Rating: 
Summary: Proceed with extreme caution
Review: So you're a Poppy Z. Brite fan? Read Drawing Blood? Read Wormwood? Read Lost Souls? Consider yourself able to handle anything she could possible deal out? Think again. Do not read this book just because you loved her other work, and certainly don't read it if you've never read her other works. There are things in this book that you can never un-read; she makes you feel things you can never forget. Granted, all you hardcore fans out there won't head this warning- I certainly wouldn't have. So do go right ahead, and when you are done you will know what I'm refering to. All of which is not to say that this is not an incredible book- as always, Poppy Z. Brite is the master of descriptions so vivid that they make you feel, smell, or taste her words. And that is what makes this book so profoundly disturbing and so utterly unforgettable.
Rating: 
Summary: A Return to the Nastiness
Review: After Lost Souls, Drawing Blood seemed to be a lighthearted romance more than anything. It even had a happy ending. With Exquisite Corpse we're back into the nastiness that made Lost Souls so fun. Granted you're stuck staring at the wall after you're through, and there are Holocaust memoirs less disturbing than this but you can't beat Poppy Z. Brite for selling you Gay Serial Killer Necrophiliac Cannibals in love. I've been told that Tran, the object of the serial killers'---ahem---affection is a dead on description of her husband. Whether or not rumors are true it's still a great anecdote. However I find that my favorite character is the periphereal character Luke Ransom, Tran's ex-lover whose dying of AIDS and trying to get back at the world through scathingly bitter broadcasts from a pirate radio station. In one moment all the contradictions and complexities of this character come to the fore and he doesn't have to kill people or hit on serial killers to be the most interesting character of the book. In Luke there is a reminder of some characterisation depth that was missing from other Poppy Z. Brite characters. You don't realize it is missing until Luke Ransom reveals himself in that scene. It's almost too bad that the most memorable moments of the book have nothing to do with Luke Ransom and have more to do with curious uses for a Phillips Screwdriver
Rating: 
Summary: Tres Interessant.
Review: As many others have said, you cannot unread Poppy Z. Brite. I would not recommend this book to rather immature people, seeing that the subject manner is quite disturbing. I wasn't at all irked by Lost Souls or Drawing Blood, but this one really got me.The characters are interestingly developed, but you don't feel the same compassion for them as you might have with Steve and Ghost/ Trevor and Zach. Andrew Compton and Jay Byrne were very interesting characters. . . it was fun to look inside the mind of a serial killer for a bit. The thing that I really didn't appreciate was all of the gore. Was it really so necessary? Could a creepier story have resulted from less blood? Perhaps. Again, this book is one that you could never forget. Tread lightly on the subject matter (and don't read it right before going to bed) and you shall be fine.
Rating:
Summary: What a Splendid Nightmare
Review: This was my first Poppy Brite book which I bought on the recommendation of the reviews here and was not dissapointed. It's a quick read - I took it with me on the airplane from Indianapolis to Philly and had finished it by the time the plane landed - I just couldn't put it down the entire time and I am not a big fan of the horror genre. Poppy's writing is incredibly lush and descriptive without becoming boring or tedious. The characters are well developed and the plot is fleshed out. While I was reading, I could picture everything being described perfectly. There was a scene in the book with Jay and "Fido" in the bathtub where I actually felt sick to my stomach. I don't know if a book has ever been able to do that to me. If you have a strong stomach and appreciate truly good writing then buy this book!
Rating:
Summary: gorgeous.
Review: i feel sorry for those too weak to handle this book, for these are words from a goddess. this book is beautiful. disturbing, yes, but so beautifully twisted, so amazingly genius. poppy is able to take what we all think and wonder about and put it into words. poppy knows what lunatics thrive on, and she acts upon this knowledge. out of all of her books that i have read or own, this is one of my favourites. poppy z. brite has insipired me like no other. a killer in london, andrew, uses his knowledge of his new disease [AIDS] in order to fake his death and escape from prison. he makes his way to the US, where he meets jay, a man very similar to himself. jay introduces him to cannibalism ... and of course, the two "fall in love" [if you will]. one of my favourite parts was the mentioning of jay keeping human flesh in his fridge and tasting it every now and then, the way a person would keep sliced turkey or other meats of the sorts on a plate covered with plastic wrap. at times, i laughed so hard that i thought i would die. the team of killers is brilliant. you find yourself on their "side", waiting eagerly for the next kill, rather than feeling sympathy for the victims. once you get to the end, it's a bit disappointing: you wish there was more to the book. i couldn't believe i was actually done with it after reading the last page. a mixture of gay sex, gore, cannibalism, pain, suicide, and suffering. definately not a waste of money...
