Rating: 
Summary: Faith Restored
Review: For a long time I had almost given up on finding a writer as good as Anne Rice. Setting her work as a standard made the quest for interesting and inspiring literature virtually impossible. Having read everything Rice had written, I floated on a sea of insipid and rather tame books for about a year, until I found this book, and I have to say, it has knocked Anne Rice firmly into second place. It's not often you find a book that made me feel the way this one felt. It was like coming home. I'm ordering the rest of her books right now. The characters are fantastic, you fall in love and loathe them all at the same time. The story is rich and sometimes poignant, it has kept me thinking since I read it. I half wish I'd never read it so I could read it again and feel that wonderful feeling of discovery and empathy. It allows you to feel things and embrace ideas most books would edge around and hint at. It's a wild, beautiful, sexy and exhilarating read. If you haven't read it, I'm jealous. Get it now, and be ready to fall in love.
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Summary: one vampire story to fall in love with
Review: I have been a fan of Ms.Brite's for some time now and it was this book a good friend gave me that introduced me to her exotic writings. Chillingly good, Brite writes her one and only (to my knowledge) vampire novel. Her characters are arcane, murky, and yet you can fall in love with them and all their flaws. Meet Nothing, his name is pretty much how he feels, and his adventure to find two men in a band that he wants to call his family. Not as erotic as some of her other stories, it is an excellent read if you love macabre writing.
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Summary: Made my nose bleed...
Review: I'm a scardy cat, and I usually can't sit through horror books because they keep me up for weeks on end. Yes, this frightened me, but in a wonderful, wonderful way. Not to mention it has the best kissing scene ever written in it ^_^. Don't believe Nick! This book will leave you sleepless and you'll like it.
Rating: 
Summary: a non-biased review
Review: After reading all the glorious blurbs about how "gritty" and "stylish" Brite's work is, how "daring" and "sensual" it is, I thought I was in for a treat. I was disappointed. A lot of fanfare has surrounded this writer, most of which is undeserved. Lost Souls reads like B-grade fan fiction. I was left with an impression that Brite had been scrummaging through Anne Rice's waste bin for discarded chapters, and then simply upped the gore factor to disguise her own inadequacies. It may appeal to disenchanted teens who have yet to acquire a measured taste in good Dark Literature, but anyone over twenty would probably cringe at Brite's clichéd descriptions of depressed goth teens with vampiric desires. Rates: 'Lost Souls' should only to be bought at a second-hand store.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting...to say the least.
Review: I thought lost souls was a wonderful quick read that i finished within the day i bought it. The characters were cool, the setting was interesting and it had pretty much everything a vampire lover would want. Although i wasnt quite happy with the way the vampire lore had been used in the book it was nonetheless quite interesting to read. I lent it to three of my friends already, and they all pretty much agree with me, that it was good and for anyone that would like just a quick book with incest, vampires and music in it then this is the book for you!
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Summary: different and a little surprising
Review: I purchased this book trusting it's positive reviews. I was mainly used to Anne Rice's more compassionate vampires so when I read Lost Souls I was surprised at how raw are sometimes even vulgar the story was. I loved it. It presented a diferent side to things than other books about vampires. I would certainly reccomend it to anyone who likes vampires. Its something of a departure from most other books on the subject, but its rather good.
Rating: 
Summary: Poppy Z Brite: Not so Bright.
Review: I'm an avid fan of Anne Rice's "The Vampire Chronicles." This being a well-known fact among my friends, a couple of them had recommended Poppy Z Brite's work to me, thinking that I would enjoy it. When browsing through this site in search of a novel of her's, "Lost Souls" seemed the one I was most likely to favor. Why? Simply because the topic was vampires, and that is a topic which intrigues me. So that's the one I decided upon. Now, the character of Zillah transfixed me immediately. I even went so far as to compare him to my beloved Lestat, my favorite Ricean vampire. And I'm not going to provide a synopsis on each character, but I will say that I think the book's true potential was in the character of Zillah. And so by killing him in the novel, Brite killed the potential. In fact, the entire ending kills the rest of the book. I don't think Brite is necessarily a poor writer. I think the book was well-written, most of the characters believable, and the dialogue pretty. And her concepts are not conventional, which I like. But she seemed to place the supreme character value on the young boy Nothing, rather than on Zillah or even Christian, another elusive and enigmatic figure in the novel. And she made the mistake of taking on two of, what I will term, "party perspectives." We go from Christian, to Ghost and Steve, to Nothing, Zillah, Molochai, and Twig. Which works...multiple perspectives aren't bad, if used wisely. (Rice did it effectively in Queen of the Damned, going between far more characters than Brite does in this novel), but she took both parties sides', if you will. She made and ending that was meant to be unsettling in its unexpectedness and seeming indifference, but IS in fact unsettling only because it is inconclusive and boring. She left it open-ended, which is fine (hell, it's expected, we're dealing with vampires here) and there were indeed some implied tragic aspects. However, she tried to make a balance between seeming good and seeming evil. She attempted to create an ending where the "good" guys and the "bad" guys could both "win." And that, in my opinion, is never effective. Or at least I've never seen a case in which it has been. She made Zillah the central bad character, Ghost (and Steve, in a way) the central good characters, and Nothing the main confused, able to sway character. But they all (with the exception of Ghost, perhaps) lack substance. Zillah had inherent charm because he was beguilingly evil, the archetype of a vampire, in that respect. But the guy had charisma too. But Nothing lacked much. Had she developed said characters more fully, making them worth our concern, the ending might have been favorable, and in fact redeemed the rest of the book, had the rest been utter garbage.
