Blood and sex, death and sex, cannibalism and sex, New Orleans and … sex.
Andrew Compton, escaped serial killer, lands in New Orleans, hot sweaty fuck me now New Orleans and meets Jay, another serial killer. They soon form a bloody bond, twined together in a death spiral of murder and lust.
19 year old Tran, a beautiful Vietnamese boy, still aching from his failed love affair with Luke, an infected writer, spins into Jay’s orbit and tempts him to break his golden rule: never kill a local boy.
Luke, thin and mad, infected and furious, wants to execute the breeders, to kill all those pushing for pairing and children.
Poppy Z Brite writes some truly fucked up prose.
Cannibals
If you ever wanted to read in gory detail about people eating dead bodies, this is the book for you. Poppy is detailed.
Poppy lingers.
“He sank his teeth into flesh that had gone the consistency of firm pudding. He ripped at the edges of the wound. Pulling off strips of skin and meat, swallowing them whole, smearing his face with his own saliva and what little juice remained in this chill tissue.”
Poppy embraces seeping liquids, our essential meatness and pulls us along from standard human behaviours (swallowing cum, revelling in vaginal juices, drinking from the lips of a lover) to further down the spectrum: swallowing blood, revelling in ichor, drinking from th
e throat of a lover.
It’s gross but a very well written gross.
The Mythical New Orleans
For anyone who has read Anne Rice, you’ll be instantly familiar with the New Orleans that perhaps only exists in fiction: hot, dark, luscious New Orleans. The French Quarter, the drugs, the beautiful waifs and doomed wanderers snuffing out like glowing embers floating from a midnight bonfire. The rich food, the good heroin, the wrought iron fences and clash of old money and new.
Poppy’s New Orleans is essentially Anne’s New Orleans. It seems impossible that it has a business district or playgrounds. Instead it has little restaurants where tourists flock, preyed on not by locals but by the excesses of the city itself. It is easy to imagine Anne and Poppy’s worlds overlapping: Lestat is stalking the streets just as Jay and Andrew are.
Her intense writing
Poppy has an amazing style of writing. It is both lurid but clean, over the top but balanced. She spends time on the details but moves her focus so we don’t tire of it. There is blood and death here but also love and relaxation.
“When morning light woke us, we rose aching and stinking, staggered into the house, and leaned on each other in the warm spray of the shower. Clean as babes we burrowed into bed and slept for the rest of the day, half unnerved and half comforted by the nearness of each other’s breathing body.”
Oh, and the fucking
This is a book of sex. A lot of sex.
Exquisite Corpse of another kind
An exquisite corpse is a surrealist technique where words and/or images are collectively assembled, resulting in a mixed piece of art. How does this relate to the book? I’m not really sure. The structure switches viewpoints as it moves from character to character but it is hardly a proper exquisite corpse: there are no multiple collaborators. I feel Poppy chose the name because she is into horror and the words have a beautiful pairing ring.
Jeffrey Dahmer
In 1991, one of Jeffrey Dahmer’s victims escaped, heavily drugged, and encountered the police while wandering the streets naked. Despite the neighbours protesting, the police turned 14-year-old Konerak Sinthasomphone over to Dahmer, who subsequently took him home and murdered him.
I won’t tell you who dies or who kills but this exact scene is written in the book and it is fucking chilling.
Why you should read it
Exquisite Corpse is beautifully written. As the story glides along we’re pulled into the simmering New Orleans, wading into it and leaping from one character to another, chapter by chapter. The serial killers are violent and maudlin, dark and terrifying, disgusting and wrong and then … we refresh with Tran, a cleansing of the palate before the next dish. The story is a meal, a dark and disturbed meal easily consumed.
How I got Exquisite Corpse
I have no idea so I’ll tell you something else instead: I once had a housemate who was really into Poppy Z Brite. She was also into internet dating. So she met this guy who had told her he was a sex addict and had a huge cock. She brought him home and he showed it to her. And apparently it was huge. They didn’t have sex though.
So think about that.
Happy reading,
Mat
–
tiny fish cleave the concrete path