Rating:
Summary: morbidly interesting -- not for the squeamish
Review: Poppy Brite writes incredibly well, but I kept wondering, where in the world does she come up with the ideas, the detail, for the gore? Some scenes were just plain disgusting, but they were so well written it was hard not to keep reading. If you're into this genre, you'll love her. If you accidentally stumbled on her while on your way to the Harlequin Romance section, keep on going!
Rating:
Summary: More Poppy Greatness
Review: Poppy Z. Brite will never cease to amaze me. After having read her brilliant novel Lost Souls and her amazing collection Wormwood, I decided to read Exquisite Corpse. This dark novel is simply amazing; it is sombre, touching, disturbing and highly affecting. I will not soon forget this book. This twisted tale displayss many tortured souls. The two major ones being two serial killers, one British and one American, who yearn to kill for reasons other than to simply satisfy a deep craving or thirst for blood. Killing is part of them, it is what and who they are. And it is only when they both join forces, and when they set their eyes on the beautiful and young boy Tram, that their thrist will develop into something greater, something they simply cannot ignore. There will be only one way for them to satisfy their craving: death. Brite's prose is simply amazing. Reading her books is like getting trapped into a beautiful nightmare where every word has a powerful impact on the reader. And her characters are so well-developed that they feel very real, very present, even though they are trapped by the boundaries of the page. Brite has an amazing talent at bringing imaginary charcters to life. Although this book is rather short (240 pages), it is never disappointing and it never offers a single dull moment. True, some scenes are rather disturbing, others shocking. And yet, the book has an effect on its reader in that it will remain embedded in your mind long after you have finished reading it. That is what I call great literature. Exquisite Corpse is Brite's finest book to date, a modern classic of terror and yearning, of loss and sadness.
Rating:
Summary: Death Is Everywhere . . .
Review: After I finished reading Exquisite Corpse, I was struck by the thought that one could, with the benefit of hindsight, make the argument that it is a transitional work in the sense that it represents a bridge between Poppy's earlier writing in horror to her current desire to write realistically about "real life" in New Orleans, as she does in her latest novel Liquor. In other words, EC is a transitional novel in that it contains both the fantastic elements of her earlier work (in this case, sophisticated serial killers) and the realistic concerns of her present day work (in this case, the horrible reality of the AIDS epidemic). Really, the only thing that keeps EC from being a totally realistic novel is her rather romanticized portrayal of the two serial killers. I say romanticized because most serial killers are mindnumbingly prosaic as human beings, and the only thing that makes them "interesting" is the fact that they have managed to kill a lot of people before being caught. I read biographies of both Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer, and I found myself depressed by the absolute banality of their lives. They, or most real life serial killers, aren't exactly the real life counterparts of Poppy's Andrew Compton or Thomas Harris's Hannibal Lecter. The horror in Exquisite Corpse is not derived from supernatural sources like with Poppy's earlier novels, such as the vampires as in Lost Souls, or a haunted house in Drawing Blood. Rather, the horror in EC is derived from the sources we find in real life such as violence and disease. EC reminded me of the Depeche Mode song "Fly on the Windshield": Death is everywhere
There are flies on the windshield, for a start
Reminding us,
We could be torn apart,
Tonight Indeed, the spectre of death pervades the whole storyline of EC. Poppy presents a portrait of New Orleans in EC where the possibility of a painful death either from a violent psychopath or from a debilitating disease is never far away from you. More specifically, the horror in EC comes from the idea of people not only dealing with the horrible reality of knowing they would soon die in the most horribly painful fashion imaginable, but also from the horrible reality of knowing that they only had a finite time left to left-very little or even no more time to spend with friends and family, to accomplish all the goals you wanted to accomplish in life, just time to sit around regretting everything you would miss out on. It is this horrible reality of death that made it a hard novel for me to read on an emotional level. I know that some people had a problem with the gore, and I'm squeamish myself, but the gore isn't what I found the most disturbing about EC. I should mention too that the gore isn't gratuitous. Poppy isn't a hack and she uses it for a purpose. The two serial killers perversely take pride in their 'work', looking at their killing as a craft just as much as anybody else has a sense of pride in what they do. It probably sounds artsy, but Poppy really does present murder and the dead body in an aesthetic light, as other people have said. Indeed, this isn't totally dramatic license on Poppy's part-there's that famous story