Lost Souls

Brite's first novel, Lost Souls, a voluptuous if gruesome vampire story about beautiful, wild and alienated youths, is not so extreme in its sado-masochism as her Exquisite Corpse, though it is by no means inoffensive. It takes the hoary cliche of the vampire rock singer and places it in the 1990s. Small town neo-Punks Steve and Ghost have enough to cope with already without feeling obliged to care for Nothing, a runaway with a taste for blood; and Nothing has his family on his track - not the suburban Marylanders who brought him up, but Zillah, Molochai and Twig. Though not generally recognized as a contemporary genre, Gothic novels are alive and well. The most exciting Goth writing today is the young Poppy Z Brite. She is very lively and intelligent, and writes with an almost scholarly understanding of Goth literary traditions and eccentricities. Her books are full of drugs and sex and bands. She writes about sex so well from the male standpoint that many readers find it difficult to believe she really is a woman. Review by Richard Davenport-Hines, whose books include 'Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil and Ruin' (Kirkus UK)