Lost Souls by Poppy Z. Brite

From the Publisher

At a club in Missing Mile, N.C., the children of the night gather, dressed in black, looking for acceptance. Among them are Ghost, who sees what others do not. Ann, longing for love, and Jason, whose real name is Nothing, newly awakened to an ancient, deathless truth about his father, and himself.

Others are coming to Missing Mile tonight. Three beautiful, hip vagabonds - Molochai, Twig, and the seductive Zillah, whose eyes are as green as limes are on their own lost journey, slaking their ancient thirst for blood, looking for supple young flesh.

They find it in Nothing and Ann, leading them on a mad, illicit road trip south to New Orleans. Over miles of dark highway, Ghost pursues, his powers guiding him on a journey to reach his destiny, to save Ann from her new companions, to save Ann from her new companions, to save Nothing from himself...

Publishers Weekly

Launching the Abyss imprint for Delacorte, this stylishly written, daringly provocative first novel plays on the appeal of vampires as romantic antiheroes. Three bloodsuckers who might pass for rock stars roll into New Orleans for Mardi Gras and then disappear again, but only after their handsome leader, Zillah, has impregnated an adolescent girl. Fifteen years later, their offspring, who calls himself Nothing, is living with adoptive parents in the suburbs and wondering, like many other teenagers, why he feels so different. In this case the answer is that he's really a vampire, a fact he discovers when he runs away from home and meets up with none other than Zillah, accompanied by sidekicks Molochai and Twig. Together they seek out Nothing's favorite band, Lost Souls, for an explosive meeting that leads to a bloody, somewhat overdone climax back in New Orleans. Brite creates a convincing, evocative atmosphere in which youthful alienation meets gothic horror, but her prose sometimes turns purplish (for example, both sperm and the liqueur Chartreuse are likened to altars). More regrettably, the story lacks a moral center: neither terrifyingly malevolent supernatural creatures nor (like Anne Rice's protagonists) tortured souls torn between good and evil, these vampires simply add blood-drinking to the amoral panoply of drug abuse, problem drinking and empty sex practiced by their human counterparts. Rather than horror, Lost Souls prompts disgust mixed with morbid titillation, but it will surely be devoured by genre aficionados. BOMC featured alternate. (Nov.)

Library Journal

This book comes highly recommended by some of the best horror writers in the business, and deservedly so, but it is not for the weak of stomach. It is the story of a lost soul, a boy named Nothing, who was born of a vampire and is searching for his true family. But he dimly understands that joining his vampire brothers will cost him more of his humanity than he wants to give up. A mysterious, caring psychic named Ghost tries to save him from his fate and, because Nothing loves this man, he must choose to preserve his own humanity in order to save Ghost's life. The book is graphic in its presentation of kinky sex mixed with vampirism and murder but nonetheless compelling.-- Marylaine Block, St. Ambrose Univ. Lib., Davenport, Ia.

BookList

This opening hardcover salvo from an acclaimed paperback horror imprint, Abyss Books, mixes all the neopunk vampiric stylings of the film "Near Dark" with aspects of Anne Rice and pretty much any teenage rebel epic one might name. What emerges from Brite's hormonal witches' brew is a gloriously sensual first novel that may herald the arrival of a major new voice in horror fiction. The tale begins with the gothic decadence of New Orleans: four vampires on a spree, three loving it, one slightly repentant. The spree results in one death, one baby vampire, one revenge-driven father, and a fast escape from the Big Easy. Cut 15 years to a small town in Maryland and a bored teenager caught up in booze, drugs, bisexual dalliances, and the rock group Cure. (Virtually every character in this book brings to mind the pale, tousled, mascaraed features of Cure's leader, Robert Smith.) Eventually, Brite brings everyone together--all the troubled teens, all the vampires, repentant and otherwise--for an all-stops-out, blood-and-sex-oozing finale. Like Rice, Brite possesses the ability to make her vampires into sometimes sad yet often quite alluring creatures. But where Rice gets literary, Brite, a punkish 24, opts for unashamedly brazen excess, the stuff of teen myth. With an electric style and no shortage of nerve, she gets away with it.

Kirkus Reviews

Bloodfest first novel written by acid-crazed vampires cooling off on marijuana. Brite's novel also kicks off the Abyss horror line, which is not likely to find as strong a follow-up for many moons to come. This is not for everyone, even hardened horror lovers. It creates its own genre, taking sadistic, bisexual splatterpunk to places it has never been. Steve and Ghost, a psychic two-man band known as Lost Souls?, are lying around drunk on White Horse scotch: "Behind them the river passed in silence; the lowest-hanging branches brushed the water, and the eaves rotted on the bough. The moon spread like butter on the black river...." They live together at the dead end of Burnt Church Road in Missing Mile, Louisiana, not far from New Orleans, where vampires roam during the throes of Mardi Gras. The story's plot is none too clear, but it involves 16- year-old Jess: Raped first by her father, she seduces Christian, a vampire bar-owner, then dies giving birth to Nothing, a vampire orphan left to be brought up by alcoholic Father and Mother. Nothing, now a bisexual teenager hooked on a Lost Souls? tape, decides to leave home and visit his idolized band at Missing Mile. Meanwhile, a trio of the rattiest white-trash vampires ever seen in fiction—Molochai, Twig, and Zillah—burn up the countryside in a van, draining hitchhikers and filling up whiskey bottles with blood. Christian too goes on the road, looking for Molochai, Twig, and Zillah, who are different types of vampire from him—meanwhile, there are the Raventon twins, a third kind of vampire. These folks bathe in blood and sperm and alcohol, and clearly Lost Souls? is not about to wipe out three strains ofvampires—though they try. Brite tosses out any idea of good taste and remakes the language of horror with a bloodlust that reduces all competitors to dust.

What People Are Saying

Harlan Ellison
This talent gives off thermonuclear vibes. I can feel them. The last time I said it, I was talking about Dan Simmons. Now I'm saying it about Poppy Brite.

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