about how Jeffrey Dahmer (who the serial killers are obviously in part based upon) had planned to construct an altar made out of his victims' skulls and bones in an artistic piece de resistance of his serial killer activities. I should mention also that it is obvious that Poppy based one of the plot turns on what happened to one of Jeffrey Dahmer's victims. When I realized Poppy was doing this I was very uncomfortable and even horrified because I wondered if it was morally okay to use this true life episode as a plot/thematic vehicle in the book since it involved the vicious murder of a real human being. However, I realized as the scene went on that Poppy was using this real life murder to very justifiably criticize some real life idiots who really dropped the ball. Poppy also uses this scene to illustrate the corruption and racism that plagues some institutions in New Orleans. Poppy makes the serial killer subgenre her own, to explore her own interests. In other words, she is decidedly not a poor man's Thomas Harris. EC's storyline is told by shifting between the four characters. Poppy shifts from the first person narrative of serial killer Andrew Compton , to the narratives of other three main characters told in the third person. In fact, when I realized that the narrative of EC was divided pretty equally between four main characters, I worried that maybe the narrative would be spread too thin because at 240 pages EC is a relatively short novel. However, Poppy was able to successfully explore these four characters and their storylines within the novels 240 pages. Considering that Poppy is an American, she also demonstrated considerable courage in writing as an Englishman, and placing the first part of her novel in London. However, Poppy brings this off admirably, even cleverly using British spelling when writing in his voice (i.e., "colour"). Poppy is undoubtedly a very gifted prose stylist. Check this passage out where Compton talks about his victims: "I gave them good food, strong tea, a warm place in my bed, what few pleasures my body could provide. In return, all I asked was their lives." Not bad, huh? EC is a very good novel. My only real "criticism" is that because Poppy is so successful in depicting the horrible reality of death, I'm not sure that it is a novel I'll want to read again any time soon just because it is too emotionally painful to read. Nonetheless, EC is a very interesting and exciting read, and I would recommend it highly.
Rating: 
Summary: Hmmmm
Review: Well, I really wanted to love this novel. It seemed just my kind of thing when I read the editorial reviews. But I was deeply disappointed. All I can see is that this book was so busy kissing its own well-made-up, taut, goth buttocks it had not time for characterizaiton. There are some very interesting beginnings here (hence two rather than one star) but I never find the characters particularly plausible. The exception is Lucas, who leaps of the page real and fully formed, until the very end of the book where he stalls quite suddenly and falls into an inaction quite out of time with the rest of his persona.
Brite's prose is good and it's a very readable book, but motivations weren't clear and depth of personality of character's lacked. There are more interesting 'mind of a killer' novels out there.
Rating:
Summary: Shockingly Disturbing
Review: Andrew Compton is a sickly twisted serial killer who seeks both solace and beauty in the slaying of young boys. However, his art cannot be perfected while in prison. Thus, Compton feigns his own death and escapes to the US. Quite unintentionally, Compton runs into a man named Jay Byrne while in New Orleans. They find they have a deep, inexplicable bond that few would understand. They both revel in the beauty that is death and torment. Thus, the two set out in search of their next victim, Tran, a disillusioned youth recently kicked out of his home and onto the streets because of his homosexuality. Though this book contains necrophilia, extreme violence, cannibalism, and gore, in no way is this a horror novel. Rather, "Exquisite Corpse" seems to fall into a category of disturbingly erotic romance and/or twenty-first century pop-culture literature. No matter how one decides to classify this novel, it can be said that this is a novel that will not soon be forgotten. This thought-provoking book will have you cringing in disgust, writhing in torment, and engaged with awe all at the same time. Poppy Z Brite has a way of sucking the reader in with her elegant prose and gorgeously vivid description that seems unrivalled by many other authors. There are few who can make torture and pain beautifully artistic. True, this book is not for the feint of heart, but if you can stomach the seemingly repulsive atrocities on the surface and dig for the deeper meaning, there is wisdom and insight to be found there. Poppy Z Brite approaches homosexuality and AIDS in a straightforward, no-holds barred manner. What has been, and still is, taboo for many is not for her. She brings current issues plaguing our society to the surface and forces the reader to acknowledge them. This is the first book I've read by Poppy Z Brite, and it most certainly will not be my last. Brite is the type of author who demands attention. If you are a fan of dark literature then give Brite a try!
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