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Summary: What's the big deal?
Review: I think a lot of her sentences meander around and really go nowhere. Most of the descriptions are overdone. Too much kudzu. Apart from the kid named Nothing, none of these characters were interesting or sympathetic. I put it down after 300 pages.
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Summary: Brite strides boldly where Anne Rice fears to tread
Review: Lost Souls, Poppy Z. Brite's first novel, may be shockingly perverse to those not already immersed in the darker waters of fiction and life, but with its lurid omnisexuality wrapped in a blood-encased poultice of horror, it stands as a mesmerizing achievement, lending ever newer blood to the world of vampirology. While some may chide Brite's vampires for being so awfully unlike the debonair charmer Count Dracula or even the grossly disfigured Nosferatu, herein actually lies the strength of the novel. In Brite's world, good and evil do not exist, and if they do, they are oftentimes quite difficult to tell apart. There is not one character in this entire novel who is even within earshot of the bells of Normality, no one whom in all truth could be called a hero in the traditional sense. This is a world encased in darkness; even the sunlight filters through halfheartedly, as if it realizes it is just fooling itself when it pretends it can wash away the darkness with its feeble rays of light. The characters are exquisite yet deeply tainted, some by blood, some by drink and drugs, and some by the shiftier shadows that like to entomb the mind of man insidiously and secretly. If nothing else, one cannot say these characters are forgettable. We first meet Christian, a centuries-old vampire running a bar in New Orleans. One Mardi Gras night, a trio of his brethren come into the bar and entrance him with their modern ways of dalliance, unrestrained pleasure-seeking, and vitality. Christian is both literally and figuratively cold and dead inside, but the vampire trio are electric and unrestrained. Twig and Molochai are almost childlike in their recklessness, but Zilla is something special. His mysterious chartreuse-enlivened eyes do all but breathe fire through their entrancingly hypnotic gazes. A young girl in the bar that night falls under Zilla's spell, and many months after Zilla and his friends have left New Orleans, a baby is born. The baby grows up in Maryland, knowing he is different from everyone else; his name is Nothing, and at fifteen he sets off on a journey of self-discovery. His first destination is Missing Mile, North Carolina, home of the underground musical group Lost Souls?, but he meets up, as if by fate, with Zilla's band of marauding vampires and finds the family he has been aching for all his life. He and Zilla share their bodies as well as their feasts of blood, and Nothing has little trouble adjusting to the life he knows he was born to lead; he is a vampire. Steve and Ghost, the members of Lost Souls?, enter the picture because of Nothing's strong identification with their music. Ghost is the most remarkable character in the novel, a young man blessed with a gift of seeing into the minds of others, both alive and dead; his gift can be a curse at times, though, because he knows the pain of everyone. Steve is his best friend, a perpetual drunk with a bad temper that caused him to lose the one girl he had ever loved. All the roads of each character meet in Missing Mile, and the events and tragedies set in motion lead the reader from there back to New Orleans, ending in a climax I found remarkably well done. Poppy Z. Brite is something of an acquired taste. The sexuality of her characters is strikingly extreme, and Zilla's band of vampires are particularly uncaring in their choice of partners; the life essence can be found in a fluid other than blood, and these creatures of the night delight in sharing themselves with each other as they race through life on a perpetual search for kicks. Drug abuse runs rampant among everyone in these pages, and the act of rape is consigned to one of those who comes closest to being a good guy. As disturbing as the intense erotic aspect of Brite's writing may be, however, it lies at the core of her vampiric creations. Zilla and his gang have no morals, no code of honor, no feelings whatsoever; there is not a trace of immorality found among them because they are completely amoral. Brite raises the world of vampirism out of its traditional trappings, and therein lies the magic that sets Brite apart as a shockingly new, amazingly effective voice in modern horror.
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Summary: Another Lost Soul
Review: Poppy Z Brite, the amazing Poppy Z Brite, wrote yet another amazing book, Lost Souls. Vampires, suave and scandalous, are the main characters of this book, along with two people of a different race, humans. This book smells of blood and altars, and Poppy's humid-New-Orleans-diction is truly a diamond in the ruff of other corny vampire novels. Nothing, the young teen with RIT died hair, feels like most teens, hoping that somehow he was adopted and has no relation to his parents. But his yearning for different birthparents came true when he found a note proving his 'parents' weren't blood parents. He ran away and coincidence turned to fate when he found his true father, a beautiful vampire named Zillah with chartreuse green eyes, along with two other vampires, mirror images of each other, Molochia and Twig. Everything in the book ties together, from drinking to the late Dylan Thomas, or red-x-voodoo-queens, and witches. Bauhaus music floods this book, serenading along with the Lost Souls? band of Ghost and Steve. Lost Souls is my favorite Poppy Z Brite book, along with her short story in that water erotica book (mainly because the pages of it are waterproof).I love it because of its wonderful, beautiful, horrifying bliss.
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