Poppy Z. Brite wrote three horror novels between 1992 and 1996 that defined an entire aesthetic, and then left the genre and never came back.
A note on the name, because it matters and is easily got wrong. The books were published under Poppy Z. Brite and that is how they still appear in print. The author is Billy Martin, who came out as a trans man in the 2010s and now publishes under that name. This page uses the byline the books carry, because that is what you will be searching for and what is on the spine, and names the author correctly here.
The Poppy Z. Brite books are the origin of goth horror as a literary category. New Orleans and North Carolina, teenagers and twenty-somethings, drugs, bad hair dye, cheap wine, queer sex written explicitly at a time when almost nobody in the genre was doing it, and a prose style so ornate it either intoxicates you or does not. There is no middle position on Brite either, which is a pattern with the writers on this shelf.
And the last of the three is one of the hardest books in horror. Exquisite Corpse was refused by his American publisher on delivery and had to be published elsewhere.
I haven’t read these. What follows is the critical consensus.
Fiction by René Rehn
The Short Version
Read Lost Souls if you want the vampires and the aesthetic, which is what most people come for.
Read Exquisite Corpse only if you have read the warning below and decided properly.
And know that everything after 1999 is not horror at all and is genuinely good.
The Horror Novels
Lost Souls (1992)
Three vampires in the American South. Nothing, a teenage runaway who does not know what he is, Zillah, who does, and Ghost and Steve, two musicians in a band called Lost Souls.
It dragged the vampire out of the aristocracy and into a van. No castles, no capes, no centuries of regret. These vampires are a separate species with a nasty biology, they are broadly awful people, and the novel is besotted with them anyway, which is the honest emotional position of a great deal of goth culture and had not been written down before.
The New Orleans and North Carolina material is the reason it survives. The specific texture of being nineteen, queer and drunk in a southern town in about 1990 is captured better here than anywhere, and the readers who love this book tend to have loved it at nineteen.
Also on vampire books.
Drawing Blood (1993)
Trevor McGee’s father was an underground cartoonist who killed his wife and younger son and then himself in a house in Missing Mile, North Carolina, in 1972, and left Trevor alive for reasons nobody has explained.
Twenty years later Trevor goes back to the house.
Zach is a hacker on the run from federal agents after a credit card fraud, and the two of them end up in the house together.
The comics material is the best thing in it. Brite writes the underground scene of the early seventies with real knowledge, the father’s work is described in enough detail to be a genuine body of art, and Trevor’s relationship to it is the emotional engine.
The house itself does something and the mechanism is never explained.
The usual verdict finds it looser than Lost Souls and better written, with hacking material that has dated comprehensively.
It shares the Missing Mile setting with the first novel.
Exquisite Corpse (1996)
Two serial killers, one English and one American, find each other in New Orleans.
This is the hardest book on this site and I want to be clear about why it is here rather than excluded. It is explicit about murder, cannibalism and sexual violence in sustained detail, and it was refused by his American publisher.
Then again, it is also a serious novel. It was written during the AIDS crisis and it is openly about it, with desire, disease, consumption and the deliberate courting of death running together, and the queer politics underneath it are the reason the extremity is not spectacle. A great many people who write about it note that the disgust is doing an argument rather than replacing one.
If the description has put you off, believe it. It is not a book to try casually and it is not the entry point to anything.
Also on cannibal books and serial killer books.
The Short Fiction
Swamp Foetus / Wormwood (1993)
The first collection, published in the US as Swamp Foetus in 1993 and in the UK as Wormwood, and it contains the best short fiction of that period of his career.
“His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood” is the one everybody names. Two young men in New Orleans who rob graves and take what they find, and a bottle of absinthe, and a thing in the French Quarter with a room full of jars.
“Calcutta, Lord of Nerves” is the strongest. A zombie apocalypse set in Calcutta, narrated by a man who has stayed, and it is doing something with the city and with Kali that is genuinely serious.
“The Sixth Sentinel” is Jean Lafitte’s ghost and a stripper in New Orleans.
“Angels” and “How to Get Ahead in New York” are the other two.
The prose is at its most lush here and the New Orleans material is the reason the whole early career worked.
Are You Loathsome Tonight? (1998)
The second collection, and the darker one, including the Elvis story that gives it its title.
What Came After
He stopped writing horror in the early 2000s and the reason is worth stating properly.
Brite has said the genre had become a marketing category he had no interest in and that he wanted to write about restaurants, and the Liquor series that followed is comic fiction about two young men opening a bar in New Orleans, with no supernatural content at all. Liquor, Prime and Soul Kitchen have a devoted readership entirely separate from the horror one.
Then Hurricane Katrina destroyed his house and his city, and the writing largely stopped. He has been open about the depression that followed and has published very little since.
He is a trans man, came out publicly in the 2010s, and now goes by Billy Martin. The horror books remain in print under the Poppy Z. Brite byline, which is his stated preference for that body of work, and this page uses it for that reason.
He has said he does not expect to write another novel.
Where to Start
Read Lost Souls if the aesthetic appeals, and read it knowing it is a book about being nineteen written by somebody who was twenty-five.
Read Drawing Blood if you want the same voice with a kinder story.
If you want the best writing in the smallest package, read Swamp Foetus/Wormwood.
And approach Exquisite Corpse last, deliberately, or not at all, because it is the one entry among the Poppy Z. Brite books that genuinely earns its reputation for being too much.
The older end of the shelf is on my horror classics page. Lost Souls rebuilt the vampire for the nineties, against everything on my vampire books list.
