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Sunday, November 14, 2010

Lost Souls by Poppy Z. Brite

Title: Lost Souls
Author:
Poppy Z. Brite
Genre:
Contemporary horror, vampire, literary fiction
URL:
Amazon
Price: US$7.99
Other Information/warnings: drug usage, incest, rape, domestic violence, violence, gore, explicit m/m sex
Summary [from the original edition]:
They are the children of the night, dressed in black, adrift without an anchor, looking for love, acceptance, a meaning in their lives.

Nothing discovers his true name on the handwritten note that was pinned to his baby blanket eighteen years earlier. It sings in his blood, telling him that all he believed himself to be is false. The discovery that he is a vampire, and the son of a vampire, seems the most natural thing in the world to him.
Ann finds herself drawn to one of the three pale, partying strangers who come to town. They drink wine that tastes almost like blood. And the small one, Zillah, has the most amazing green eyes.

Ghost has always had visions and sensations that come from beyond his small town, from beyond the world of the living. Now his powers lead him away from home to New Orleans in a desperate attempt to save Ann from her new companions, and to save Nothing from himself.

My review: Everywhere you go these days, you can’t help but hear all the kids talking about Twilight: about how the vampires are so groundbreaking, how they can walk about during the day, about how their fangs don’t show until they need them, how the angst of these teen vampires just speaks to them.  Now, I haven’t read Twilight, but I do have a few acquaintances (significantly younger than I) who can not get their fill of the brooding teen bloodsuckers, and I’ve heard more than my fill of the plots or the groundbreaking nature of the books.  Except, you know what? None of it sounds particularly groundbreaking to me, and I have to point out to the fans of this newest vampiric incarnation that much of what they are describing has been done before and–from what excerpts I’ve read of Twilight and the various literary reviews–done better.


Since Stoker first published Dracula in 1897, vampires have fascinated readers and writers alike, and vampire fiction has gone through every cycle of life and death imaginable ever since.  The vampire literary genre has been declared dead more times than Elvis has been sighted in roadside diners.  And just when you count (pun entirely intended) the bloodsuckers out, someone slips through and breathes new life into the old beast.  George R.R. Martin wrote the fascinating Fevre Dream and in the process re-imagined what everyone thought of as vampires. And of course Anne Rice, in her overly verbose way, created one of the literary world’s most enduring vampires in Lestat from her wildly successful Vampire Chronicles series of novels.  And then the genre once again lapsed into a coma, every vampire thereafter becoming a deeply affected, brooding, depressive, sexually ambiguous prettyboy who tended to whine over every little problem being undead brought along.  Once again, the vampire became anemic in its portrayal, and the world again decried that there could be nothing new. And then, in 1992, up-and-coming short story horror writer Poppy Z. Brite surprised everyone by spinning the vampire lore on its head with her remarkable debut novel, Lost Souls.

The plot of Lost Souls really is very simple.  Zillah and his vampire cohorts Molochai and Twin, venture into an off-the-beaten path bar in New Orleans where Zillah becomes enamored with a young girl, brooding and dressed all in black, who has been waiting for the vampires–any vampires–to come for her.  After a few nights of passion, Zillah and his pals disappear into the night, leaving the girl devastated that they hadn’t taken her with them, or better yet, turned her into one of them.  She returns to the bar night after night, week after week and month after month, as Zillah’s baby grows in her stomach, and the bar’s kindly owner Christian–who knows a thing or two about vampires–looks after her.  When the baby finally tears its way through her body, the girl’s life ends and Christian leaves the young baby on the doorstep of a family as far from New Orleans as he can manage.  Flash forward 15 years, and that child has grown into a young man, someone who doesn’t know why he is different from everyone else, why his heart is filled with a longing to find where he truly belongs.  His name is Jason, but he calls himself Nothing because that is what he feels like in his parent’s Wonder Bread world, and that was the name given him in the note left pinned to his blanket when he was left at his adoptive parents’ door:  His name is Nothing. Care for him and he will bring you luck. It is when Nothing discovers the note and the fact that he was adopted that he decides to find who he truly is, where he truly belongs and he goes on a road trip headed…well, headed wherever the road takes him.

