Pros: Incredibly powerful and well-written, Engaging storyline, sympathetic characters. Unforgettable.
Cons: Extremely violent and disturbing situations, definitely not for everyone.
The Bottom Line: Powerful, shocking and compelling. Extremely well-written with likeable characters and one of the most disturbing endings that I have ever come across. An unforgettable novel.
kaochan's Full Review: Poppy Z. Brite - Exquisite Corpse
Ever thought books should be rated like the movies?
I'm not advocating censorship, far from it. I do think, however, that some paperbacks should be kept quite firmly out of reach of children and the squeamish. I'm not either, but I'm willing to admit that reading Exquisite Corpse has warped my mind slightly, and I knew exactly what I was letting myself in for when I opened it.
The author, Poppy Z. Brite, pulls off a very difficult trick with this book - she demands sympathy and respect both for the victim and the murderer and somehow she manages to get it. Often in books which focus on a killer or killers the reader is not required to feel for the victims in any more than a remote, detatched way. You aren't allowed to know them, or the facts of their lives are presented in a more flat, documentary style, and as such you can't feel for them. With this book you could, which made the violence that much harder to take for me. There's no happily ever after in this book, there isn't even a quietly upbeat or even ambiguous ending - it's bleak, bleak, bleak, but there's a twisted feeling of romance to it.
Twisted romance is what the book does best, detailing as it does the relationship between two gay serial killers and the friendship they strike up with their intended victim, who has developed feelings for one of them. There is a certain inevitability about the ending on cold reflection, but it loses none of its power, nor does it make the conclusion any easier to read.
For me this book was almost impossible to finish, simply because the ending was just so disturbing and upset me that much. I've read books with more graphic violence in them but by the end of 'Exquisite Corpse' I had found myself engaging so deeply with the characters that the final chapters, in which the lives of all four of the major players in this book are changed irrevocably for the worse and in some cases ended, left me wishing the book had ended differently. I'd cared for those characters. I wished them well, all of them. I couldn't help but like the serial killers.
'Eqxuisite Corpse' is quite disturbingly graphic in its' depictions of sex and violence - this is partly to be expected given the subject matter. Brite's imagery and descriptions, as always, are incredibly powerful and vivid which only makes the whole package that much more compelling and disturbing. For all that parts of this book horrified me, I couldn't look away for all that I almost wanted to. I can imagine, however, that the detailed descriptions of violence and murder would have some putting the book down in quiet disgust. Sex and death have become quite firmly linked in this book - it is worth mentioning that a number of the characters are HIV positive.
Personally, I feel that the book is slightly inferior to 'Lost Souls', one of Brite's earlier novels, though unfortunately for the purposes of the review I can't quite put my finger on why. Maybe it's the slightly more upbeat ending offered in 'Lost Souls', maybe it's just that I'm very fond of pretty vampires and thus prefer the characters. This is not to deny, however, that I found 'Exquisite Corpse' a more powerful and memorable book than its two predecessors simply due to its subject matter and the horrifying way it concludes, as well as Brite's always superb eye for description and detail.
This book's subject matter could be considered repulsive by a number of people. It contains graphic descriptions of homosexual sex, as well as rape and scenes of horrific violence, torture and murder. I would only reccommend this to my friends because my friends have very similar tastes to me. However, if you like this sort of thing then the book is an absolutely great buy.
In this tale of two killers on the loose in the demimonde of New Orleans French Quarter, daring young writer Poppy Z. Brite recreates the voices and v...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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