Two young men, jaded and bored beyond belief by their excesses in art, sensuality, drink, and drugs, turn to grave-robbing for ghoulish kicks. This story always reminded me of Lovecraft's minor tale ' The Hound,' yet it is undeniably Brite's own. But it's also relevant since it refers to 'His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood,' which was the first story I ever read by Brite, in 1990's Borderlands.

Still, it's a good title, evoking the poison and delirium of absinthe, then still a more or less obscure liqueur beloved of true arty decadent types. This paperback edition from Dell did not come out until 1996, and then retitled Wormwood probably because someone took offense at the original. When I first read most of these stories it was late 1993 and the collection was entitled Swamp Foetus, a limited-edition hardcover from Borderlands Press. And it didn't hurt that her two earliest champions were Dan Simmons (who wrote the introduction for this collection) and the mighty Harlan Ellison.

Published in hardcover, Lost Souls made Brite the hot horror commodity of the early 1990s. Certainly to an audience used to the familiar comforts of Koontz, King, or Saul this wasn't going to go over well at all, but it didn't need to Brite's first novel, the highly anticipated Lost Souls (1992), was part of Dell's line of innovative and edgy horror novels not geared towards a mainstream audience. They hung out in filthy, ill-lit clubs, wore black rags and had messy hair and crashed in abandoned houses and churches, sleeping on stained mattresses and consorting intimately with a variety of partners, usually all in a New Orleans of perfume and rot. This approach was something horror mostly lacked in the era, concerned as it was with middle American families, or children and teenagers.Ī teenager herself when her stories were being published in The Horror Show magazine in the mid 1980s, Brite's characters were the misfit kids, part of subcultural movements that I was familiar with and sympathetic to-punk and goth and whatever the mixture of the two beget. She was concerned not with morality but with sensuality and brought a sort of fin de siecle decadence to the genre just as its paperback popularity seemed to be fizzling out. Brite's first stories, collected in Wormwood, there is no real sense of good or evil, just the aesthete's pose of worldliness and boredom. Horror's purview is one of good versus evil, obviously, but that's one battle which doesn't interest me much in fiction I do not think art has to be didactic or proselytize to be effective.

Wormwood by Poppy Z. Brite