Brite (Drawing Blood, 1993), the reigning queen of Generation-X splatterpunks, pulls out the stops in this ghastly tale of two serial killers who find true love over the body of a murdered and mutilated boy in the historic French Quarter of New Orleans. It is a novel for those who dare trespass where the sacred and profane become one.īlood-soaked sheets, cannibalism, rotting, half-dissected corpses: this gruesome psychological horror novel has all the grue a reader might-or might not-want.

Exquisite Corpse confirms Brite as a writer who defies categorization. Brite dissects the landscape of torture and invites us into the mind of a killer. Swiftly moving from the grimy streets of London’s Piccadilly Circus to the decadence of the New Orleans French Quarter, Poppy Z. Together, Compton and Byrne set their sights on an exquisite young Vietnamese-American runaway, Tran, whom they deem to be the perfect victim. Tortured by his own perverse desires, and drawn to possess and destroy young boys, Compton inadvertently joins forces with Jay Byrne, a dissolute playboy who has pushed his “art” to limits even Compton hadn’t previously imagined. After feigning his own death to escape from prison, Compton makes his way to the United States with the sole ambition of bringing his “art” to new heights.

To serial slayer Andrew Compton, murder is an art, the most intimate art. Sometimes brutal and hilariously waspish, but always humane.From the author of Lost Souls, Drawing Blood, and Wormwood comes a thrilling and chilling novel that bestselling author Peter Straub says serves as a “guidebook to hell.” The result is a tragicomic tour de force, an upside-down roadmap to everyone’s inner Sodom, a perversely moral (and morally perverse) masterpiece by a modern-day Marquis de Sade. As one surreal episode morphs into the next, these searchers change shape and their journeys change direction names and identities come and go, storylines collide, and desires intertwine, all with the lightning-quick illogic of a dream. In forty-nine brief, highly cinematic chapters, we meet a series of twisted but sincere searches-Tomtom Jim and his naked, hungry family Mary Poorpoor and her utterly “otherly” baby angry John Doe and his sex slave, James Madison-each in flight from despair. Lyric and tender one moment, cruel and dizzying the next, The Exquisite Corpse neither celebrates perversity nor laments it rather it projects it as part of man’s never-ending search for a true self and for transcendent communion with others.

The exquisite corpse book