Exquisite Corpse: Book Review

After I dipped my toe into the wide world of horror with Tender is the Flesh, I stumbled upon Exquisite Corpse by Poppy Z Brite. It was highly recommended by many on Reddit, so I decided to pick it up on Barnes & Noble's ebook app.

Before you start reading this review or the book, it does mention cannibalism, SA, and graphic violence. There are plot spoilers in this post.

Poppy's novel is a wild ride from start to finish. As a former avid Stephen King reader, I was expecting this book to drag on a bit, but I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly Brite jumps into the story. The novel contains a lot of visceral violence and I had to put it down a few times to recover, so be warned.

We start out with British serial killer Andrew Compton escaping from prison by pretending to be dead and then slaughtering several morgue workers. He quickly finds a victim out at the pubs who happened to be American. He murders the man and steals his money to make his way to the United States, New Orleans specifically, to escape the police and continue on his murderous activities.

In New Orleans, there are a few characters we switch between: Lucas Ransom, Jay Byrne, and Tran. Lucas Ransom is an HIV positive pirate radio DJ who goes by the name "Lush Rimbaud". His former lover is Tran, who is a child of Vietnamese immigrants. Jay Byrne is a wealthy man who spends most of his time to himself. He buys drugs from Tran and murders homeless men. Isn't that fabulous.

Ok, so Tran is easily the most sympathetic character here. A young man kicked out of his home because his parents find out he's gay and is forced to take refuge with Jay Byrne. But we'll get to that.

We find out that Lucas and Tran are no longer together because Tran cheated on him and Lucas tried to infect him with his HIV positive blood. Lucas' radio station aims to reduce stigma around those who are HIV positive, but his anger and combativeness turn people off. He works with a few other people, who I wish Brite had dived deeper into.

Back to Andrew. The interesting thing about Andrew's sections of the novel is that they're in first person point of view, while each of the other characters' sections are in third person. A little over halfway into the novel, Jay and Andrew meet at a bar and have a little scuffle at Jay's house that ends with them deciding to be together. They catch and kill a few stray men, but really have their sites set on Tran. They manage to get Tran to come over and assault him, but he escapes. Jay finds him and bribes the police in other to take him back to his murder shed. Lucas is somehow in the vicinity and tries to stop them, but is thwarted by the aforementioned police.

Ok, so Jay and Andrew get Tran back into their murder shed and cut him open. They start to eat his organs while he's still alive and Lucas breaks into the shed. He kills Jay but flees without killing Andrew. Andrew leaves New Orleans while grieving Jay, and Lucas decides to write about what's he'd witnessed.

Ok, that's a lot to take in. Now, if you've read this novel or heard of it, I'm sure you've also seen the discourse around Tran's death being blow for blow identical to an actual victim of Jeffrey Dahmer's, of whom Jay is based off of. If you know anything about Dahmer's victims, you'll see the similarities immediately. While this is callous and disrespectful to the victims and their families, I would like to believe it wasn't written out of malice. I'd like to believe that Brite meant no harm.

Would I recommend this book? It depends on to whom. It's extremely graphic and I felt nauseous at times. I'd only recommend this to extreme horror fans. I felt that the murders were described with sickening detail, and this isn't for the faint of heart. There were also very violent sex scenes that were honestly quite disgusting, so there's another warning for you.

The characters were interesting, and I do wish we had gotten to know all of them better. I felt Lucas to be a bit insufferable at times, but you must remember that he's a terminally ill, deeply wounded man. I wish Tran had a larger role that wasn't just a horny victim, and I wish that we had gotten to know more about Lucas' radio coworkers, like I said before.

This was not at all thought provoking to me like Tender is the Flesh - this novel was just one violent act after another. Truly a shock factor novel, despite being beautifully written.

Thanks for reading!