Lost Souls by Poppy Z. Brite

read by Chris Patton

I so wanted to get into this book. This was my second time through it, my first having been in the early-to-mid Aughts after a friend who is a horror fan (and now a horror writer—hi, Ben!) loaned it to me. Actually, he first loaned me another book of hers, Drawing Blood, and although I’m not generally a tremendous horror fan myself, I loved it. I remember not loving this one quite as much, but still, I got into it. It was a vampire book from, in part, the point of view of the vampires, after all; and it took place, in part, in New Orleans. I’m a complete sucker for all of that.

Not so much this time, though. Drawing Blood stands the test of time by being charmingly time-capsule-like. Lost Souls, though, fails the same test by charmlessly and blatantly pandering to the sensibilities of the horror-goth kids of the 90s, mindlessly repeating Anne Rice-esque tropes while splattering gratuitous gore everywhere. Sad to say, I didn’t even make it all the way through this time around.

It starts sometime in the late 70s or very early 80s. A very old vampire named Christian runs a bar in the French Quarter of New Orleans and notices a young girl spending a lot of time there. She believes there are vampires and is hoping to meet some there, in hopes of becoming one herself—though why she should believe this and why she should suspect they hang out at this bar is never explained. She’s more right than she knows, but our barkeep never reveals himself to her. And she’s wrong about one critical thing: in this reality, vampires are born, not made. So even if she does find the beings she seeks, it won’t do her any good.

In fact she does end up meeting some, and it does her much worse than “not any good.” Three old vampire friends of Christian’s roll into town for a visit and end up partying with the girl and impregnating her before taking off for the next chapter of their monotonously rollicking life on the road. After that Christian takes her in, giving her work at the bar and letting her live with him--but never bothering to explain that all vampire pregnancies end in the death of the mother, as the infant invariably eats its way out.

This takes place, and Christian disposes of the body very dispassionately and then drives up north and leaves the infant on a random doorstep with a note pinned to it. In the note he says that the baby’s name is Nothing and that he’ll bring luck to those who raise him.

So that’s all setup. Nothing grows up to be a teenaged psychopath—actually all the vampires pretty much act like teenaged psychopaths, aside from Christian, who acts like a tired old psychopath—and runs away from home and toward an inevitable encounter with his vampire dad and cohort, and also with the two main human characters.

These are Ghost and Steve. They are two young men from a small rural town called Missing Mile, North Carolina, which is also where much of Drawing Blood takes place. Ghost is a spooky kid who has visions. His best friend, roommate, and bandmate is Steve, a self-absorbed rapist. Both are bisexual—seemingly everyone in this book is bisexual—but they don’t appear to be lovers, just very close friends.  Their band, Lost Souls, gives the book its name and provides the plot device that brings the two of them and all the vampires and Steve’s ex-girlfriend and rape victim, Ann, onto a collision course.

Nothing and his father, Zillah, become lovers and then discover their relationship—which delights them both and cements their union, with Zillah becoming fixatedly possessive and Nothing becoming fixatedly dependent. Zillah impregnates Ann and takes off for New Orleans. Ann becomes fixated on Zillah and decides to follow him there, and Ghost decides to follow her and try to save her. This was the point at which I stopped caring about what happened to any of these crazy and painfully improbably people and stopped reading.

If this is the sort of book you like, you’ll really like this book. A lot of people do.