At
29, New Orleans-based author Poppy Z. Brite has accomplished more than most people twice her age, and stirred up
enough controversy and heretical ideas to make both Oscar Wilde and Aleister
Crowley proud. Though her previous short story collection and novels were
marketed to horror fans, her fiction outstrips the genre trappings of
contemporaries like Stephen King and Dean R. Koontz.
Lost Souls, her first novel, took the standard vampire tale and warped
it into a stunningly original gay love story with Goth overtones, while its
semi-sequel, Drawing Blood, deconstructed the Southern-Gothic ghost tale
for the Nineties that leaves the reader shocked, disturbed, and hungry for
more. Her short story collection Swamp Foetus (released in paperback
last summer as Wormwood) is likewise one of the most wonderfully
distressing books it’s been my privilege to encounter.
Now, after what has seemed like a interminably long wait to her legions of
fans, her newest novel, Exquisite Corpse (“gay serial killers in love”)
is out in hardcover from Simon & Schuster. Originally scheduled to be
released by Dell, Exquisite Corpse was unceremoniously dropped by that
publisher after senior editors deemed it “too extreme.”
I talked with Brite over a fiery Thai dinner and via phone over the course of
this year (as Exquisite Corpse‘s on again/off again publishing schedule
warranted), and this is what she had to say.
And yes, that is her real name.
n
Austin Chronicle: How did Poppy Z. Brite get started writing, and when?
Where did she come from?
Poppy Z. Brite: It’s one of the things I’ve been doing since I can remember,
basically. I wrote my earliest coherent stories on paper when I was about five,
and I was telling stories into tape recorders before I could put pen to
paper.
I started doing it seriously with an eye toward publication when I was about
12. I began submitting stories to markets and put in my average six and a half
years of rejection that they say most writers have, I just started earlier
than most.
I sold my first story to The Horror Show magazine when I was 18
(“Optional Music for Voice and Piano”), and I sold my next several stories to
them as well. Then I started selling to anthologies, and then I sold the book
Lost Souls.
AC: …You’ve been called the “Queen of American Southern Gothic,” alongside
fellow New Orleans author Anne Rice. How do you feel about being in such
illustrious company?
Brite: Well, I don’t pay a lot of attention to the labels, and I don’t
think I take it any more seriously than [John] Skipp and [Craig] Spector took
being called “splatterpunks” — the label started as a joke and it dogged them
for the rest of their careers and I’m sure that it will continue to do so even
now that they’ve broken up as a team.
I heard that someone referred to me, Melanie Tem, and Kathy Koja as the
“Feminist Jihad of Horror,” which is just ridiculous. I don’t know where that
came from. Kathy’s work has some female characters, Melanie’s work is the only
one of the three that could conceivably be called “feminist,” and I hardly even
write about female characters — most of my characters are gay men.
That’s the only reason that I think the “Queen of Gothic Horror” label is an
apropos label for me, because that’s my subject matter. Even “horror” is
just a label to me — it’s just a way to market books, and I’m not convinced
it’s a great way to market books, but there it is. When I’m working, I’m not
thinking, well, I’ll write a “horror” story today, or I think I’ll write some
“dark suspense,” or whatever. I’m working from my obsessions, I’m working from
the characters, and it usually comes out fairly dark and publishable as
“horror.” But that’s not necessarily all it is, or the only audience that it
would appeal to.
AC: You mentioned “obsessions.” What are your obsessions when you’re
writing, and what did you mean by that?
Brite: Oh, whatever happens to be my obsession at any given time. For
the past year and a half I have scarcely been able to write anything that
wasn’t about serial killers. Now I’ve [written] Exquisite Corpse and I
sincerely hope that I’ll be able to write about something else.
As soon as I finished my second novel — Drawing Blood — I became
obsessed with Jeffrey Dahmer. I collected everything I could find about him. I
put a giant picture of him over my desk, and a couple of weeks before I
finished the book he got killed. So …now I can find something else to be
obsessed with. I don’t know what that’s gonna be yet.
AC: What were your previous obsessions?
Brite: …Ahh….
AC: Gay vampires?
Brite: No, I was never obsessed with vampires. I never really liked
vampires all that much to tell you the truth.
AC: But for some reason you get pigeonholed — along with Anne
Rice….
Brite: Well, it’s like I say, “You write one gay vampire novel and
you’re stuck with it forever.”
