5/20/2023 0 Comments Wormwood by Poppy Z. Brite![]() ![]() ![]() They hung out in filthy, ill-lit clubs, wore black rags and had messy hair and crashed in abandoned houses and churches, sleeping on stained mattresses and consorting intimately with a variety of partners, usually all in a New Orleans of perfume and rot. This approach was something horror mostly lacked in the era, concerned as it was with middle American families, or children and teenagers.Ī teenager herself when her stories were being published in The Horror Show magazine in the mid 1980s, Brite's characters were the misfit kids, part of subcultural movements that I was familiar with and sympathetic to-punk and goth and whatever the mixture of the two beget. She was concerned not with morality but with sensuality and brought a sort of fin de siecle decadence to the genre just as its paperback popularity seemed to be fizzling out. Brite's first stories, collected in Wormwood, there is no real sense of good or evil, just the aesthete's pose of worldliness and boredom. Horror's purview is one of good versus evil, obviously, but that's one battle which doesn't interest me much in fiction I do not think art has to be didactic or proselytize to be effective. ![]()
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