Rating: 
Summary: what a beautifully written book
Review: Brite really has outdone herself this time with developing characters with depth. Every character in this book has a background that may not be unique or wild, but you know their motivations and get a chance to crawl about in their heads. The story is beautifully written and the main characters crawl into and out of madness are clearly defined. The love story, complete with fighting is one of the most accurate descriptions of infatuation turning into a lifebond I've ever seen on paper.
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Summary: This needs to be a movie; with no changes!
Review: I just finished reading this novel and it was exquisitely fantastic. It made me want to live the book. I will forever more be obsessed with this novel. I would absolutely love to see this in the theatre, but details would probably be changed and graphic content taken out so I guess i'll have to be content with the book. I've also read 'Exquisite Corpse,' which was also great, but I liked 'Drawing Blood' more. Keep writing Poppy; I'll never read Steven King again.
Rating:
Summary: Still great after all these years
Review: I first read Drawing Blood when I was in high school, and I remember loving it back then. Here it is five years later, and I just purchased another copy of the book and began reading it again. I wondered if I'd still like it as much as I did in high school, and it turns out I love it even more now.I haven't gotten a damn thing done all week because I've had my nose in that book every free minute. Every time I go to sleep, the graceful, spidery, blackened words imprint themselves on my visions and haunt my dreams. I am truly absorbed. This book has some of the most gorgeous love scenes I have ever read. They are slightly different than your typical love scene, but they are delicious. I am female, so the scenes don't exactly vicariously include me, but I find a sense of strong loving beauty in them nonetheless. These kind of scenes really explore and dissect the human body inside and out, examining both emotions and anatomy in the rawest, most honest and passionate light. I find myself swooning, drowning in the descriptive prose. The whole story is captivating, and very unique. It is somewhat philisophical as well as entertaining. You'd be doing yourself a favor to engross yourself in this book. You might find it peeling away your layers and getting inside you.
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Summary: Me likey very much
Review: This book FLOWS. Poppy's style is both breezy and descriptive, an envious combination. I simply loved her characters, the way they thought and carried themselves. I could picture them easily in my mind's eye. The New Orleans atmosphere was almost tangible; you could almost hear the music, see the old buildings, feel the sticky Louisiana heat. As I think back on this story, I wonder if Brite alternates between writing with a caligraphy pen and a sledghammer. Her narrative impacts you just that much. Once you pick this book up, you won't let it go until the very last word, which is sad, because you'll want the experience of reading her prose to last so much longer.
Rating:
Summary: A great read
Review: I think I must be one of those few poeple who like Drawing Blood better than Lost Souls, Poppy Z Brite's much more touted debut novel, although Lost Souls was very good also. Lost Souls was basically a coming of age story spiced up with some twisted vampire lore. Drawing Blood, on the other hand, is a love story; and I've always been a real 'sucker' for a good love story, gay or straight. As always, Brite's characters are vividly drawn and colorful, and her prose is so smooth and mellow that you hate to see the book end. I've read where some have criticize the over abundance of gay sex loving detailed in this book. But, hey, I'd read those any day over that terrible scene of Steve raping Anne in Lost Souls.
Rating: 
Summary: Beautiful and creepy, just like you should expect from Brite
Review: This haunted house book has some of the more fleshed out characters. Not quite as nihilistic as Lost Souls it still manages to darken the shadows and haunt the nightmares. Two goth boys find themselves in a house that is slowly possessing one of them. The tension of their relationship to each other and the house increases with every chapter. This is a great litte horror novel and a nice followup to Lost SOuls. I would actually recommend reading this book first but that's just because after Lost Souls, the rest of Poppy Z. Brite's works are a little disappointing (unless you like her short stories which are brilliant - especially in Wormwood) The only caveat I have with this book is that Brite gets kind of gratuitous with the goth boys having sex scenes. They just won't stop doing it. I know she has her kinks and she loves it, but it gets old. This is even worse in her Crow book (which I would recommend you forget you knew about) but here she does actually come back to the actual story and you are with the characters again. The only other author I would recommend if you love Poppy Z. Brite (besides most of the horror writers that you know) is Tanith Lee whose vampire novels are not as creepy but more beautiful and whose Heartbeast is a novel to make the werewolf standard have new life.
