George R.R. Martin Hopes Guillermo Del Toro Adapts His Underrated Vampire Novel

In adapting "Frankenstein," filmmaker Guillermo del Toro caught his white whale. He's now said "Frankenstein" is the capstone to his "blessed enterprise moved by love upon love upon love for monsters," and now he's ready to try something new. But there's at least one person who'd want to woo del Toro back to the world of horror and monsters: George R. R. Martin, author of "A Song of Ice and Fire."

While Martin is going to be most remembered for his stories set in Westeros, he had a long writing career before "A Game of Thrones" hit bookstore shelves in 1996. In an exclusive interview with Collider in 2025, Martin said that "maybe his favorite child" is his second solo-authored novel, 1982's "Fevre Dream." Set in 1857, the book follows a steamboat man named Abner Marsh. While traveling the Mississippi River on his boat, the Fevre Dream, Marsh discovers his business partner Joshua York and several passengers are vampires.

Martin, who wants to write the potential "Fevre Dream" movie himself, told Collider he's met with a few filmmakers about adapting the book. One of them is Guillermo del Toro. In a 2024 interview with Winter Is Coming dot net (a "Game of Thrones" inspired pop culture site), Martin recounted:

"[Del Toro] loves ['Fevre Dream'], he says he wants to do it ... but he doesn't want to do it now. He always has this project first and that project first, and then this other project. But eventually he'll do 'Fevre Dream,' if he lives that long and I live that long and movies live that long."

Indeed, del Toro's list of unmade projects is long, from an H.P. Lovecraft's "At The Mountains of Madness" movie to a live-action series of the horror-thriller manga, "Monster" by Naoki Urasawa.

Martin doesn't just have a director in mind for "Fevre Dream." His pick to play Abner Marsh is Ron Perlman, who has been part of del Toro's regular troupe of actors since his vampire movie debut, "Cronos." 

Perlman also has experience working with Martin; the actor starred in the 1987 "Beauty and the Beast" TV series, of which Martin wrote several episodes. Perlman was the Beast, or the lion-faced Vincent, opposite Linda Hamilton as Catherine, the Beauty. Before the "Game of Thrones" TV series, Martin had also said Perlman was his choice to play scarred knight Sandor "The Hound" Clegane, another Beastly character. (The Hound was ultimately played by Rory McCann, however.) One also wonders if Perlman-as-Vincent's long blond mane was on Martin's mind when he conceived of the golden-haired, lion-themed Lannister family.

In "Fevre Dream," Marsh is described as a huge man, and Perlman always looks towering onscreen. The steamboat captain is uneducated but not slow; he takes to reading Joshua's poetry books, and in fact discovers his friend is a vampire because York lets slip that he once met the long-dead Lord Byron. Abner has a simple dream of running the fastest steamboat on the Mississippi, and he's headstrong in defending it. Perlman is excellent, and often scary, at playing characters quick to anger. 

Another actor who connects both Martin and del Toro is Charles Dance, who appeared recently in "Frankenstein" and stole the show as coldhearted Tywin Lannister on "Game of Thrones." Dance might seem a natural pick for evil vampire "bloodmaster" Damon Julian, but I'd argue he could play against type as the white-haired, stern, and mysterious but ultimately benevolent Joshua York.

"Fevre Dream" has little in common with "Game of Thrones," but Martin fans should read it. You can see his writerly flourishes taking root, such as his gift for writing dialogue and his ornate scene-building (especially when describing feasts). Vampire book fans would be bereft not to read "Fevre Dream," too. The most common pitch for "Fevre Dream" is that it's Bram Stoker (author of "Dracula") meets Mark Twain, particularly Twain's Mississippi River-set "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." That blend echoes Anne Rice's "Interview with the Vampire," which, like "Fevre Dream," throws blood-suckers into the Southern Gothic.

Given the setting, "Fevre Dream" unavoidably explores slavery; Julian is introduced feeding on the blood of enslaved people. Vampires in "Fevre Dream" call humans "cattle," echoing the way that chattel slavery dehumanized Black people. York, who wants to free his people of the "red thirst," is looked down upon by Julian the way that slavers would have at white abolitionists. When York steps in sunlight, Julian jests that he wants his skin to turn "brown and leathery."

Another easy comparison is Ryan Coogler's recent vampire movie "Sinners," set in Jim Crow Mississippi. That movie uses vampires not to depict the American South's racial hierarchies like "Fevre Dream" does, but as an allegory for cultural assimilation. Why else depict head vampire Remmick (Jack O'Connell) as an Irishman living in America? 

"Fevre Dream" has been adapted as a comic miniseries, scripted by Marin's protege Daniel Abraham, but no other adaptations have been realized. ("All we need is $100 million," Martin said to Winter Is Coming). Alas, like Martin's "A Dream of Spring" — the still unpublished conclusion to "A Song of Ice and Fire" — a "Fevre Dream" movie might remain, indeed, only a dream.