Rating: 
Summary: Dark Horror Fiction at its Finest
Review: Several years ago I walked into a book store and my eyes fell upon Poppy Z. Brites Lost Souls. At the time it was her only novel. I bought the book initially just based on the fact that I liked the cover art. Now my original copy is held together with duct tape. I love this book. It is fascinating, original, dark, erotic, and in my opinion one of the best horror books out there. I have re-read this book more times then any other. I still get hooked into the story line and feel for the characters that I have grown to love. This novel explores many topics that are fairly common in horror fiction. Yet, Poppy breathes new life and fascination into both vampires, misguided youth, and rock n' roll. This book is almost the modern day tale of vampires. I recommend it to all dark horror lover, vampire fans, and anyone who loves a well crafted and executed story. If this is your first time trying Brite--be warned her words are potent, strong, and filled with images. This is the original Poppy book. I urge you to give it a try, and maybe, just maybe, a few years from now you will find your copy of this book held together with duct tape from too many late night readings.
Rating:
Summary: I couldn't write enought to do this book justice!
Review: I must agree with Miss Kali, the person from Kirkus Review must not be very dedicated to the notion of *reading* the book before reviewing it. NOTE TO THE STUPID KIRKUS PERSON: It's Missing Mile NORTH CAROLINA, not Louisiana, and there is only one rape in the entire novel. I'd hate to see what they'd say about "Exquisite Corpse". I hope the stupidity doesn't turn people off who've never read it...As with some others who have posted, I have also lost this book numerous times to "friends" i've loaned it to. Can't blame them, though it's such a FABULOUS novel. With so many characters, one wouldn't think Ms. Brite would be able to go into such depth of who they are as a person. Even Jessy, who makes the briefest appearance in the book (besides Laine, hee hee) touches you with her rebellion and romanticism. Poppy takes me on the vampiric trios journey, perfectly displays the sensitivity of Ghost, Nothing, Ann, and Steve, by the end of the book, I feel like I know them, they are friends. Not many authors can do that and the few that can aren't close to Poppy's caliber when it comes to description-I can smell, taste, see, and feel everything in this book. As anyone with a brain in their head should know, this book is not for people who don't indulge in decadent adventures, midnight road trips, or a good round of Chartruese (which I've been blessed enough to drink in Paree). For those yet to delve into the world of PZB, this first novel is the perfect introduction to her twisted, dead-on, dark-as-four-AM vision.
Rating: 
Summary: Somewhere in the Middle
Review: A friend of mine recommended Poppy Z. Brite to me a few months ago, and i immediatly got her short story collection, "Wormwood" that I would highly recommend to anyone. But upon reading this, I found myself somewhat impartial to this book, finding it to be a good book, but not great.
The writting style is excellent. She paints a really goos picture in your mind of the charactors and their surroundings, and the story is relativly easy to get into. The problem I had with this book was the way the author tried to shock you with things that may have been shocking thirty years ago, but now seem dated and contrived.
Overall, I would say that this book is better than Anne Rice's growing number of dull novels, and is worth reading in your spare time, as long as your expectations aren't really high. I would say buy it a used book store or check at your local library.
Rating:
Summary: Praise its holy name!
Review: "Lost Souls" is the book that spoiled me. After reading it, I didn't think I would ever again find a story so well-imagined, so beautifully crafted. In this tale of vampires, it would've been so easy to scrawl out a hackneyed "bite me, drain me, toss my body in the gutter" plot, but Poppy and her muse must have screamed "No way!" The narrative is dripping with sensory information -- sights, sounds, smells, everything Poppy always uses to take the readers where she wants them to go. The characters aren't lifelike, they're LARGER than life. They drag you alongside them and make you sympathize with them, love them, hate them, feel their own loves and their own hates. Steve's is an earthy, often ill-humored presence. His bandmate Ghost is enigmatic and beautiful in his eccentricities. The vampiric trio of Molochai, Twig and Zillah are a collective dark force, and every time they enter a scene you can't help but to murmur "uh-oh."This story is tightly woven. Everything's there on the page because it needs to be. There is nothing overdone, and no apologies made. Poppy has a flair for tailoring her signature violence and male homoeroticism into her backdrops, turning out a world that's so surreal, yet smacks of normalcy. That flair is no less evident in "Lost Souls." I read a variety of fiction, and I have yet to encounter anything that even approaches the soul-stirring caliber of this book in ANY genre. I was let down at the end, not because it was a bad story, but because it was an AMAZING story, and it was over. I've read some decent books since I finished "Lost Souls," but none have been as worthy of adoration.
Rating: 
Summary: I expected more.