And, yeah, I’m obsessed with — well, not “obsessed with” — gay men, so much
as that’s always what I’ve felt like. I have nothing against women, and there
are women that I love very much, but I’ve never felt any kinship with my
supposed gender.
I don’t know if it makes any sense to someone who can’t look it at from the
inside, but I feel like I’ve conducted most of my more important romantic
relationships as a gay man as well. Not that there’s one way that gay men
conduct their relationships across the board… I just feel that dynamic has
been important in my relationships.
AC: Clarify, please.
Brite: Well, when Lost Souls came out, that’s when I started to
talk about this publicly, because people started to ask me about, you know,
“Why are all your characters gay or sexually ambiguous?” and “Why are they all
male?”
I had no answer to give them but the truth. So, I started talking about it and
I’ve gotten all sorts of reactions: Some people turn it into a joke (and I
can’t blame them for that — I know it sounds funny), and some people just call
it a publicity stunt, or they call me a poseur, or whatever. I accept it. The
reactions are not all gonna be favorable if I’m gonna talk about this stuff.
Still, I feel a lot more confident and a lot better about my writing and about
my personal relationships since I started talking about it.
I live with two boys — both named Chris — one of them I’ve been with for
five years and he was with me through what I call the “coming out period,”
where I started identifying myself as being a gay man in a female body, or
whatever. He’s seen me go through quite a few changes and stuck by me through
those. My other boyfriend I met in October of 1993 at the World Fantasy
Convention in Minneapolis. From the moment we met, there was just this intense
male/male dynamic between us. He had previously had some experience with men
and some with women and had identified himself as bisexual. But, this was the
first time he’d gone head over heels into a relationship with someone he’d
considered a guy even though they were anatomically female.
Beyond that, I’ll answer any questions you have, but it’s difficult to know
how to explain it, because it just feels like such an integral part of me
now.
AC: And you’re married now?
Brite: Well, I’m legally married to Chris Li, the younger one, though I
consider myself married to both of them, or neither of them. I don’t really
talk that much about being married because I’m not… I’m not that into the
concept of marriage. I always said I would never do it until they relaxed the
arbitrary gender requirement. But… he moved down from Canada and it just
turned out to be the easiest way for him to live in America. I didn’t have any
huge objection to it, so we went ahead.
AC: What other writers do you read?
Brite: Some of my favorite writers that I’ve discovered in the past
several years are Dennis Cooper, Kathy Koja, Thomas Ligotti… and some writers
that I grew up with and cut my teeth on are, oh, Ramsey Campbell, Stephen King,
William S. Burroughs, Ray Bradbury, Shirley Jackson, Peter Straub, Flannery
O’Connor.
AC: Stephen King, eh? I think the last King epic I read was Insomnia.
Did you read that one?
Brite: I loved it! I have an extreme prejudice where Steve is concerned.
I know what a lot of people think of him but I just love him to death. He can
do hardly any wrong. I didn’t like Needful Things.
AC: Is the new novel set in Missing Mile [the fictional site of both
Drawing Blood and Lost Souls]?
Brite: No, it’s not a Missing Mile story. It’s set almost entirely in
New Orleans except for a few early chapters in England. One of the serial
killers is a Brit, and when the story opens he’s been in prison for five years.
He proceeds to escape and ends up in New Orleans.
AC: Are you aware that people who read your writing — much of which is set
in New Orleans — frequently try to “discover” those places mentioned in your
novels? “13 Rue de la Exsanguinator de Amour,” et al.?
Brite: (laughing) Yesssss… yes, both me and Nancy Collins. It doesn’t
annoy me, but they might do a little more research. It only annoys me if they
get there and don’t like it and then blame me. Hey, guys, it’s called “fiction”
— it’s not my fault that club I wrote about doesn’t exist. You know, some of
them used to — not by the names I give them, but… the club-type places in
Lost Souls are based on places I actually went, and if they’re not
there, that’s not my fault.
There was a really cool Goth club that’s been closed for years that
Christian’s [a character in Lost Souls] bar is based on — it’s now a
bar called the Hog’s Breath Saloon.
AC: Do you consider yourself Goth?
Brite: I consider myself Goth-influenced, but I don’t like to slap on
labels that are all-inclusive of anything. I still wear a lot of the old black,
but I’m not nearly as suicidal as I was 10 years ago, and I’m glad. It’s hard
to stay suicidal for very long without killing yourself or starting to feel
like a poseur.
AC: Tell me how you finally got your first book deal, after years of doing
short fiction for the small press market and such?
