Don't they call us snappy antique dressers Goth now, Quinn?

For some reason, even though baby bat me read a lot of Anne Rice and a lot of other weird vampire nonsense, I never got around to checking out the other big name in disturbing and sexually explicit New Orleans-based horror with vampires in, Poppy Z. Brite. Possibly Anne Rice was just Enough and I didn’t need any more of that very specific brand of wacky at the time. Possibly there are just too many vampires books for me to read them all.

 

Anyway, I more recently picked up a copy of Brite’s short story collection Wormwood, and figured this October would be a good time to read it, even though it is not technically a vampire novel and I am running out of time to read my annual October vampire novel. But Brite is most famous for his vampire novels, so I feel like it sort of counts.

 

Wormwood does not actually have any vampire stories in it at all, which surprised me a little, but it does have plenty of ghosts and zombies and other monsters and some general unexplained supernatural shenanigans, plus at least one instance of what appears to just be very bad drugs and not anything supernatural at all. 

 

Another thing the book does not really have any of is female characters; there are a number of vessels for assorted horror-y happenings concerning the female reproductive system, but none of them have anything I would consider characterization, and half of them are already corpses or statues or whatnot by the time they appear on the page. The closest thing to a female character is probably Rosalie from The Sixth Sentinel, which for a brief shining moment I thought was going to be a story about an asexual goth, but which is instead, structurally, an abstinence-only story (albeit much better than any of the horror stories that actual evangelicals can cook up)--don’t have teen sex or your daddy will shoot your boyfriend and go to jail, and you’ll get pregnant, be forced to have an abortion, run away to an abusive relationship, and wind up an alcoholic stripper in a shabby one-bedroom in New Orleans until you’re murdered by a horny ghost! It’s actually a very good story; I found it quite funny. Anyway, while a lack of female characters defined in any way outside of sexual body horror is a longstanding problem in the horror genre, I’m not one of those people who finds that type of horror inherently misogynistic, because reproduction actually is terrifying! It’s just the character writing that sucks. The horror bits are fantastic. 

 

The character writing is very good for all of the gay dudes that populate most of the stories and is, uh, deeply obnoxious for the straight dudes who are the viewpoint characters in a handful of them, which I cannot necessarily say is bad character writing. Short story characters aren’t always the most deeply drawn and it can be tough to both get a sense of the characters themselves and have whoever is viewpoint-ing remain cipher-y enough to make a nice easy vehicle for the story in just a couple of pages. Some of the stories take the easy route, where the narrator is the most normal person in this particular band of junkie goth musicians or whatever and is largely observing everyone, such as in A Georgia Story; in other, more impressive stories--the ones that have become more famous, I gather--the narrator is also completely batshit, like Howard in His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood (although I do relate to the feeling of doing something that is supposed to be terribly exciting and being like “That’s it? We’re having fun now?” and this is why I rarely go to concerts), or The Sixth Sentinel’s aforementioned horny ghost. 

 

Most of these stories were written in the late eighties or the nineties and there is often something very nineties about them, which in some cases makes them more creepy, although in other cases the language is a bit dated. They have a bit of that late-twentieth-century ennui about them sometimes, with characters who have fallen through the cracks of the end-of-history prosperity but who still seem to have plenty of time to wander aimlessly around the ungentrified squalor of cheap, rundown cities. Most of them take place in New Orleans but there is one very memorable story that takes place in New York city, which opens with a viscerally terrifying account of getting lost in the Port Authority, which is simultaneously actually hilarious given the overwrought, otherworldly language used. Like, damn, someone really fucking hates the Port Authority, and I do not blame them at all. (On the other hand, the story that takes place in Calcutta mostly just highlights the fact that we did not have sensitivity readers in 1991.) There’s also a lot of stuff that’s a bit cliche for early Goth media--lots of humorously unimpressed references to Goths, lots of characters who are struggling artists and musicians with substance abuse issues, lots of extremely gross-sounding cocktails--but it’s fun, the Classic Goth Author vibes come through real strong. 

 

Anyway, do you like fucked-up gross shit and think it is extremely funny? Do you want to be both disturbed and amused at the same time this Halloween? Then I have got a short story collection for you!