Review: Spoiler Alert! I had heard several rave reviews about this novel so I read it and was disappointed. What you must keep in mind I am 29. I think had I read this book at 14 or so, I would have been enthralled with it. It borrows liberally from superior works, most notably Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles. There was a lot of extraneous expository writing that felt like a waste of time reading, overused adjectives (apparently everyone in Poppy Brite's world has "spidery" hands, smokes clove cigarettes, lives in proximity to kudzu trees). And of course it had the typical "let's kick some vampire ass" ending. Lost Souls is almost entirely a landscape of young, beautiful, skinny, white males, mostly making out with each other or killing people in graphic detail. It just comes across more as titillation rather than trying to say something about the human condition or go beyond being entertainment in the same vein as rock videos. One reviewer mentioned it as being like fan-fiction, and I got that vibe as well. It also makes the fatal mistake of trying to make vampire rock stars, which is tantamount to trying to run a car on water instead of gas. It's a great idea if it could work, but alas, it never does. The book also takes "Goth culture," for lack of a better term, a bit too seriously for it's own good. Besides the occasional sarcastic quip from Steve, the book doesn't acknowledge any of the complete absurdity of some of the situations described, the way a good "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" episode would. It is very much written for the serious, Marilyn Manson-listening, dressed-in-black set. It doesn't really try to transcend it's genre, so it's difficult to recommend such a book to anyone who doesn't fall into that category. Even then, I'm sure many self-proclaimed "Goths" would cringe at the thought of reading this. That said, I will grudgingly give Brite some points for her additions/twists to the vampire myth (Mostly the pregnancy- vampire hybrid ideas - I can only hope they were of her own invention and I'm giving her credit justly) Ghost, I thought was particularly nicely rendered as a character. There were some interesting visual ideas (Christian as a roadside rose stand vendor comes to mind). I managed to make it to the end at least, and take the time to think enough about the book to give it a review, so I think that shows that I have a least a modicum of respect for it. Bottom line- I wouldn't recommend it to readers older than 20-25, and who aren't already interested in vampire fiction.
Rating: 
Summary: Dark and sexy
Review: Having read PZB's follow up to Lost Souls, Drawing Blood, I knew what to expect from this book. And it certainly delivered. The book is a beauiful creation, Poppy's prose so deliciously written at times that, like the liquors she so often describes, I found myself reading some passages over and over again.
The characters are all uniformly weak and vulnerable, feeding from each other in more ways than one. The idea of copious amounts of drink and drugs coupled with homosexual orgies is another to fill many with horror, but Poppy has such an erotic writing style that I could almost feel the bisexuallity stirring in me as I read on.
The plot is well constructed, sparse at times, especially concerning the characters respective backgrounds, but this is always viewed as surplus to the needs and troubles the characters face in the present.
It veers occasionally, for instance it is obvious at times where Poppy has reached a plot stumbling block and glossed over it with her magical prose. For instance, after the vampires arrive in Missing Mile they go on a rampage, determined to take revenge on Steve and Ghost for the beating they took in Ghost's house on their first night in the town. But after finding them, the two parties drift apart again and the vampires spend the next month engaged in drugged sex orgies in a caravan park, while Steve and Ghost smoke pot and talk about revenge. Neither party seems at all willing to advance the plot.
Poppy's prose has a way of smoothing over these problems, and sooner or later the book moves off again and you become lost.
And that, really is what it is all about. You could read a hundred Kings or Koontz's, and never find anything as deeply engaging as this. It is the sort of book of which you begin to miss the characters when the story is over and the novel put away. You wonder what became of them, what, if they were real, they'd be doing now.
For a while I lost my soul to this book, and sometimes that is what you want.
Rating:
Summary: Somewhere in the Middle
Review: A friend of mine recommended Poppy Z. Brite to me a few months ago, and i immediatly got her short story collection, "Wormwood" that I would highly recommend to anyone. But upon reading this, I found myself somewhat impartial to this book, finding it to be a good book, but not great.
The writting style is excellent. She paints a really goos picture in your mind of the charactors and their surroundings, and the story is relativly easy to get into. The problem I had with this book was the way the author tried to shock you with things that may have been shocking thirty years ago, but now seem dated and contrived.
Overall, I would say that this book is better than Anne Rice's growing number of dull novels, and is worth reading in your spare time, as long as your expectations aren't really high. I would say buy it a used book store or check at your local library.
Rating:
Summary: A great Erotic Vampire Novel
Review: Lost souls is a great book for all of you who love to read vampire erotica. Poppy's most known characters are in this book; Steve & Ghost. Steve and Ghost make up the band Lost Souls? They live in Missing Mile North Carolina. Everything is going great until a boy named Nothing shows up with his Vampire friends, then all hell breaks loose.
Rating:
Summary: Lush, Hip and Sexy
Review: This is one of my favorite vampire stories, although it's not for the prudish. EXCELLENT prose. Antiformulaic, with no castle, no faultless ingenues... just beautiful [androgynous] boys, lost girls, Southern charm and supernatural entities that will both scare and intrigue you. Lots of interesting male/male relationships, sexual and otherwise. Definitely a worthwhile read.
Rating:
Summary: It was better when I was 16
Review: This used to be my favorite book when I was in school. When I first read it I thought it was cutting edge, but now that I'm older it seems kind of forced. Don't get me wrong, I love Miss Brites work, I just don't think that this is her best. This was her first novel, so she's grown a lot in her writing, and I don't think she cares about writing what people expect anymore.
As far as vampire books go, this is one of the best that I have read. When I was younger, I felt very akin to Nothing (What teenage freak doesn't?) and I thought it would be fun to have my real dad be a vampire, (although I definitely wouldn't sleep with him) and what a fun life it would be, just drifting and partying across the country. I'd recommend reading this before any of Poppy's other works--Once you see what she's capable of, this will lose most of its effect.
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