Brite: I started writing Lost Souls after [editor/author] Doug
Winter saw a couple of my short stories in The Horror Show. He was
working, at the time, as a publishing consultant for Walker and Company, and he
wrote to me and asked if I had a novel in the works. I sort of did, anyway, but
after that, I definitely did. I had a novella that was showing signs of needing
expansion, so after a year or so, I sent a first draft to Doug and he sent it
to Walker, and through no fault of his own, it ended up sitting on a shelf for
about a year until they decided that they weren’t going to do the horror line
that they had planned on.
At that point, the book was recommended to an editor at [Dell’s discontinued
horror imprint] Abyss by a friend of mine who had just sold one of his works
there, and they ended up taking it.
At first, I signed a one-shot paperback deal with them, and then they turned
around and decided to make it their first hardcover, and so I ended up signing
a three-book deal with them, the third of which was going to be Exquisite
Corpse. What happened was this: Simon & Schuster is going to be
bringing it out in July in the U.S. Dell dumped it because they thought it was
too “extreme.”
AC: That was Dell’s specific reason? That the book was “too extreme?”
Brite: Well, they never had the decency to even contact me to offer any
explanation — I heard it all through my agent. As he put it, the senior editor
at Dell finally read it and had to change her underwear afterwards. Then she
decided they couldn’t publish it. So, they dumped it and it bounced around to a
few publishers and finally Robert Asahina at Simon & Schuster picked it
up.
He was the first editor to purchase Brett Easton Ellis’ American
Psycho. He had bought it and then was forced to give it up by his editors,
almost lost his job, and was then forced to watch it become a best-seller for
Knopf. Either he has different bosses now or they’re listening to him more.
It’s going to be coming out in hardcover, and it’s not going to be released as
a “horror” book, but as a mainstream book, which is really cool. I think they
know a lot more about targeting the youth and gay audiences, which Dell really
didn’t have a clue about. And I’ve seen some of the books that Robert’s edited,
and they look great. He did The Zoo Where You’re Fed to God, by Michael
Ventura.
AC: Rumor has it you’re involved in a biography of Courtney Love?! Is that
true?
Brite: Yeah. Apparently she’s been a fan of my work for a while, and so
we met and hung out and now I’m writing a book about her. On the record, it was
my idea and she’s not going to be directly participating because it’s supposed
to be an “unauthorized” biography, but it’s going to be the realest
unauthorized bio you could hope to find.
AC: So what are your impressions of Ms. Love?
Brite: I think she’s an incredibly smart and articulate person when
she’s not completely whacked-out and burning herself to death with cigarettes.
Um… I’ve never met a character exactly like her, because when she’s on, she’s
on, and then she just snaps and turns herself off when she feels like it. And
then there’s always someone around to watch out for her, which is very weird.
Personally, I really like her. She’s cool, and she’s been on her best behavior
around me.
AC: I read somewhere on the Net about a fire at a post office….
Brite: — I know what you’re going to ask (laughing). Okay, what
happened was, there was a private mail store in Los Angeles, and Barry Levin —
who is a bookseller in California — had ordered three copies of Drawing
Blood, and had them delivered to a P.O. box at this place. The books were
in his box at the time of the incident, which was, basically, [when] a former
customer of the mail store firebombed the place with a Molotov cocktail and
managed to burn himself to death in the process.
The three books survived undamaged, but supposedly they were all impregnated
with the odor of burning human flesh, and so the bookseller decided to get a
certificate of authenticity from the police, or something, and sold these
things for $600 apiece. Since then, I’ve heard that they’ve been resold for
twice that. I would have liked to have had one myself, but I certainly wasn’t
going to pay for it. I’ve been reviled for refusing to disassociate myself from
this. I didn’t make any money off of it, but….
AC: Reviled by whom?
Brite: By members of the press, by various other horror writers, by
[author] Andrew Vachss, who has now sworn to boycott everything I ever write —
like he was going to be such a big fan of mine anyway. That’s because I said
publicly that I thought it was kind of cool, which probably wasn’t the smartest
thing to say, but then I have a history of not saying smart things in public.
And I’m not going to censor myself because of someone else’s more delicate
sensibilities… it’s an honest opinion. I don’t think the guy was any great
loss to the world, and I like the idea of my books being scented with the odor
of burning human flesh. I can’t help it. n
This article appears in October 25 • 1996 and October 25 • 1996 (Cover).