first form a bolus—a ball-shaped cluster,
like a collection of rubber bands. Every
member of the bolus keeps moving, the pulsing
amalgam growing as more snakes arrive. One
man peered into a cave and saw a bolus more than
four feet thick. There are bigger claims, too,
if you want to believe them.
Writer J. Frank Dobie reported the story of a
hired man sent to bring in two grazing mules.
The man's boss heard a scream, then a fainter one.
He found the body in a gully amid hundreds of
rattlers. The snakes were forming a bolus. The
man, who must have stepped into the gully without
looking, was already dead.
—Gordon Grice, The Red Hourglass:
Lives of the Predators
Elvis sleeps through the day (rising usually between four and eight p.m.) and cannot abide the least sliver of light, so his bedroom windows are shrouded in musty cloth. The bathroom, though, is a shag-carpeted chamber of light with a big black toilet, modular and low-slung, that Elvis privately thinks of as The Toilet of the Future. He spends a good bit of time leafing through girlie magazines on that padded throne, not masturbating—he hasn't had a hard-on in months—but just looking. He's sitting on The Toilet of the Future right now, reading not Penthouse or Cheri but a book about sexual astrology. Elvis is a Capricorn and supposedly likes to be aggressive. His worst quality is an inability to take “no” for an answer. And that used to be true, actually, back when anybody still dared to tell him “no."
Right now the only thing telling him “no” is his own bowels. He's been sitting here for hours, it feels like. Sometimes he has to take an enema or soak in a hot tub until his belly softens up. His digestive tract, slowed to a crawl by downers, cannot handle the massive amounts of soft processed food Elvis shovels into it each day.
He strains, feels something deep in his gut stirring but refusing to dislodge itself. And then the pain tightens around his heart and begins to squeeeeeze.
Elvis hopes there will be peace in the valley for him, but he fears there won't be.
***
The colon is approximately five to seven feet in
length in a person Elvis's size and should have
been about two inches in diameter. By [Shelby
County M.E.'s investigator] Warlick's estimate,
however, Elvis's colon was at least three and a
half inches in diameter in some places and as
large as four and a half to five inches ... in
others. As [pathologist] Florendo cut, he found
that this megacolon was jampacked from the base
of the descending colon all the way up and half-
way across the transverse colon. It was filled
with white, chalklike fecal material. The
impaction had the consistency of clay and seemed
to defy Florendo's efforts with the scissors to
cut it out.
—Charles C. Thompson II and James P. Cole,
The Death of Elvis
Atmosphere is the all-important thing, for the final
criterion of authenticity is not the dovetailing of
a plot but the creation of a given sensation.
—H.P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror
in Literature
... And in Closing (For Now)
Caitlín R. Kiernan
Afterwords, by their very nature, come after you've already read the words, the stories themselves. In this case, after you've read Poppy Z. Brite's second short story collection. So it seems, and has always seemed this way to me, odd to prattle on about how good or skillful or transgressive (or whatever) the collection at hand might be, when the reading's already been accomplished. You know, by now, how you feel about seeing Zach and Trevor again in “Vine of the Soul” or the historical macabre of “Mussolini and the Axeman's Jazz” (unless, of course, you're one of those perverts who skips ahead and reads the afterword first) and you surely don't need me, or anyone else, to assure you how you feel, one way or another, about these pieces. That's between you, the pages, and Ms. Brite. So, since I have been asked to provide an afterword, regardless of my feelings about those words which are meant to come after, I offer the following prattlings instead.
Poppy Z. Brite made her first fiction sale thirteen years ago, when she was eighteen and living in North Carolina, a story with the distinctly unhorrific title of “Optional Music for Voice and Piano,” which was published by David Silva in The Horror Show in early 1985. But you've probably read this part half a dozen times, at least; it's usually in the interviews.
I met Poppy on October 24th, almost five years ago, at a cozy and now regrettably deceased bookshop in downtown Athens, Georgia. A mildly blustery Friday evening, and I was in town for a Concrete Blonde show the next night, and Melanie Tem and Poppy were passing through on a book tour double-bill for Dell Abyss: “Madames of Horror,” as the bookshop advertised the reading and signing, little red handbills with Poppy's photocopied eyes peering mischievously past a rose and ferns. It'll probably embarrass her to find out I still have one of those handbills, tucked inside the copy of Drawing Blood I bought that night. But she knows I'm a sentimentalist and, usually, she forgives me for that.
We sat very still in the little bookshop (which smelled like dust and old pages, as a proper bookshop should), our butts by turns aching and numb from the uncomfortable metal folding chairs, and listened while she read to us by candlelight, read to us about Zach and Trevor in the ghosted old house on Violin Road.
That was the night I met Poppy.
