Poppy Z. Brite

Back in the day (and it’s kinda weird to be able to start a piece with this phrase), we were busting for something new to come along; something that would grab us by the goolies and give us a good shake. I, like many of my associates, was into different things: I read comics; I played roleplaying games; I read fiction; I watched movies and TV shows. For me and my peers, there were things to champion, and old mainstays to tear down, in the manner of all good iconoclasts.

So we tuned in to “Twin Peaks” and the “X-Files”; we saluted Neil Gaiman as the voice of our outcast generation; we devoured every word penned by Mark Rein(dot)Hagen. And we read Anne Rice.

I discovered Anne Rice (well, actually I discovered that there was book called The Vampire Lestat – I didn’t know who had written it at first) by reading Bill Willingham’s “Elementals”, perhaps the most realistic – and bleak - superhero comic to come out of the mid-‘80s. I pestered booksellers to get me a copy, but they’d never heard of it, and the best they could do was something called An Interview with A Vampire: would that do? As it turned out, it would do just fine.

The other thing we were reading back then was William Gibson: Neuromancer blew the lid off science fiction as we knew it. The cyberpunk genre touched raw nerves in the passive-aggressive souls of Generation X: no more would we sit idly by while Clifford Simak paraded female astronauts in their goldfish-bowl helmets and yellow micro-shorts; no more would we tolerate the sheepish grins of the Stainless Steel Rat. The future was dystopian; dysfunctional; and covered in dirt.

Those were glory days. Now Gibson barely raises a shiver: his latest books are obvious and tired. Anne Rice found religion and lost us completely. Who knows what happened at the end of the “X-Files”, because going back over the Season Nine God-awfulness is like ripping scabs. Even Gaiman suffered a mid-life crisis and did the obvious – chucked his family for some neo-Goth dolly-bird with tattooed eyebrows. It seems, as it always seems to have been, that the heroes of yesteryear are the sell-outs of today.

And then there’s Poppy Z. Brite.

(I have to confess here, that the middle initial is problematic for me. I know he - for he is no longer a "she" - probably thinks of himself as ‘Poppy Zee’; my inclination is for ‘Poppy Zed’, which instantly conjures Bruce Willis saying “Zed’s dead, baby; Zed’s dead”. Probably, Mr. Brite would find that amusing.)

I dipped into the splatterpunk genre for a moment. Let’s just say that I dangled a toe. It wasn’t for me: I don’t get death and dismemberment and paddling about in the entrails. It speaks of Freudian distress and monkeys playing with their own pooh. I read some disturbing pieces of splatter, loudly declaiming that they were the Next Big Thing in horror; sadly (for them, I guess), they were only a cul-de-sac. As far as I was concerned, there wasn’t anything going on with this sub-sub-genre that hadn’t already been explored by Baudelaire and Genet; or Huysmans and Mirbeau. Or de Sade. There is nothing clever about wallowing in your own crapulence; three-year-olds do it all the time, and they are not encouraged.

Bewilderingly, this attitude towards writing became hopelessly enmeshed with the Goth subculture, all wrapped up in black lace, kohl and fishnets. Suddenly, the tiresome, effete spectres of those badly-written stories were walking amongst us: heroin-chic became vampire-chic; lust became pain and emotional dependency. It was like Glam-Rock on monochrome film stock, with the contrast turned up.

It was about this time that I heard Poppy Z. Brite’s name mentioned for the first time. Goth had turned to “swampy goth” and New Orleans was the capital of the Nosferatu world, fuelled by absinthe and the Sisters of Mercy. Horror was only legit if there were lashings of kudzu and Spanish moss, and if there were voodoo practitioners around every corner. There was a book called Swamp Foetus; my response?

“Oh for f**k’s sake! Spare me!”

So, needless to say, Mr. Brite and I got off on the wrong foot.

It’s taken me quite awhile to get back to him, and it’s all due to one wonderful, exhilarating piece of writing. That piece is “Are You Loathsome Tonight?” from the short story collection Self-made Man. Quite apart from the inspired pun of the title (I’m a bit of a punster myself), the sublime lyricism of this short story defies words. So I’m not going to waste any on it, other than to say, you can find it in the collection The Children of Cthulhu (available as an e-book from Amazon), if you’re unable to find the original release.

