#29 of 2009: The Devil You Know by Poppy Z. Brite

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

Love Poppy Z. Brite? Check This Out.

Poppy Z. Brite was a huge influence on me as a teenager back in the 90s. Once I realized I wanted to spend the rest of my life writing horror, her novels became shining examples of everything I wanted to achieve with my own prose. While other girls my age were reading Seventeen magazine and YA titles, I was devouring Poppy’s stories of vampires, gay men in haunted houses and necrophilia.

I turned out a bit odd, but I don’t blame her entirely. There had to be some sort of inborn element present to start things off. She was just the amazingly brilliant (and absolutely creepy) catalyst that set everything in motion. I wouldn’t have it any other way, either.

Over the last several years, Brite’s changed her focus from horror to restaurant-themed fiction, and the woman’s still after my heart. Next to vampires, ghosts and zombies, nothing captures my attention quite like food. Brite’s Liquor series, as I’ve stated before in my review of the first novel, is pure food-porn bliss. Her writing style hasn’t changed nearly as much as her choice of topics, and the stories are superb. Ricky and G-Man are every bit as lovable as Zach and Trevor or Steve and Ghost, and their stories are hilarious and heartwarming in that weird, warped Brite way.

Hurricane Katrina hit Brite and her world hard, and I didn’t think we’d be seeing any new Liquor novels for quite some time. While that may still be the case (Ricky and G-Man’s restaurant is fictionally located in a section of the city that was rather brutalized), her two related novellas The Value of X and D*U*C*K are available now as a softcover collection titled Second Line: Two Short Novels of Love and Cooking in New Orleans. These were originally available only as hard to find hardcovers, and while they’d been on my radar for quite some time any copies I managed to track down remained firmly out of my price range.

No longer. The collection has an MSRP of sixteen bucks, and is currently on sale at Amazon for $10.88. Very cool.

#11 of 2009: Liquor by Poppy Z. Brite

I read a lot of Poppy growing up. Back then, it was all extremely visceral horror that was sometimes referred to as “splatterpunk.” Vampires, ghosts, cannibals and serial killers with HIV, it was all rather grotesque and very, very dark.

I loved it. It influenced me quite a bit, and what pieces remain from my early writing portfolio show this rather shamelessly and explicitly. During my teenage years and through my vampire fiction phase, nobody influenced me more than she did, including Anne Rice and all the bizarre, fucked up authors who penned books in the Dell Abyss line. Nobody.

Somewhere along the line, young, cult horror phenom Poppy Z. Brite grew up. And, eventually, so did I. As I grew older, I became a bit of a gourmand, and I also lost some of my interest in horror. Not all of it, mind you. I’d like to think my horizons just broadened a bit, allowing me to include all manner of fiction (even “serious literature,” to my initial chagrin) on my reading lists.

It was with a bit of surprise that I found out a few years ago that Poppy Z. Brite had been writing books about New Orleans chefs. The New Orleans part didn’t shock me, nor did the sexual orientation of her characters, but leaving horror behind? I didn’t really want to believe it at first, and for several years I put off her Liquor novels, reading her older works or books by other authors. I wanted to go back and see if I was affected by the earlier horror novels as much as I was the first time I read them.

One thing I’ve found out over the past year is that nostalgia is an exceptionally powerful emotion, and that most things are stronger when viewed through the smoky looking-glass of time. Nothing I’ve gone back and reread has been as joyous a read for me as the first time I picked it up as a teen. Nothing. Some have come close and still stand up as powerful stories, but as I’ve aged the things that grip my heart and move me have changed a bit. I’ve come to accept this as a hard fact, and despite knowing that the magic won’t be as powerful or may not even be there at all, I’m still going to go back and reread some of the things I loved that influenced me. I’m just not going to have lofty ideas about reconnecting with the books in the way I had before.

Sometimes, though, you just need to move forward. Pick up new books you haven’t read, give new authors a chance. In this case, give an old friend a shot at something new. And I did.

Liquor is a tribute to food that borders on sexual fetishism. I love it. I read most of it in one day, unwilling to put it down before I got to the last page.

Rickey and G-man are lovers, have been best friends since they were in the fourth grade and have been working in the kitchens of New Orleans restaurants since they were fifteen. Bouncing around from employer to employer (not always due to their own planning), they grow tired of working for other people. They want freedom, control over their own culinary creations and a bit of money. Being poor and working sixteen hours a day six days a week for some rich asshole is no fun indeed.

Rickey is struck with an idea while drinking in the park. Dishes made with alcohol. A whole restaurant based on the concept of alcohol in food. In a city like New Orleans, where natives and tourists alike cruise the margarita stands, where people are encouraged to drink all they can, an idea like this could be their golden ticket.

But first, Rickey and G-man have to straighten out their own issues, shake off the people dragging them down and find the capital to make their dream come true, and it won’t be easy.

I will be tracking down the two sequels, Prime and Soul Kitchen, this summer. A previously published prequel of sorts, The Value of X, is a bit pricier and harder to obtain, but I will be tracking that down at some point as well.

5/5

#56 of 2008 - Drawing Blood by Poppy Z. Brite

I first read Drawing Blood when I was much younger. The copyright is October 1994, so I would have just turned sixteen when it was released. I bought it shortly thereafter, during the days when I would walk into town and raid the bookstores (the new one and both of the used shops) for horror books on a near-daily basis.

Drawing Blood is the story of one very creepy haunted house that was the setting for a multiple murder-suicide and the now-grown survivor who revisits it to find out why he is still alive. On the way through his journey he meets and grows close to many people, including a young hacker on the run from the Secret Service who had a dysfunctional childhood of his own. Full of blood, drugs and explicit (gay) sex, this isn’t the kind of book I’d imagine would attract a teenaged girl. But it did. In fact, the sex didn’t phase me much, despite having not grown up in a home that was overly open about “alternate lifestyles” or sexuality in general. We kind of glossed over that stuff at the old Brown homestead.

I had such amazingly fond memories of this book that I had to reread it at some point. I raided my attic looking for my cache of prized paperbacks, but it was nowhere to be found. All those obscure 90s vampire books, all the Dell Abyss novels, my hardback of Lost Souls with the dust jacket intact that I’d bought from the library for fifty cents in the ninth grade, all gone. I resigned myself to the fact that some of these books, especially the ones that I did not remember the exact titles for, were gone forever, or at least until I stumbled across them in a dusty used bookstore, and those establishments are about as common as fountain pens in a drawer full of Bics these days.

Brite’s books, though, are still in bookstores, and for $8 I bought my second copy of Drawing Blood. There were a lot of pop culture references I didn’t pick up on way back when, and now the “hacker speak” sounds somewhat dated, though it’s not horrible or even irritating enough to slow down the plot. It just plants Drawing Blood firmly in the early-to-mid-90s as surely as Zach the hacker’s 2800 baud modem does. And that’s all right, really.

This book makes me want to befriend the nearest Jamaican (if there are any nearby) and smoke some “smart ganja” all damn day. Just the descriptions of the smell of pot and pot smoke make my mouth water, and I’m not all that much of a fan of it in real life.

This is one of THE novels that made me want to write long fiction, along with Kirino’s Out and Miyabe’s Crossfire. The characters are painfully exquisite, the drama familiar enough to feel a connection to while alien enough to remain interesting. This is one of those books that, when I look at my own short little 200-page rough draft, I feel woefully inadequate. I can only pray that revision and polishing render my own characters this lifelike and wonderful.

5/5