But I'd known her, as an author, since sometime two summers before, when a friend read me a review in which Linda Marotta listed Lost Souls as one of the ten best vampire novels ever (Fangoria #116, Sept. ‘92) even though the book wasn't even due out for several months. I was living in Birmingham then, working as a dancer and typist, trying to finish my own first novel, hardly making enough money for food and rent, much less new hardbacks. So, that November, when Lost Souls finally showed up at B. Dalton or Waldenbooks (or some other such mallspawn that definitely did not smell the way a bookshop should), I shoplifted a copy. I read it fast, and then promptly dumped my own manuscript in the kitchen trash, where it stayed for at least a couple of hours before a roommate rescued it.
At the time, I think I wanted very badly to hate her: for that book, for those words. For that beautiful sad story told in the lush and prickling sort of voice that so very rarely speaks from horror (Bradbury did it, but I can think of no one else offhand). That she'd been the one to say those things and not me.
And not just the simple quality of the voice, but the world it spoke from, and spoke to: I knew I'd never find Missing Mile on any road map, but knew, also, how much of my life I'd spent there, that Poppy had distilled something essential about growing up Southern. Growing up weird and Southern, more precisely, more importantly. That she'd tapped into the stickywarm, kudzu- and whiskey-scented days and nights of those of us who did not just survive our misfit Southern adolescences, but somehow thrived despite the Sunday School and playground hostilities in a world that, never mind what you might have heard, was seldom so simple as black and white.
Like any writer worth his or her weight in the trees cut down to print her or his work, Poppy has attracted her share of criticism, especially, it seems, from within the “horror community.” There has, from the publication of Lost Souls on down to Exquisite Corpse, been no shortage of authors, small press critics, and fanboys/girls willing to bend your ear (and patience) with an accounting of the many threats she poses to the future of dark literature. Or to the youth of America. Or whatever. Take your pick; the list is as long as the insecurities and fears of her detractors. She's been accused of rampant amorality, promoting irresponsible and unsafe sex, serial acts of bad taste, advocating the use of illegal drugs, attempting to capital
ize on the self-immolation of a racist arsonist, jumping on the “homosexual bandwagon,” and sleeping her way into a career. I suspect that she wears most of these as badges of honor, evidence that she must be doing something right. Authors rarely upset and draw so much flack from their peers unless they're perceived as a threat to the status quo.
After her strength as a stylist, I'd count Poppy's choice of themes and characters as the secret of her power (and, of course, the source of so much of the unrest). In the last half of this century, so much of horror has been given over to the business of defending middle-class Suburbia from its own guilty nightmares, sitcom Good and Evil, Stoker's Company of Light on riding lawnmowers. The protection of a way of life as vampiric and ultimately soulless as anything that Irishman ever imagined, and a world that, when she has even chosen to acknowledge it, Poppy has steadfastly insisted must be judged not by its words, but by its actions. Especially its actions against its children.
And this has been the vital spark that has brought her much of her readership, the dark children, the queer children who risk the wrath of parents and school counselors if they dare express themselves beyond the narrow confines of a long since bankrupted morality. The teenagers and young adults who know that Nothing and Ghost, Steve Finn and Eddy Sung and Zachary Bosch, Trevor McGee and Tran Vinh and Luke Ransom are far more honest and valuable role models for their generation than the preening Ken and Barbie fantasies passed off on television as “good kids."
For every critic who complains about the lack of sympathetic characters in Poppy's work, there are a hundred or a thousand of us who can see the truth in Nothing's desire or Luke's terrible anger, in Zach's recklessness or Ghost's simple love for Steve, because we've been there. Or because we'll always be there.
***
Two years ago, Poppy and I spent the week before Easter in Dublin, as guests of the Trinity College Science Fiction Society. We passed our spare time walking in James Joyce and Oscar Wilde's footsteps, sampling Dublin's eclectic and uneven cuisine, and haunting every musty bookshop within walking distance of our hotel on Dame Street. Our hosts spent the week trying to keep the posters advertising our Thursday night lectures up, as another Trinity campus group, right-wingers with a history of denouncing the Society's taste in speakers, had decided to protest by tearing the posters from walls and bulletin boards. Despite the valiant efforts of the members of the Society, most of the posters wound up in trash barrels or simply vanished.
So, it seemed ironically appropriate that Poppy had chosen to devote her half of the talk to recent experiences with censorship, specifically, the resistance and rejection she encountered after finishing her most recent novel, Exquisite Corpse. She told the story of a friend who had, in June 1994, been interrogated and detained by the U.S. Justice Department and Canadian customs agents, after a search of his bags had turned up a Xeroxed copy of the opening chapter of the book. She described how Dell had rejected Exquisite Corpse without offering any explanation, how her British editor had also passed on the manuscript, citing his discomfort with the book's “tendency to see the characters as admirable, almost vampire-like figures” (I suppose it never occurred to him that vampires are, by definition, serial killers, or to question his implication that it's acceptable to view vampires as admirable), and how the book had bounced from publisher to publisher before finally finding a home with Simon and Schuster in America, and Orion in the U.K.
