From the Library Book Review: Exquisite Corpse
Exquisite Corpse (1997)
Pubisher: Touchstone
Written By: Poppy Z. Brite
Review By: Kayley Viteo
Imagine meeting Nilsen and Dahmer in a bar, being invited home for coffee …
Yes, imagine that. I can guarantee you that whatever you come up with is less than half of what this novel manages to provide. In the horror genre, people have been saying wonderful things about Poppy Z. Brite long before I came along. I took the roundabout way to reading one of her books, which in retrospect is probably a good thing. This is absolutely not a book for the faint of heart or the easily grossed out. It is as sexually and murderously explicit as a book can get and if you are not an avid horror fan, I doubt you will like this novel at all.
Poppy Z. Brite’s Exquisite Corpse is one of the darkest love stories ever told. She takes the simple premise of two men falling in love and places that love into the hands of the darkest, filthiest characters I have read about in years. Andrew Compton, a serial killer convicted of necrophilia and killing 23 boys, escapes from prison in London and travels to New Orleans to begin again. Meanwhile in New Orleans, Jay Byrne continues on a murderous and cannibalistic spree of his own. Their paths to each other grow more and more complex and when they finally meet, hell literally breaks loose. Not only do they find they love each other because they each find a companion and true match in the other, but they also find they have things they can learn from one another. When two serial killers get together and start teaching each other things, you can only imagine the horror for whoever falls in their path. The last kill is particularly gruesome … and fantastic.
Brite has been called the queen of Generation-X splatterpunks and, in a sense, that is true. She is absolutely the queen of writing such dark material as necrophilia, cannibalism, and the “aesthetics of dismemberment” in such great detail as we see here. Still, the novel is not all violence and gore – although that is where much of the story centers itself. What’s important to note is that Brite weaves a sort of spiritualism into the pages, presenting the killings as a way of being one with another soul in this world. The AIDS epidemic and its horrors are a strong component of the novel, running through nearly every storyline and adding a sense of realism to the pages. The dangers of sex and taking someone home are increasingly in the forefront of everyone’s mind and Brite draws on this, creating a compelling and monstrous cast of characters thrown together both by fate and bad choices.
Brite’s novel does have a few weak points. One being that she switches point of view far too often, taking us from the centerpieces of the novel to lesser characters that are really, in the end, not the soul of the book. It detracts from where we really belong – with Andrew Compton and Jay Byrne. By the time they finally find each other, the last few chapters of the book feel hurried and tacked on – what should be the meat (in some ways, literally) of the story falls into the background of a rather pathetic hero subplot. Structurally, Brite falls apart in the last quarter of the book, but given the filthy loveliness of the first three-fourths, I am willing to forgive.
What is perhaps one of the most striking aspects of this novel is the way Brite moves so seamlessly from an act of love to an act of sheer dehumanization. The language is much the same, with the body being worshipped either way – albeit, the latter’s imagery is absolutely terrifying. Eroticism and sexuality colors every single one of Brite’s pages, including the ones where bodies are literally being butchered. What is especially fascinating is when the two facets – sex and violence – begin to truly blend and, as a reader, it is difficult to separate them. It is quite a challenge reading such a book, but one well worth tackling.