As Nothing goes on his journey, we also catch up again with Zillah his crew as they drink chartreuse and eat Ho-Hos and revel in the joy of being young and eternal. In short, they relish being vampires. No regrets, no brooding angst here. We also get a third road trip as we meet Steve–a shit-kicker from South Carolina–and his best friend Ghost–a painfully thin young man with psychic abilities–as the two do a mini-tour as Lost Souls, a rock band that has developed a cult-like following amongst the disaffected and outcast goth youth. And one of those youths just happens to be Nothing. It is then that we realize that these three different road trips will all come crashing together, and we’re fascinated to see just how Brite manages it.

What made Brite’s vampires so groundbreaking is the blend of the gothic scene, vampiric lore, and honest to god real people with real depth and emotion.  Brite threw out most of the vampire clichés, however. Brite’s boys have no problem with sunlight, and their fangs have been bred out of them, forcing them to file their teeth into sharp points, and–in a really nice turn–the appealing bad boy Zillah is not some tall lanky creature and his cohorts are not ultra cunning.  Zillah is short, but still enigmatic and charming, and Molochai and Twig…well, let’s just say that the vampiric chandelier has had brighter bulbs. The vampires here of course love blood, but they revel just as easily in the haze of alcohol and drugs and the taste of each others’ bodies.  And Brite did something else that hadn’t been done before….she didn’t mince words one bit when it came to her character’s sexuality. Unlike Rice who cloaked her characters in a mist of homoeroticism, Brite went balls-out and made her vampires bi-sexual or gay, the body being one of the extreme pleasures in life that shouldn’t be discriminated against. Brite (who has admittedly never read Ann Rice, despite claims by many that she had to be influenced by her) also threw out the verbosity that had choked the genre, making her prose clean and crisp and evocative. She created not only the feelings of her characters in precise ways, but also used her words to capture the sights and smells and essence of her settings, each locale becoming a character in its own right.  She veered into purple prose upon occasion, but the images she created were stunning and utterly true in every way.

But the characters she created are the heart of the story.  Nothing’s longing to learn who he is and where he comes from is palpable.  It’s not so very different from the feelings most adopted children feel when they lean their parents are not who they believed them to be.  The childlike joy in the vampires Molochai and Twig is infectious, as is the viciousness and pride Zillah takes in being omnipotent, or so he thinks.  And while all the characters resonated with readers, none were quite as appealing as Steve and Ghost.  There is so much love between these two men and so strong is the need for them to be there for, and to protect, one another, that their relationship transcend brotherhood and friendship. The dynamic is so utterly real that one even began to wonder if Steve and Ghost were ever more to one another than just friends.  The relationship Brite created between these two men was erection inducing for a lot of us. We wanted to see these two together, but this was not some calculated trick of Brite’s.  She simply wrote two men who would be lost souls without each other, and we the reader just wanted (and in some cases needed) it to go beyond that.  It was masterful, and years later–because the topic was such a fervent one amongst Brite’s fans–she would answer the question as to whether Steve and Ghost’s relationship was ever more than just friends in a limited edition chapbook (no longer available).

In the end, Brite re-wrote the book on vampires.  She blended splatterpunk and the gothic scene and vampire mythology into an excellent character study about finding who you are and how you fit in.  It’s a story of self-discovery and the building of families and for once it was a story that spoke to and included my kind, gay people, in an unabashed, unapologetic way.  There was nothing wrong with being gay any more than there was anything wrong with being a vampire; it all comes down to each person and how they react and treat others.

Unfortunately, many stood on Brite’s shoulder’s after Lost Souls, and the literary world was so glutted with vampire-meets-goth-rock novels, that those new to the novel often find it cliché.  But, as I like to remind people, when Brite wrote the work, most of this was new and exciting.  It has only become cliché because of the pale imitations that followed. So when your niece or nephew comes to you to rave about Twilight, tell them they don’t know Nothing…or his father…or his favorite band, Lost Souls, all of whom have been there and done that…likely before they were born.

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