Exquisite Corpse (#84)

Exquisite Corpse by Poppy Z. Brite


What I said then:

Lots of people get killed, apparently. A friend said my book reminded him of it. I'm worried.

What I say now:

Holy shit, everybody! A blog post about a book, on John's book blog! It's a friggin' miracle!

In my defence, I've been trying to make a movie, which I reckon is pretty reasonable as far as 'reasons from being distracted from stupid self-imposed quests' go. During June/July I was pretty stressed about the whole Apartmentality thing, so any reading time I did have, I spent relaxing with old favourites. It's possible that I re-read the entire series of Hornblower novels, but I'm not gonna confirm or deny anything.

Anyway, when I did decide to pick up the challenge again, I decided that, given I loved Dead Europe with all its horror stylin', I'd have a crack at one of the other horror books on my list. There aren't too many to choose from (I'm more a fantasy or sci-fi guy when I want to get down and dirty with some pulpy fiction), but Exquisite Corpse, about two gay serial-killers who meet and fall in love, features more than enough eviscerated corpses to fit the bill.

In England, Andrew Compton languishes in jail for the murder and rape (yes, in that order) of twenty-three destitute youths. In New Orleans, Jay Byrne makes a hobby of killing any young drifters that cross his path, then eating their remains. Both seem to find the ultimate beauty in the stiffening bodies of their victims, and find murder an essential part of their sex drives. They're also both complete sociopaths: no reason is ever offered for why they are the way they are, or how their desires have come to take these sickening forms. After Compton escapes prison (by faking his own death), kills an American tourist and uses his passport to flee to the U.S., the meeting of these two deranged killers is inevitable. When their eyes eventually lock in a crowded French Quarter bar, sparks fly and they decide to team up.

Brite's novel is pretty full on in terms of its gore quotient, and I'd imagine it would be too much for some people. Every murder that gets committed is described in intense, loving detail. The inside of their victim's bodies are like the main character's playground, and Brite must have done a hell of a lot of research with a medical dictionary to know what Compton and Byrne were going to find in there. There's pretty much an exact parallel to how lovingly precise the many sex scenes are, and that makes perfect sense given that, for our main characters, sex and murder are two halves of the same coin.

Unfortunately, beyond the litany of mutilations and blow jobs, there's not much else to this book. Because the majority of the book is told from either Jay or Andrew's point of view, and because both of those characters believe themselves above any questions of morality, there's never really any urgency to anything. Whether they kill that guy or not, or whether they get caught or not, it doesn't ever really seem to matter. It's pretty impossible to empathise with a guy whose main concern is how pretty his next murder is going to be, but I never really empathised with any of the (underwritten) victims either. Given how much time is spent setting up that neither Andrew nor Jay has any feelings or emotions about anything at all, to have them suddenly fall in love (well, lust) just seems ... wrong, somehow. It just doesn't quite scan.

The one character who might have brought this whole thing to life is a guy named Luke, dying of AIDS and spouting anti-straights propaganda on a pirate radio station. He enters the story because his ex, Tran, gets chosen by Andrew and Jay to be their 'perfect' victim. Written in the mid-nineties and set (I think) a little earlier, AIDS panic is still a thing, and Luke's slow, messy decay has him feeling like a pariah (it also contrasts neatly with the quick, surgical beauty of the main couple's murders). Unfortunately Luke, who ought to be the heart and soul of the book, spends most of his time being a complete arsehole to everybody he meets, which makes it hard to go with his sudden, end-of-the-novel turn into good-guy-ness.

Also, and I'm kinda reluctant to say this given I'm pretty much the straightest, whitest, most privileged guy in the universe, and Brite most definitely is not, but the whole 'Homosexuals as Serial Killers' thing feels uncomfortably retro in its politics. Compton and Byrne's murderous impulses are so explicitly linked to their sexual desires that it's hard not to see their gayness as a contributing factor to their evilness. They're kind of like more salacious versions of Norman Bates, or Buffalo Bill, or the killer in Dressed to Kill that I can't remember the name of. Luke's radio rants touch on some really interesting issues to do with queer politics, but Brite never follows through, preferring to hack and slash his way to the end of the book, rather than try for something deeper. Oh well.

Cheers, JC.


about to read: Independence Day by Richard Ford
books to go: 83