Sometimes, as a reader, there will be times when I want to drop myself into an immersive world full of well-written characters with a long story that will keep me occupied for days. Other times, feeling less interested in universes and plot intricacies, I find myself looking for a good short story collection to keep me entertained in smaller, much more manageable bites.
Poppy Z. Brite has been, for me, a literary mainstay for fifteen years or more. I read her novels Lost Souls and Drawing Blood for the first time back in middle school, falling completely head-over-heels in love with both her writing style and subject matter during a period in my life where I was beginning to take my own attempts at storytelling somewhat seriously. She became for me, over the next few years, a source of both inspiration and heavy-handed imitation, before I found my own style and voice and moved on to penning things that were a bit less of a rip-off of better writers’ plots.
I never did forget her stories or stop admiring her as an author. As I grew older, I branched out into other genres and styles, and I didn’t go back to her fiction as often as I used to. Some of her smaller books, the ones not released by mainstream publishers, were a bit out of my price range as well. However, she popped back into my mind every now and then, and over the last year or so I have been both revisiting the works I read as an impressionable teen and finally getting to read the books I missed between that time and now. I reviewed Drawing Blood in late 2008 and Liquor this past summer, and I have to say the magic is still there, with both the older works and the newer ones.
There’s something about a well-rounded, well-written set of short stories that suckers me in and refuses to let me go, and the collection The Devil You Know is an amazing mix of old Brite creepiness and new Brite food fetishism, with the usual strong characters and mundane-yet-bewildering settings longtime fans have come to love. Published by Subterranean Press in 2003, The Devil You Know is more “average New Orleanians in odd situations” type of stuff than it is the old horror works of Lost Souls, Drawing Blood and Wormwood (her first short story collection, which is also worth reading and is still in print), but it is still the smirkingly unsettling stuff I craved as a youth and still have the urge to read to this day. To say I was not disappointed would be a serious understatement.
A good single-author collection should have an interesting foreword to rocket the reader in the proper direction, and, like Wormwood before it, this one contains a classic. Unlike the foreword to Wormwood, which was written by Dan Simmons, The Devil You Know’s introductory section was penned by Brite herself. In these brief few pages, titled “Dispatches from Tanganyika,” Brite gives readers some background information about her writing process, her departure from the horror genre and explanations of each story and how they came to be. Before I’d even read any of the fiction between the covers, I was in a comfortable place, feeling as if I’d just returned to a home I’d never meant to stray from.
The stories in this collection run the gamut from creepy to humorous, terrifying to bittersweet. Some are meant to elicit chuckles and disbelieving shakes of the head (especially those that feature alter ego New Orleans coroner Dr. Brite and her ruminations on death and food), while others are small illuminations on the subjects of human nature and love. At times I found myself laughing, while other times I felt only bitterness or soft optimism by a story’s end. Brite is a magnificent writer who has not in any way lost her touch.
The Devil You Know also contains two short stories written using copyrighted characters for projects Brite has been involved in. “Burn, Baby, Burn,” a story that takes place during Liz Sherman’s teenage years, was written for a Hellboy anthology. “System Freeze,” taking place in the world of The Matrix, was written as a promotional piece for the now-downsized whatisthematrix site.
I’ve heard complaints from readers on various Internet forums about Brite’s common use of homosexual characters in her fiction recently, and though it honestly shouldn’t matter I feel it deserves a least a moment’s attention in this review. Yes, she prefers writing about gay men, often explicitly, and it’s certainly not going to please everyone. No, this collection isn’t any different than anything else she’s written in that regard and there’s quite a bit of none too subtle male-on-male eroticism going on. If that’s not your cup of tea, or if it bothers you to the point of distraction, look elsewhere. Mostly these comments are found in conjunction with criticisms about her so-called “Goth phase,” which is long over and really only spanned one novel (and a handful of short stories), which was also her first work of long fiction and was published while she was in her early twenties. One of the comments that still stands out in my mind went something like “She writes about underaged gay Goth kids having sex all over the place (and in great detail), and writing ‘fuck’ on their shoes as if she wants everyone to know just how cool and weird she is.” This irritated me to no end because the individual who wrote it obviously only read Lost Souls and then stopped, because that is the only book where Goth kids have a huge presence. Only one kid writes “fuck” on his shoes (Lane), and it is mentioned only briefly.
Still, the Brite-hater had a point. There’s a lot of gay sex going on in her fiction, and there always will be. Nothing wrong with that.
Readers who don’t mind (or enjoy) homoeroticism, and are looking for an eclectic collection that spans a whole array of moods and themes, should check out The Devil You Know, if they haven’t already.
5/5
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