Horror Reanimated… the home of Bloody Books

Women in Horror: Alan Kelly examines the works of Poppy Z. Brite

February 26th, 2010

Poppy Z Brite photo by J.K. Potter; Creative Commons license

As a writer Poppy Z Brite took the lost and the depraved, the vicious, the misguided, the outsider, the deviant and the freak by the hand, she lead some home, some to the sadistic salvation they would discover in the extreme ecstasy and pain to be had from “violating the sanctity of a dead boys ass”, abandoned baby vampires into violent pansexualized father/son fuckfests and even others towards the relative safety found in the “transubstantiation of culinary delights” and I loved every fucking word.

As a 16 year old boy, growing up gay in a small backwater her novels became a beacon of hope – or despair, depending on whatever disposition you favoured – breaking through the psychotic monotony of my teenage years – each of her books were connected by one fundamental thread – her characters where for the most part lithe young boys who wanted to be girls, avenging resurrected photographers, dirt poor chartreuse soaked teenagers, gentle mystics, grunge musicians, vampires and necrophiliac cannibals in love. She effortlessly, exquisitely took the mantle of the masculine – Brite identifies as a non-operative transsexual – and offered a uniquely feminine fetishism of the gay male -  beautiful descriptions of hard-core gay sex, lurid descriptions of violence and prose as elegant as anything Shirley Jackson or Oliver Onions ever put on paper overlapped seamlessly.

Her wordplay was pictorial in its depravity, think B-movies or quasi-horror cum skin flicks with an intellectual bent and you’re not even halfway there. Her oeuvre connotates the absurd, the sexual, the glorious Grand Guignol in a bracingly intelligent, sometimes serious and sometimes even light-hearted fashion. She had an ear for macabre whipsmart dialogue, extraordinarily vivid characters; her fiction had me delight in the weirdness and inherent brutality of existence beneath the dark miasma that hung over most of her characters’ lives. What can I say, I’m a sadist. She worked me like an addiction I never wanted to break. Her frames of reference incorporated everything from The Church of The Subgenius to the cyber-punk/avant Goth subcultures which populated the seamy seedy French Quarter in New Orleans, Trent Reznor, AIDS terrorism, filicide and filleting boys.

Because this is Women in Horror Recognition month I’ve decided that the focal point of this piece is going to be on Brite’s earlier body of work – in her later novels Brite’s moved away from – though not completely out of – the horror genre: The Value of X, Liquor, and D.U.C.K are more akin to the writing of Faulkner, Flannery O’ Connor and Harry Crews; I’ve also chosen to omit her commercial projects (the unauthorized Courtney Love biography) and her “franchise fiction” (The Lazarus Heart – which is a tie-in of The Crow).

In her debut novel Lost Souls (Dell bought it in 1991 and a few months later she was signed to a six-figure three-book contract) I was introduced to a triumvirate of psychotic vampires called  Zillah, Molochai and Twig – creatures I wasn’t sure I wanted to fuck, or flee from. After subjecting a young woman to a night of alcohol-fuelled crazed lust – they disappear. An unfortunate side-effect of humans mating with vampires is that said young woman won’t survive the pregnancy, therefore forcing another of their kind to leave the orphaned vampire baby on a doorstep in grim suburbia; the baby, who grows up to become a reclusive teenager and goes by the name of Nothing, rejects the dull normies and the stifling small-town he was forced to grow up in and leaves it all behind in search of his true heritage. The Lost Souls of the title are the heartbroken musician Steve and the fey psychic Ghost, residents of Brite’s fictitious Missing Mile (apparently inspired by Athens in Georgia, where Brite resided before making New Orleans her permanent home). Eventually Nothing hooks up with his real family and embarks on an incestuous affair with Zillah – the leader of the pack and his own father. At first Nothing is easily seduced by the lure of these creatures’ hyperreality. Nothing finds his own way into the damnation – that is the easy part – however, he soon realises that after witnessing some of his new family’s more unsavoury antics he might need to find a way back to the light. The morally conflicted little vamp finds allies when he finally encounters Steve and Ghost, but the pack isn’t prepared to give up one of their own without a ferocious fight.

Lost Souls was listed by Fangoria as one of the best vampire novels ever written and Brite was crowned as the reigning Queen of the Macabre – dethroning even Anne Rice. The contract with Dell left Brite free to write full-time – up until this, she had been making ends meet as a stripper, artist’s model, mouse-caretaker (she cleaned up after them at a cancer research lab) and short order cook.

