Exquisite Corpse: A Novel

To serial slayer Andrew Compton, murder is an art, the most intimate art. After feigning his own death to escape from prison, Compton makes his way to the United States with the sole ambition of bringing his "art" to new heights. Tortured by his own perverse desires, and drawn to possess and destroy young boys, Compton inadvertently joins forces with Jay Byrne, a dissolute playboy who has pushed his "art" to limits even Compton hadn't previously imagined. Together, Compton and Byrne set their sights on an exquisite young Vietnamese-American runaway. Tran, whom they deem to be the perfect victim.
Swiftly moving from the grimy streets of London's Piccadilly Circus to the decadence of the New Orleans French Quarter, and punctuated by rants from radio talk show host Lush Rimbaud, a.k.a. Luke Ransom, Tran's ex-lover, who is dying of AIDS and who intends to wreak ultimate havoc before leaving this world, Exquisite Corpse unfolds into a labyrinth of murder and love. Ultimately all four characters converge on a singular bloody night after which their lives will be irrevocably changed - or terminated.

Blood-soaked sheets, cannibalism, rotting, half-dissected corpses: this gruesome psychological horror novel has all the grue a reader might?or might not?want. Brite (Drawing Blood, 1993), the reigning queen of Generation-X splatterpunks, pulls out the stops in this ghastly tale of two serial killers who find true love over the body of a murdered and mutilated boy in the historic French Quarter of New Orleans. Londoner Andrew Compton, imprisoned for the necrophiliac slayings of 23 young men, escapes from prison by (rather unbelievably) faking his own death and killing the coroners gathered to autopsy his body. Fleeing to Louisiana, he hooks up with Jay Byrne, slacker scion of a wealthy old family, a man whose murders are even more fiendish than Compton's own. Brite is a highly competent stylist with a knack for depicting convincing, if monstrous, characters. Her plot development rests too heavily on coincidence, however, and on an excess of details drawn from the life of real-world serial killer and cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer. Though Brite shifts point of view throughout, she always returns to Compton's first person. This technique gives the narrative rhythm and emotional force but also seems aimed toward intimating the reader in Compton's acts of dehumanization ("the aesthetics of dismemberment") and depravity. And so what Brite really presents here is, ultimately, yet another crimson leaf in the literature of the pornography of violence.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Or Necrophiliacs--The Serial Killers' Love Story. Brite's first horror novel, Lost Souls (1992), a high-intensity rock-'n'-roll epic about southern white-trash vampires, gained much of its energy from parody and her over-the- top bloodlust. A follow-up, Drawing Blood (1993), cleverly absorbed an R. Crumb cartoonist into Brite's universe of lyric soul-sucking. In this third novel, the author, now 29, outdoes herself, creating a pair of gay necrophiliac lovers--both serial killers--who meet in New Orleans for a feast of corpse-eating and coupling with the rotting dead. Brite may well lose fans this time, her superbly composed arias on the most disgusting forms of death and sloshy decay being likely to turn off many admirers of her previous torchlit searches through the caverns of hell. Is it art, or simply a compulsive rolling about in the most intense descriptions possible of the ecstasy of hideous murders and the gourmet delights of human flesh-eating? It's sure repulsive. And yet Brite can be defended as an artful poet of murder and obsession, uncannily capturing the dead souls and unhinged appetites of two memorable characters. The plot follows the adventures of young serial killer Andrew Compton, who escapes from a British prison cell by playing dead, flies to Atlanta, then to the Big Easy, where he meets wealthy young serial slayer Jay Compton. The two quickly realize that they're kindred spirits as Jay leads Andrew into ever greater refinements of gay desire and bloodlust. Meanwhile, the gaudiest of several subplots features the pirate-radio station WHIV and its AIDS-infected host Lush Rimbaud. That's all of the plot you need to know. A blood-soaked romance with human entrails and sandwiches of flank-meat lightly fried in butter. Shocking and fascinating in about equal measure, but only for the strongest stomachs. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Acclaimed horror writer Brite (Drawing Blood, LJ 10/1/93) has never been one to mince words, but even the most hardened among us will cringe when reading this latest, which easily surpasses Brett Easton Ellis's American Psycho on the gore-o-meter. English serial killer Andrew Compton, who killed 23 boys before being caught, escapes from prison and makes his way to Louisiana, where he inadvertently teams up with another fellow who shares his appetite for dismemberment and necrophilia. Young Tran, a gay Louisiana teen who is evicted by his Vietnamese father, foolishly proffers himself to our vicious pair. Tran's only hope for surviving the encounter with all limbs intact is his ex-lover Luke, a tough but AIDS-weakened writer who rants about heterosexual America on a pirate radio station, using the name "Lush Rimbaugh." All in all, Exquisite Corpse is a rub-it-in-your face novel that is all the more terrifying because of its author's razor-sharp prose. Purchase wherever Brite has a following.?Mark Annichiarico, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.