Indeed, the various controversies that followed the publication of Lost Souls and then Drawing Blood seem rather tame in comparison to the unease that Exquisite Corpse has elicited from some. Repeatedly, Poppy was told by prospective publishers that the novel represented her very best work yet, but that they could not, in good conscience, publish it. Their letters described the book as “too nihilistic,” as “too extreme,” and as “a bloodbath without justification."
At the root of all this anxiety and alarm seems to be Poppy's decision to portray the novel's two cannibalistic killers as human beings instead of reducing them to one-dimensional monsters who could then be easily dismissed by readers as Not One Of Us. That Andrew Compton and Jay Byrne are shown as men with passions and fears, strengths and weaknesses, that they are humanized rather than demonized, putting the reader at risk of gaining some insight into appetites so alien to their own, and so taboo to their society. And, I suspect, a fear that even the most disgusted reader may find a faint spark of empathy.
I've talked to some who've objected to my labeling the opposition Poppy encountered with Exquisite Corpse as actual “censorship.” In fact, it may represent the most insidious form of censorship, far worse than the burning of books or their removal from school and public libraries. By rejecting a book not because it's badly written, but because it happens to offend an editor's sensibilities, the publisher engages in a sort of preemptive self-censorship, that, if successful, will prove far more effective at quieting a subversive or disruptive or merely disturbing voice than all the rednecks who ever thumped a Bible. The message filters down to authors, and as Janice Eidus wrote in an essay published in American Notes and Queries in 1992:
It has become all too common these days for writers to plan to submit timid, bland, “least offensive” stories ... to magazines and publishers in hopes of appearing in print ... stories that do no more than fearfully celebrate the status quo. I have sat among groups of writers as they help one another to figure out—in cynical, defeated tones—which is their least offensive work, work that will, therefore, have the greatest chance of being rewarded.
This situation is surely as prevalent in horror and dark fantasy today as in any other area of literature. And again, I come to the value of Poppy Z. Brite as an author: that she stood behind Exquisite Corpse rather than backing down and offering to rewrite the novel as another tiresome morality tale, that her belief in herself has permitted us a powerful and compelling vision of minds that may be outside our everyday experience, but are certainly not outside the experience of humanity.
Another example:
When Poppy began soliciting stories for Love In Vein II, her second anthology of vampiric erotica, she was told by her editor to tell contributors that there should be “no taboos” this time around, instructions which she passed along to her prospective contributors. So, a lot of folks who might not ordinarily have approached the market were intrigued by the chance to contribute to a sort of bloodsucking Dangerous Visions.
So. The submissions came in (and came in), and Poppy selected the ones that she liked best, and then passed the manuscript (comprised of 22 stories) along to the publisher. And was soon informed that four of the stories, pieces by Nancy Kilpatrick, John Ames, Scott Urban, and Bentley Little, would have to be cut. No room for debate, never mind the original guidelines for the book, the anthology would not be released if these four stories were included.
Why?
Because they were too explicit for an anthology of vampiric erotica whose guidelines, at the editor's request, had specified that absolutely nothing could be too explicit. I recall, Poppy passed quickly through fevery stages of shock, anger, and depression. She briefly considered scrapping the whole project and I think she finally decided not to only because canning Love In Vein II would screw the eighteen other authors (at this point, she'd already actually bought the stories, you see, all the authors had been paid and informed by Poppy that they would be in the book). The four offending stories were excised from the final manuscript, and an expurgated, presumably less taboo-violating and therefore more market-friendly, version of the anthology was released.
And, as Harlan Ellison has said so many times, so it goes. At least as long as we let it.
***
In 1995, Poppy moved out of her apartment on Royal Street and into a huge and rambling old house she shares with her husband, Chris DeBarr (a chef), 12 cats (Colm, Marie, Boris, Nicky, Tomas, Gideon, Milo, Maymay, Marcel, Rexina, Nathan, and Abby), three dogs (Charlie, Todd, and Annabel), and an albino king snake named Sredni Vashtar. S
he and Chris have made their bedroom in the beautiful old solarium looking out on the backyard and greenhouse.
It's the house where she finished Exquisite Corpse and wrote her biography of Courtney Love, the house where she's begun her next novel. The sort of house that's haunted in the most gentle way possible, ghosts you feel (but never see) waiting behind the sturdy lathe and plaster walls, or watching quietly from beneath the tulip trees; the wise and patient sort of house that all writers need, a house that's seen enough to know that things take time. A house as unapologetic and complex as Poppy's fiction. Which is a good thing, since, given the continued freedom to travel to her favorite cities on a regular basis (Amsterdam, San Francisco, Negril, New York, and London), it's a place she seems content to live for a while.
We should all be half so fortunate, I think.
Postscript: A few hours after I finished this piece, a friend at Aberdeen University in Scotland e-mailed me that comedian Jenny Eclair has been banned from reviewing Exquisite Corpse on British Radio 4.
***
[A shorter version of this essay originally appeared as “Approximately 2,000 Words About Poppy Z. Brite” in the Program Book of the 1997 World Horror Convention, May, 1997.]
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1998 by Poppy Z. Brite