

The books in the series have always been a little over the top in terms of reality, but so many people came back from the dead in this book. Someone died, and five minutes later there they were again. Not once, not twice, not even three times it happened, I actually lost count how many times someone was thought to be dead and then Surprise! Not actually dead. By the end it was no longer a surprise but kind of expected.

Also, the side plot with the bells was super weird. Jack showed in the end that you can control people without them being put to sleep, so what was the point of sphinx doing that? Like for real, why did he need to put people to sleep? He'd have gotten the power regardless. It would have even been better power without putting people to sleep because then he could control people without them knowing. Which Jack ended up doing in the end. (I also find that odd, that Jack would actually use the powers in any way, aside from that moment at the end with his dog.

I also felt like there were too many characters too spread out, and too much (but not much really) going on in the different places. It started to feel long. Which is an odd feeling for what is normally a fast paced action story.

Otherwise the book was standard fare for a Matthew Reilly novel and on the surface level I did enjoy it. But it definitely wasn't one of his better books. And I say that as a huge fan who has read everything he has written. But hopefully this isn't actually the end of the series and one day we'll be surprised with a new and better book for the series. :)

This is one of those books that not everyone is going to love. The first half of the book has a dream like quality to it, and is mostly the erotic desire of a queer male sea captain. It's his private diary of thoughts and desire leading up to the end. It gets reasonably graphic, but not overly so in my opinion. The second half of the book is a more factual journal of events, a captain's log of sorts. It was almost like reading two completely different books with the same premise.

The Route of Ice and Salt was a really well written book that conjured up a lot of imagery and sold the story of the sea captain really well. However, I found it really hard to get through, and I almost didn't finish it several times. I think this is because what the book was, and what I was expecting the book to be were two different things. I'm giving it three stars for being well written but also because I didn't love it, but I didn't hate it either.