< Poppy Z. Brite >

dark beauty

By Wendy Cavenett

Poppy Z. Brite is more than just a cultural fetisheer. Responsible for several darkly decadent novels, she has also written an unauthorised biography on Courtney Love and a novel based on The Crow film series. In Sydney for her sold-out book reading, Wendy Cavenett discovers that the brilliantly disturbed world of Poppy Z. Brite is a teeming labyrinth of freakish obsessives who love the taste of flesh.

Poppy Z. Brite doesn’t have blood under her fingernails. How disappointing. But there is something decidedly disconcerting about sitting alone in a room with her. She looks harmless enough dressed in black and drinking from a can of Diet Coke but her friendly demeanour belies a bunch of hideous literary creations that have the American underground howling for more.

Her work precedes her: characters such as the necrophiliac, cannibalistic, gay serial killers Andrew Compton and Jay Byrne from Exquisite Corpse (her third novel) specifically come to mind. Two of the most depraved characters ever to meet between the pages, they couple with the decaying dead, eat the lightly fried flesh of their victims or just rip it off the bones in sado-sexual murderous frenzies. Yes, Ms Brite enjoys gore, revels in bloodlust, and composes uncompromising, intensely explicit scenes even the American Psycho Bret Easton Ellis would admire.

“You can tell from reading Exquisite Corpse that I obviously have fantasies about killing and dismembering people,” she says, “but I don’t feel I have the right to take someone else’s freedom, someone else’s life.”

Her mindset is decidedly Burroughsesque. She names Naked Lunch, Queer and Junkie as three of her “favourite novels of all time”. In an obituary dedicated to him she writes, “You shaped my way of thinking about everything from drugs to jism to prose style to loving my enemies… Tonight you are dead at 83, and I figure the least I can do is pen a fantasy about fucking your corpse.”

America’s Dennis Cooper, whose own literary calling was inspired by punk music and de Sade, is also a major influence. She cites his third book, Frisk (the tale of a homosexual serial killer), Celeb Carr’s killer-classic, The Alienist, and the notorious real-life killers Jeffrey Dahmer and Dennis Neilson as inspirations for her 1996 novel, Exquisite Corpse. “The book,” she says, “is the result of imagining what would happen if two such weirdly similar characters met.

“With someone like Jeffrey Dahmer, I find it much more interesting to explore how he came to do what he did rather than just label him a monster. People love to call sexual perversion unnatural but that ignores the fact that we are nature, that we define nature. I’d like to know where that particular part of human nature comes from.”

Born in New Orleans in 1967, Brite admits that there is a history of craziness and mental depression in her family but says her most traumatic experience growing up was her parents’ divorce.

“But I was a morbid little kid,” she says. “I wasn’t unhappy but I was just interested in strange things. I was especially fascinated with the human body and how it worked. I even thought about possibly becoming a medical examiner or a doctor but never really wanted to be anything but a writer.”

After leaving school, Brite worked as a gourmet candy maker, an artist’s model, a cook, a mouse caretaker and an exotic dancer. She also wrote horror short stories and in 1992 released her first novel, Lost Souls. A darkly decadent take on the lives of white trash gay vampires, Brite, who was heavily involved in the gothic/deather subculture, was hailed as the most exciting new horror writer of the ‘90s; the Anne Rice of the real New Orleans netherworld.

In Drawing Blood (1993), her second novel, she introduced cyberpunk and splatter fantasy to her already rich Bauhaus-inspired landscapes; both books were nominated for the Lambda Literary Award. “I would describe my work as dark and obsessive,” she says. “I wouldn’t really like to put a label on it like horror or dark fantasy or any of these labels publishers are so fond of. I follow my obsessions whatever they happen to be at any given time and that’s where the characters and stories come from.”

In 1995, Brite revisited her childhood fantasy when she watched an autopsy to research Exquisite Corpse, the first of her true crime-inspired novels.

“It was an older man,” she says of the corpse, “he was 50 or 60 years old. He died of a heart attack. I certainly wasn’t doing any of the cutting myself but I was there watching the pathologist cut him open, remove the organs, section the organs.

“He was explaining everything to me and then he took off the top of the skull and allowed me to take out the brain and that was just amazing, holding someone’s brain in my hands.

“And then standing next to the table when the guy was hollowed out and there was nothing left inside him. He was spread open and you could see straight through to his backbone. It was a feeling of overwhelming intimacy… with the body not the person. It sounds strange but it’s the only way I can describe it.”

Brite, who met her husband in 1989, believes she is a gay man in a woman’s body. The couple experimented with a ménage a trios but predictably, she says, the younger man became jealous and left the situation. Now happy in her monogamous relationship, Brite is currently writing her fourth novel, a trashy rock’n’roll Hollywood saga without the strain of true crime but featuring an important female character.

Writing Courtney Love’s biography and The Crow: The Lazarus Heart has helped Brite relate to her female side, something she realises she is not particularly in touch with. But it is her startling ability to portray evil as an alluring and almost sensual experience that marks her as an American literary original.

“One thing I really don’t like about traditional horror is that it is about the vanquishing of evil by good and the elimination of the freak,” she concludes. “I’m not interested in that at all. I’m more interested in exploring and celebrating the freak, writing from the freak’s point of view.

“I like juxtapositions. It’s not just death and decay but an attempt to actually find beauty in that. One of the main things I want to do in my writing is to make the reader see the beauty in things that they might normally find horrible or disgusting.”

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This article originally appeared in Australian Style, 1998. Since its publication, Brite has been writing like, dare I say... a mad woman! Her much-anticipated Antediluvian Tales is scheduled for release in the US on November 25, 2007.

Other recent releases include:

Plastic Jesus, (2000), with Virginie Despentes
Penis Is As Penis Does, (2000)
Love In Vein II: 18 More Tales of Vampiric Erotica, (2000)
Guilty But Insane, (2001)
Wrong Things, (2001), with Caitlin R. Kiernan
Told By The Dead, (2003), Ramsey & Poppy Z. Brite
Louisiana Breakdown, (2003), with Lucius Shepard & J.K Potter
The Value Of X, (2003)
Triads, (2004)
D*U*C*K, (2006)
Love, Bourbon Street: Reflections of New Orleans, (2006), with Greg Herren & Paul J. Willis

For more, visit Poppy's official website @ http://www.poppyzbrite.com/

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