Reviews

Exquisite Corpse by Poppy Z. Brite

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natalie28's review against another edition

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fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

saintt's review against another edition

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3.0

Absolutely repulsive and insanely problematic but I just couldn’t stop reading.

slswilley's review against another edition

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3.0

I love gore.

I love horror and I love villains and I love exploring trauma in a fictitious landscape - and I was promised all of that and more when I kept running into this title on my search to find my next favorite. There was a lot of hype surrounding this book and the number of people I saw saying Exquisite Corpse terrified and traumatized them was enough to make me rabidly sprint to the nearest B&N.

Unfortunately, all of the hype surrounding this book was, for me, its downfall; I'd like to believe that the terrors of reality can easily eclipse those of the fictional variety. Bottom line, I did not find large and important pieces of this plot to be believable.

The first example of this is within the first fifty pages, when

Spoiler

Andrew escapes prison by pretending to be dead

which would be the first of many eye rolls for me. However, I wanted to give this work a fair shot and kept chugging along - which I'm glad I did! It was within those same initial pages that I saw descriptions of gore and horror that left me delightfully aghast and yearning for more.

I did not expect the numerous discussions surrounding the AIDS crisis. This wasn't a problem for me, and I respect the author tackling such a difficult subject. I imagine writing about HIV/AIDS is much more difficult than writing any gory slasher bits. Discussing this topic was a net positive for me and added a great deal of believability to the plot, as well as an immeasurable sense of dread for Tran ~~poor kid felt doomed from the start.~~

What I did expect were the ~~underlying~~ themes of eroticism

Spoiler

-they weren't underlying at all-

which is ultimately where this book lost me. I'd wager that I love smut ~~more~~ just as much as the next guy, but the sex scenes here felt unintentionally juxtaposed and even shoehorned in with the rest of the story. Undoubtedly, there are ways to write about the sexuality of a serial killer which maintains the integrity of the characters and plot. For me, all of the sex scenes felt detached from the characters involved - like the author had written the smut separately and then pasted them into the manuscript at the last minute. This is not to say that it wasn't well written, on the contrary! These "romantic" scenes stand on their own for the most part, but they don't fit the themes of the plot encasing them.

I've read no small number of reviews which accuse the author of purple prose, but I'd like to argue that the prose was this book's saving grace. In my opinion, the gore genre inherently needs an abundance of detail - is that not why we're reading it in the first place? Brite is a highly skilled wordsmith, and despite my dissatisfaction with the overall believability of this novel, the level of writing is what would make me consider reading his other works. After all, I read this bad boy in a single sitting.

In short, I would say that while there is nothing "wrong" with Exquisite Corpse, its shortcomings are mercifully spared by everything that Brite got "right" - which places it in a solid meh category for me.

Three

Spoiler

sluttish livers

out of five.