Are You Loathsome Tonight? (20 page)

And this has been the vital spark that has brought her much of her readership, the dark children, the queer children who risk the wrath of parents and school counselors if they dare express themselves beyond the narrow confines of a long since bankrupted morality. The teenagers and young adults who
know
that Nothing and Ghost, Steve Finn and Eddy Sung and Zachary Bosch, Trevor McGee and Tran Vinh and Luke Ransom are far more honest and valuable role models for their generation than the preening Ken and Barbie fantasies passed off on television as “good kids."

For every critic who complains about the lack of sympathetic characters in Poppy's work, there are a hundred or a thousand of us who can see the truth in Nothing's desire or Luke's terrible anger, in Zach's recklessness or Ghost's simple love for Steve, because we've been there. Or because we'll
always
be there.

***

Two years ago, Poppy and I spent the week before Easter in Dublin, as guests of the Trinity College Science Fiction Society. We passed our spare time walking in James Joyce and Oscar Wilde's footsteps, sampling Dublin's eclectic and uneven cuisine, and haunting every musty bookshop within walking distance of our hotel on Dame Street. Our hosts spent the week trying to keep the posters advertising our Thursday night lectures up, as another Trinity campus group, right-wingers with a history of denouncing the Society's taste in speakers, had decided to protest by tearing the posters from walls and bulletin boards. Despite the valiant efforts of the members of the Society, most of the posters wound up in trash barrels or simply vanished.

So, it seemed ironically appropriate that Poppy had chosen to devote her half of the talk to recent experiences with censorship, specifically, the resistance and rejection she encountered after finishing her most recent novel,
Exquisite Corpse
. She told the story of a friend who had, in June 1994, been interrogated and detained by the U.S. Justice Department and Canadian customs agents, after a search of his bags had turned up a Xeroxed copy of the opening chapter of the book. She described how Dell had rejected
Exquisite Corpse
without offering any explanation, how her British editor had also passed on the manuscript, citing his discomfort with the book's “tendency to see the characters as admirable, almost vampire-like figures” (I suppose it never occurred to him that vampires are, by definition, serial killers, or to question his implication that it's acceptable to view vampires as admirable), and how the book had bounced from publisher to publisher before finally finding a home with Simon and Schuster in America, and Orion in the U.K.

Indeed, the various controversies that followed the publication of
Lost Souls
and then
Drawing Blood
seem rather tame in comparison to the unease that
Exquisite Corpse
has elicited from some. Repeatedly, Poppy was told by prospective publishers that the novel represented her very best work yet, but that they could not, in good conscience, publish it. Their letters described the book as “too nihilistic,” as “too extreme,” and as “a bloodbath without justification."

At the root of all this anxiety and alarm seems to be Poppy's decision to portray the novel's two cannibalistic killers as human beings instead of reducing them to one-dimensional monsters who could then be easily dismissed by readers as Not One Of Us. That Andrew Compton and Jay Byrne are shown as men with passions and fears, strengths and weaknesses, that they are humanized rather than demonized, putting the reader at risk of gaining some insight into appetites so alien to their own, and so taboo to their society. And, I suspect, a fear that even the most disgusted reader may find a faint spark of empathy.

I've talked to some who've objected to my labeling the opposition Poppy encountered with
Exquisite Corpse
as actual “censorship.” In fact, it may represent the most insidious form of censorship, far worse than the burning of books or their removal from school and public libraries. By rejecting a book
not
because it's badly written, but because it happens to offend an editor's sensibilities, the publisher engages in a sort of preemptive self-censorship, that, if successful, will prove far more effective at quieting a subversive or disruptive or merely disturbing voice than all the rednecks who ever thumped a Bible. The message filters down to authors, and as Janice Eidus wrote in an essay published in
American Notes and Queries
in 1992:

It has become all too common these days for writers to plan to submit timid, bland, “least offensive” stories ... to magazines and publishers in hopes of appearing in print ... stories that do no more than fearfully celebrate the status quo. I have sat among groups of writers as they help one another to figure out—in cynical, defeated tones—which is their least offensive work, work that will, therefore, have the greatest chance of being rewarded.

This situation is surely as prevalent in horror and dark fantasy today as in any other area of literature. And again, I come to the value of Poppy Z. Brite as an author: that she stood behind
Exquisite Corpse
rather than backing down and offering to rewrite the novel as another tiresome morality tale, that her belief in herself has permitted us a powerful and compelling vision of minds that may be outside our everyday experience, but are certainly not outside the experience of humanity.

Another example:

When Poppy began soliciting stories for
Love In Vein II
, her second anthology of vampiric erotica, she was told by her editor to tell contributors that there should be “no taboos” this time around, instructions which she passed along to her prospective contributors. So, a lot of folks who might not ordinarily have approached the market were intrigued by the chance to contribute to a sort of bloodsucking
Dangerous Visions
.

So. The submissions came in (and came in), and Poppy selected the ones that she liked best, and then passed the manuscript (comprised of 22 stories) along to the publisher. And was soon informed that four of the stories, pieces by Nancy Kilpatrick, John Ames, Scott Urban, and Bentley Little, would have to be cut. No room for debate, never mind the original guidelines for the book, the anthology would not be released if these four stories were included.

Why?

Because they were
too explicit
for an anthology of vampiric erotica whose guidelines, at the editor's request, had specified that absolutely nothing could be too explicit. I recall, Poppy passed quickly through fevery stages of shock, anger, and depression. She briefly considered scrapping the whole project and I think she finally decided not to
only
because canning
Love In Vein II
would screw the eighteen other authors (at this point, she'd already actually
bought
the stories, you see, all the authors had been paid and informed by Poppy that they would be in the book). The four offending stories were excised from the final manuscript, and an expurgated, presumably less taboo-violating and therefore more market-friendly, version of the anthology was released.

And, as Harlan Ellison has said so many times, so it goes. At least as long as we let it.

***

In 1995, Poppy moved out of her apartment on Royal Street and into a huge and rambling old house she shares with her husband, Chris DeBarr (a chef), 12 cats (Colm, Marie, Boris, Nicky, Tomas, Gideon, Milo, Maymay, Marcel, Rexina, Nathan, and Abby), three dogs (Charlie, Todd, and Annabel), and an albino king snake named Sredni Vashtar. She and Chris have made their bedroom in the beautiful old solarium looking out on the backyard and greenhouse.

It's the house where she finished
Exquisite Corpse
and wrote her biography of Courtney Love, the house where she's begun her next novel. The sort of house that's haunted in the most gentle way possible, ghosts you feel (but never see) waiting behind the sturdy lathe and plaster walls, or watching quietly from beneath the tulip trees; the wise and patient sort of house that all writers need, a house that's seen enough to know that things take time. A house as unapologetic and complex as Poppy's fiction. Which is a good thing, since, given the continued freedom to travel to her favorite cities on a regular basis (Amsterdam, San Francisco, Negril, New York, and London), it's a place she seems content to live for a while.

We should all be half so fortunate, I think.

Postscript
: A few hours after I finished this piece, a friend at Aberdeen University in Scotland e-mailed me that comedian Jenny Eclair has been banned from reviewing
Exquisite Corpse
on British Radio 4.

***

[A shorter version of this essay originally appeared as “Approximately 2,000 Words About Poppy Z. Brite” in the Program Book of the 1997 World Horror Convention, May, 1997.]