I've been revisiting some of my teen favourites this month. For a lot of people, that may mean returning to Hogwarts, or Narnia. For me, it means falling back in love with Steve and Ghost, the best friends, lovers and rock stars from the weird and wonderful Lost Souls by Poppy Z. Brite.
A vampire story in part, Lost Souls tells of how a young girl is impregnated by a bloodsucker. She does not survive the pregnancy, and her half-breed child, christened Nothing, is left with a human family in the heartland of America, to grow up ignorant of his origins. Luckily, this grim beginning gives way to a colourful opus of blood-drenched Americana. Nothing runs away from home, hitches
a ride with a van full of vamps (unaware that one of them is his father), and together they go on a road trip to Missing Mile, North Carolina, which is the hometown of Nothing's favourite band, Lost Souls. The Lost Souls musicians are dealing with their own complicated problems - Steve loves to hate his ex-girlfriend Ann, and Ghost, his best friend, is cursed to hear the thoughts and dream the nightmares of those closest to him.
Events spiral out of control, Ann joins the vampires on their hedonistic voyage, and Steve and Ghost must pursue them to New Orleans for a deadly showdown. I cannot even begin to describe how good this book is, nor how it made me feel. A complete antidote to more modern teen vampire tales such as Twilight and The Vampire Diaries, Poppy Z. Brite's world is one of isolation, of bitterness and longing. Even the most human of the characters have demons, but what I love about Brite's prose is that even in the midst of death and destruction, you just know she is having the most wicked fun.
Her follow up horror novel, Drawing Blood, brings the reader back to Missing Mile. A young man fresh from social care returns to the house where his father killed his entire family, and there he crosses paths with a criminal on the run. Naturally, they fall in love, and together face the spectres from their pasts.
Perhaps the most extreme of Brite's books is Exquisite Corpse, in which two serial killers meet by chance on a hot New Orleans night, and realise they may be soulmates. They join forces to find the perfect prey, and then conspire to commit the perfect murder...
Gruesome, unsettling fare, the lot of it. And when I was fifteen, I couldn't get enough of it. I will never throw these three paperbacks away, because even the quickest flick through their pages takes me back to the first time I ever read those words, met those characters, and realised that I too could be controversial, provocative, sensational. Who knows what I might have been, had I not read those books. But I thank the Lord and Poppy Z. Brite that I did!
J. x
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