Rating: 
Summary: A More Apt Title: "Trevor's Erotic Adventures"
Review: Having read and enjoyed "Lost Souls", I was quite disappointed in this book. It is marketed as a haunted house story. The book contains, however, precious little "haunting". It hardly deserves to be in the book store's horror section. The book is more of sexual coming-of-age story, heavy on the eroticism. I suppose that this would be fine if this is what I paid my six bucks for. That story line, however, got old very fast. I finished the book only because I expected the "haunting" to start at any moment. It never happened. The shame is that Ms. Brite writes very well.
Rating:
Summary: Haunted
Review: With every book by Brite I read, I love her even more. This story set in North Carolina centers on Trevor who is revisiting the house where his father killed his mother and brother and himself, but not Trevor. While there, he meets Zach, a hacker on the run, and the two fall in love and face the ghosts in the house, and in their pasts, together. Full of electric sensuality and vivid horrors, the book increases pace the deeper one reads, further and further drawing the reader in until it's impossible to let go. This might be the most accessible of her books, but I have yet to read them all, so. If it's possible to live in a book, that book would definitely be written by Poppy Brite.
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Summary: Ms. Brite scrapes the pop-culture barrel
Review: As the majority of my fellow reviewers have, I preferred Lost Souls to Drawing Blood, having read and re-read both in idle moments. For that matter, I preferred *most* things to Drawing Blood. Ms. Brite should have overcome the sophomore slump long ago, but this *is* her second book with the Missing Mile cast, and it reveals all too clearly a hasty and clumsy scramble to make the newly-introduced characters as compelling as our old friends Steve and Ghost. She tosses in 'edgy' elements willy-nilly: underground cartoons, computer hackery, voodoo, rock stardom, FBI manhunts, poltergeists, and more. While all of these elements *could* be cleverly and cohesively woven into one story, Ms. Brite has taken neither the time nor the effort to smooth out the rough edges joining them. While she makes a decent case for each, the odd elements combine with unseemly speed, and with a glossing-over that leaves one idly wondering if she'll come back to it and explain rather better when she does. Her tendency to put overly lyrical phrases (the vaguely embarassing phrase 'his sperm smelled of altars' in Lost Souls being one example) in the minds and mouths of characters unsuited to them is more pronounced in Drawing Blood. This is a tendency she shares with Anne Rice--Ms. Rice, however, uses florid and melodramatic characters to deliver such phrases, while Ms. Brite uses the common folk, in whose mouths such things sound thuddingly false. Her love of pretty gay boys runs rampant: short of Kinsey Hummingbird and the elderly gentlemen with the Nehi cap-checkers, this new elaboration on the locals suggests a lack of anyone in Missing Mile who would have been willing to father the local children. An effort, certainly. It is a *decent* book, if not a *good* one. Drawing Blood serves its purpose best as something for Poppy Z Brite fans to read while waiting for her next try.
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Summary: Another Mississippi review
Review: I'm writing this review in hopes that Poppy Z. reads it. I have to agree with the previous review from Mississippi...you have SO more to offer than entertainment for the Beavis and Butthead crowd and with this book you begin to prove this point. When I read LOST SOULS I was disappointed. I expected more than drugged out experiences, acid rock, and unwashed bodies. I purchased LOST SOULS and DRAWING BLOOD at the same time. After reading the first book, DRAWING BLOOD collected dust for awhile before I could talk myself into giving the 2nd book a chance. Thank goodness I did. Still more drugs and unclean people than I care to read about, but a wonderful STORY! Totally entertaining and HIGHLY recommended. Dear Poppy Z., please write more of the mysteries of the south in your books. You know exactly of what I speak. PLEASE PLEASE can I persuade you to write a gothic horror tale based in New Orleans with clean people and no dopers? I think you would have jillions of us "adult" horror fans rushing to Amazon for that one!
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