It took only another nine months for Brite to produce her second baby, Drawing Blood. The setting may have been the same (being almost exclusively based in Missing Mile) but although this novel had supernatural overtones, it was a very different book in tone and subject-matter than her previous one. In the opening chapters a father brutally kills every member of his family, sparing only his young son Trevor. Years later – much like his predecessor Nothing – Trevor returns to the place of his birth, now a stoic young illustrator, and the house where his family perished. In New Orleans the cyber-hacking, slutty Edward Scissorhands lookalike Zach needs to get out of dodge post-haste when a shadowy government agency begin tailing him. He is aided and abetted by the sultry exotic dancer Eddy Chung (perhaps the only female I remember as a mainstay throughout the novel, though in Brite’s earlier work, gender, pretty much like everything else was debateable). Trevor returns to his home and meeting Zach offers him sanctuary. The boys fall in love but soon the malevolent force that runs through the house starts to assert itself. The ultimate solution for Trevor is to find his way through and out of a mysterious liminal dimension known as Birdland. Brite’s conjuration of Birdland took my breath away – her allusions to the insane architecture of such a place can be traced as far back as the now-defunct 1920’s fantasy/horror publication Weird Tales which had lurid, garish covers of archetypal monsters and other assorted ghouls. One sequence in a cinema had me leaving the lamp burning for three whole nights – it was as if Todd Bronwyn had cast the characters that lived there.

Drawing Blood was perhaps the most gentle and tame of her Gothic Line. It was around the same time that Brite had her first short story collection Swamp Foetus (or Wormwood in the UK) published and saw her cover similar if no less unsettling terrain and even had cameo appearances from some of the characters of her earlier novels.

This brings me to Brite’s most controversial novel to date Exquisite Corpse. A novel which took me to the shocking, acid-skin-stripping, viscera full frontiers of psychosexual obsession and corpse-revelry and I fell in love. A tour-de-force with a taunting, teasing, thrilling and tortuous narrative trajectory that undoubtedly had maniacs salivating on the frontlines of the lunatic fringe. So extreme in content was this that her publisher Dell refused to publish it – her UK publishers also declined. Eventually it was picked up by Simon and Schuster in the US and Orion in the UK. This was so much more though than just another “extreme” novel; even with Lost Souls and Drawing Blood Brite took incredible risks and happily gave the V to any of her detractors. She wrote a novel that dragged you into the darkest realms of humanity – but her characters weren’t “monsters.” Caitlin R. Kiernan wrote in the afterword of Self-Made Man:

“At the root of all the anxiety and alarm seems to be Poppy’s decision to portray the novel’s two cannibalistic serial killers as human beings instead of reducing them to one-dimensional monsters who could then easily be dismissed by readers as Not One of Us. That Andrew  Compton and Jay Byrne are shown as men with passions and fears, strengths and weaknesses, that they are humanized rather than demonized, putting the reader at risk of gaining some insight into appetites so alien to their own, and so taboo to their society. And, I suspect, a fear that even the most disgusted reader may find a spark of empathy.”

This novel wiped the floor with the Brett Easton Ellis pussy-hating, chainsaw cub-scout Patrick Bateman. Delving deep into the psyche of the most damaged “monsters” and indeed, as Kiernan pointed out, giving us an insight into another world. Brite was a braver writer than another so-called-subversive enfant terrible, A.M Holmes, who took an intellectual and infuriatingly moral stance in her exploration of paedophilia in The End of Alice. The tabloid detachment of Holmes’ style sickened me while the intimacy of Brite’s full-blown love affair with the “monsters” or the “freaks” offered me a better understanding of the depth of things – however depraved and vile those acts may be I never felt the urge to scald my skin after reading. She led me to other subversive writers like Dennis Cooper (Frisk) Matthew Stokoe (High Life) Laura Albert (the writer formerly known as JT Leroy) and the divine former pro dominatrix Christa Faust (who collaborated with Brite on Triads and is the author of Money Shot) and many other writers who weren’t afraid to grab life by the dick and suck it (or in Andrew Compton’s case, bite it off).

With Exquisite Corpse she really raised the stakes – this was before Eli Roth could shave the hairs on his balls or Takashi Miike and The French New Wave got behind a camera. Before the gang-rape and violent retribution of Virgenie Despentes’ Baise Moi or the small-press deciding Charles Manson is worth publishing. Not that I’m diminishing any of these people and their endeavours, I’m just pointing out that Poppy Z. Brite was writing material at a time – the early nineties – that you probably wouldn’t get away with doing today. This is why I felt honoured when Joseph D’Lacey (who runs this site) asked me to write a piece on one of my favourite writers; his own novel Meat is one seriously fucked up, intelligent, though like Exquisite Corpse, a significant piece of work with staying power and violence and grace. And something which actually tells us, rather than dictates something very real about humanity – even if we might not yet know what that is.

I’m also going to mention a few more female writers you might want to look up which are: Caitlan R Kiernan, Laura Hird, Joyce Carol Oates, Helen Zahavi, Darcey Steinke, Val McDiermud, Joolz Denby, Sarah Langan, Sarah Pinborough, Cathi Unsworth, Rhodi Hawk, Gabrielle Faust, Christa Faust, Megan Abbott, Vicki Hendricks, Lydia Lunch, and Alexandra Sokoloff.

And if you fancy finding out more about Women in Horror Recognition Month, you can always visit these places:

• http://womeninhorrormonth.com/
• http://www.pretty-scary.net/
• http://www.thechainsawmafia.com/home/index.php
• http://www.fatally-yours.com/

Entry Filed under: Writing Chat