Wormwood: A Collection of Short Stories
by Poppy Z. Brite
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Book Summary Information
Author: Poppy Z. BriteEdition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1995-12-01
ISBN: 0440217989
Number of pages: 256
Publisher: Dell
Book Reviews of Wormwood: A Collection of Short Stories
Book Review: Butthead: Uh, he, he, he-Poppy said 'wood'!
Summary: 4 Stars
This collection of stories containing Brite's earliest published short fiction showcases her considerable talent as a storyteller and prose stylist. Indeed, the prose style Poppy employs in many of these stories is at times downright poetic. Check out how she describes a person being killed with a shotgun: "Papa's deer shot caught him across the chest and belly, a hundred tiny black eyes weeping red tears." It's passages like that which make me wonder if Poppy has ever written (and published) any poetry since her prose style at times has the sensibility of a poet. Poppy is very skillful in creating a mood with her early rich prose style that largely manages not to be overly self-conscious or intrusive. Indeed, one of the aspects of Poppy's writing style that I really admire is her ability to provide rich description to the reader that allows one to feel like one is actually present during the scenes in her stories. In the really good story "Missing" Poppy makes one feel like they know how it is to walk the streets of New Orleans and experience it's sights, smells, and sounds. Also, just as the fiction of Stephen King and H. P. Lovecraft turned New England into a creepy landscape, so too has Poppy made the already haunted landscape of the South even creepier through these stories.
My favorite story is "The Sixth Sentinel" which successfully combines ghost story, pirate lore, the setting of old New Orleans, and (I'm guessing) Poppy's own experience as a stripper. Another favorite "His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood" is actually a retelling of H.P. Lovecraft's story "The Hound", which I didn't realize when I first read it since I never read the original. I recently read "The Hound" off the internet and I was astonished that it wasn't included in "The Best of H.P. Lovecraft." Poppy was able to take the basic storyline of Lovecraft's story and successfully make it her own without sacrificing any of the creepiness or quality of the original. I also really liked "Calcutta, Lord of Nerves". I recently saw a National Geographic program about a certain religious sect (name?) in India. Many of rituals practiced by these men involve dealing with and handling many items that people consider to be unclean, including dead bodies. Anyway, this story reminded me of a lot of the topics and images I saw in that program. I also liked "Angels" and "Xenophobia". It's interesting to note that many themes that seem to fascinate Poppy are repeated in many of these stories like recurrent motifs: music and musicians, alcohol and substance abuse, food, and twins or twin-like couples.
I read "Wormwood" and "Liquor" (which is her most recent novel and representative of her new realistic direction) at the same time and the contrast and similarities between her earliest and latest fiction is really interesting. You can arguably see the beginnings of the Poppy's more realistic style in the stories "The Elder", "How to Get Ahead in New York", and "The Ash of Memory, Dust of Desire". In fact, one criticism I have of stories such as "NY" and "Ash" is that they probably would have been more successful if Poppy would have kept them totally realistic. When the horror element enters into these stories, it almost seems like an intrusion or an afterthought rather than an integral part of the story. It's as though the young Poppy had the mindset of since she was a horror writer, she had to insert a horror element into all of her stories no matter what. I think if Poppy would have been writing "Ash" or "NY" today, they wouldn't have had a horror element in them, but I could be wrong. "The Elder", on the other hand, consistently retains a realistic tone throughout and hence is superior to "Ash" or "NY".
If you like the short stories of Lovecraft, Poe, or Stephen King, chances are you will also like many of the interesting stories in "Wormwood". Good job Poppy! Four and a half stars.
Summary of Wormwood: A Collection of Short Stories
A collection of erotic horror stories follows the adventures of solace-seeking lonelyhearts on a North Carolina highway, behind a dusty Georgia carny show, in a Baton Rouge mausoleum, and an alley in Calcutta. Reprint.The name of Poppy Z. Brite is well known to most horror fans. What some do not know, though, is that Brite hit the ground running as a fiction writer, and some of her best work so far is right here in this collection of a dozen tales (originally published as Swamp Foetus) she wrote between ages 18 and 24. The exigencies of long plot development and evolving characters that sometimes bog her down in the novels are absent from the short story form, where Brite's extraordinary talent for compressed, redolent imagery combines with her keen sense of narrative structure to create perfect little objets d'art. Stories like "His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood," "Calcutta, Lord of Nerves," and my favorite, "The Sixth Sentinel," are too exquisite to be missed.
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