Quite simply, I was gob-smacked. His writing is punchy and sensuous, full of gritty descriptions and virtuoso turns of phrase. He writes about the unsettling, the unpleasant, the disturbing, as though he were penning pastoral verse. He has a knack for finding beauty in the detritus and cast-off remnants of the world. My only disappointment is that I’ve arrived too late.

I’ve tried going back to William Gibson’s early books and I find that it’s incredibly painful. He writes about people dressed and thinking in the style of the early 1980s, alive in a world that has largely come to pass, or which will come to pass two years from now. Some of the stylistic flourishes that I never noticed at the time, nowadays make me wince. Put quite simply, the books have dated. Their impact was couched in tearing down the conventions of the time and launching imaginatively into a future tied to that zeitgeist. As they say, you can’t go home again.

This is the problem with Poppy Z. Brite. His stories are populated with the proto-Goth outsiders all of us felt ourselves to be back then. All of them are painfully thin, pallid of complexion, given to spiky hairdos and the occasional application of shadow about the eyes. They all affect androgyny and latent (or blatant) homosexual, or bisexual orientation. They all wear mesh t-shirts and snakeskin boots. It makes you feel like you’re in the front row of a Jesus & Mary Chain concert.

This alone would normally not be such a big deal, because it’s his ideas that lift these tales up from the rest of the pack. For there is a pack and it’s not pretty. To begin with, there’s Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire. Then, in gaming circles, there’s Richard Watts. And then there’s Anne Rice (again!), along with a whole lot of others. Their stock-in-trade is self-indulgent homosexual shock tactics: nothing is forbidden; nothing is too bloody, too perverse or too smeared with excrement. It’s Siouxsie Sioux on a splatterpunk bender. And, it’s all old news.

I found a stash of Mr. Brite’s books at a second-hand dealer’s and I took them home. I scanned the first few pages and the old ennui began to return. Here we go again: homeless pretty-boys in sexually ambivalent relationships, with spiky hair and eyeshadow. Here again, the cigarettes, the absinthe and rum, the soiled bed linen and self-harm: sadistic, erotic romance among the outcasts and refugees of society. I felt like this examination was going to be a chore worthy of Herakles; but then I found “Are You Loathsome Tonight?” nestled amongst the offerings and I re-read it and re-discovered the enjoyment. Jumping ship from Self-made Man I flipped through the collection entitled Wormwood (the new 1996 title for Swamp Foetus) and read the title piece, “His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood”. A few pages in, I realised that this was an homage to Lovecraft, a re-telling of “The Hound” with a new, updated setting (Okay, well not exactly new, but different from the original). I was two-for two: HPL references in two stories, both well-told, fabulously written and brilliantly executed. I plunged in again...

The results varied. While initially I lucked-out with the love-notes to Lovecraft, the rest of the pack are more quintessentially Poppy Z. Brite’s own distinctive creations. At times, there are notes reminiscent of Ramsey Campbell at his best; at others there are echoes of Machen dressed up as a “Gloomcookie” story arc. Every now and then, the splatterpunk tendencies creep in, but I see the more extreme of these now as elements introduced by his collaborators rather than his own input. My feeling is that Mr. Brite knows when to hit the brakes; knows how much to reveal and how much to suggest, like all of the best purveyors of horror writing. A true splatterpunk doesn’t have these limits or sense of control: having read the collaboration with Christa Faust “Saved”, wherein a boy-on-boy B&D session with a lubricated Luger has the inevitable consequence, I wish there was a way to expunge it from memory; but alas, what is read cannot be unread.

So, I highly recommend reading some of Poppy Z. Brite’s works; my recommendation is couched in much the same terms as those I would use when advocating the tales of Oliver Onions, or of M.R. James – as creations from a distant time and place, artefacts of a world gone by. Perhaps, that faded sensibility, the pentimento of a time long gone, is the best way to approach a genre – and its best writer -  that have been trivialised down to the instant gratification of “True Blood”.

Possibly Mr. Brite would be amused.