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videoreturnslot's review against another edition
3.0
I haven't read this since high school and decided to re-read it again with a friend.
There's elements of it I still enjoy as much as I did when I was younger and "edgier" and constantly chasing my next fucked up read. Sadly, overall, my enjoyment of the book has waned with age.
The constantly jumping POVs made it hard for me to feel tied to the story at all, and so much effort and time was spent on the killer that I wasn't sure what I was supposed to feel by the end of the book. So much detail was put into his thoughts and his killings and barely any into Jared's return.
The sparse few times we get to see Jared seek revenge, we barely get a few lines, and each death is over before it really begins.
Jared barely had a story arc, and the remaining effort that wasn't spent on the killer was used up on fleshing out Lucrece and also Frank Gray (who went nowhere, why spend so much time building him up if he's not going to be anything important?)
And I couldn't have been more disappointed in the final revenge on the killer. This sick guy who has tortured, raped and haunted the trans community (in great detail) gets crushed to death, one measly line. That's it. No details, just: "they crush the life from the man that has robbed each of them of the thing that they loved above all else."
As poetic as that is, it's bullshit. I don't want to sit through a whole book of reading about him torturing people without some sort of retribution. We don't get to read any of the fear and pain he felt at the end like we had to read with each of his victims.
I enjoyed the imagery, the setting, gothic elements, and some of the characterisations in the book, but overall, I felt a bit disappointed in my return to this read. I just wish the story was stronger. I think it would have worked better as a comic instead of a book.
Makes me nervous to re-read any other Poppy Z Brite stuff I loved so much in my teen years.
There's elements of it I still enjoy as much as I did when I was younger and "edgier" and constantly chasing my next fucked up read. Sadly, overall, my enjoyment of the book has waned with age.
The constantly jumping POVs made it hard for me to feel tied to the story at all, and so much effort and time was spent on the killer that I wasn't sure what I was supposed to feel by the end of the book. So much detail was put into his thoughts and his killings and barely any into Jared's return.
The sparse few times we get to see Jared seek revenge, we barely get a few lines, and each death is over before it really begins.
Jared barely had a story arc, and the remaining effort that wasn't spent on the killer was used up on fleshing out Lucrece and also Frank Gray (who went nowhere, why spend so much time building him up if he's not going to be anything important?)
And I couldn't have been more disappointed in the final revenge on the killer. This sick guy who has tortured, raped and haunted the trans community (in great detail) gets crushed to death, one measly line. That's it. No details, just: "they crush the life from the man that has robbed each of them of the thing that they loved above all else."
As poetic as that is, it's bullshit. I don't want to sit through a whole book of reading about him torturing people without some sort of retribution. We don't get to read any of the fear and pain he felt at the end like we had to read with each of his victims.
I enjoyed the imagery, the setting, gothic elements, and some of the characterisations in the book, but overall, I felt a bit disappointed in my return to this read. I just wish the story was stronger. I think it would have worked better as a comic instead of a book.
Makes me nervous to re-read any other Poppy Z Brite stuff I loved so much in my teen years.
rainbowblight's review
4.0
I can't believe I haven't read this one long before now. Also, Poppy Z. Brite really had a thing about twins.
Jared Poe rises from the dead inside his own mausoleum and embarks on a quest to exact vengeance against those who pinned the blame on him for his husband Benny's murder, sending him to prison where he ends up stabbed to death in the exercise yard. This isn't a cut-and-dried Crow story, and that's a good thing. Jared is warned by Benny's twin, a voodoo dabbling telepath called Lucrece, not to go after the men who hurt him but to instead focus on the man responsible for Benny's murder. Unfortunately the crow, Jared's link to the world of the living, is unable to discover this man because he is shielded by his lunacy, the very thing that has driven him to hunt and kill members of New Orleans's transgender and transsexual community.
It's a Brite novel, so obviously it's beautifully written and stunningly gory, but the book does suffer because of its length (just over 200 pages). Interesting characters are introduced and then never revisited while others have so little input they could have been done away with all together. Aaron, owner of the Eye of Horus, was a particularly strange choice for the epilogue as he'd only been in one previous scene. Everyone had been killed by that point though so I suppose Brite was limited in his character choices. I would have preferred to revisit Robin, a "gutterpunk" who watches her friend Michele be led to his doom in a narrow alley over the top of a "ratty paperback novel" called Silk, a nod to Caitlin R. Kiernan (The Lazarus Heart was also dedicated to her). These gutterpunks are only introduced in one scene and I was left wanting to know more about them. I'm wondering now if there is an overlap with Silk and maybe those characters show up there too - wouldn't that be amazing?
The fate of poor Michele is the one scene I can't seem to get out of my head but perhaps that's because despite the level of gore in this book, it is the most detailed murder. This is the line that lingers:
"The scalpel clangs loudly into the metal tray with all the other instruments and the man's red latex hands pass between Michele's eyes and the parts that have been cut loose and hang on hooks above the table where he can see them, has to see because the man took his eyelids right at the start."
Yeesh.
One character, Frank Gray, a gay detective teetering on the brittle edge of alcoholism, is given almost too much backstory considering what little he eventually adds to the plot. The same could be said of another cop character, a homophobic detective (most of the cops are depicted as homophobic - even the gay detective which proves to be his downfall) called Jim Unger. We see quite a bit of Unger's life - his relationship with his former partner who has recently committed suicide, his reaction to Benjamin DuBois's murder and his feelings about coroner Pam Tierney, a "dyke" who was "currently shacked up with some artist chick from New York City" - yet all we really needed to know was that he has no sympathy for gay people and was more than willing to point the blame at Jared, an S&M photographer who looks "guilty as sin". In Jared's mind, Unger deserves to die for his part in sending him to death row. If Unger had less backstory, perhaps it would have freed up space to concentrate on Benny and Jared's relationship.
Despite this being a Crow story, wherein the protagonist's relationship to their brutally killed loved one is usually central, we do not get to see many glimpses of Benny and Jared together and in love. We are shown their first meeting, which - although intriguing - is pornographic rather than romantic, and we know they were married (in their eyes, if not in the eyes of the bigoted law) and lived together, but that is really about all we do know. Benny is a very interesting character, an orphaned waif who runs away to New Orleans with his twin brother (later to become his sister) after burning down their dead grandmother's house and hopping on a bus. I would have loved to read more about Benny's life in New Orleans and with Jared but instead we have pages and pages of crooked cops drinking themselves into stupors and waking sweaty from nightmares. This is a Brite novel, though - none of this information is boring. I just wish the book could have been long enough to explore more of the world and the characters it creates.
Another point that may sound like a criticism but really isn't: Jared barely seems to be the protagonist (I would instead bestow that honour on Lucrece who is far better fleshed out and hence more sympathetic) and is in reality a crappy Crow. He is so invested in his side quests of finding and killing Jim Unger and District Attorney John Harrod (whose death is brilliant by the way, naked in the front seat of his car, his head blown clean off leaving a "...jagged few inches of spine jutting out between dead shoulders"), he allows Lucrece to be captured by the very serial killer he's attempting to track and is so physically damaged by the time he finds him, he has been slowed down and Lucrece is already dead. Then his crow is easily killed and Jared flops to the floor like a wet, useless fish. Lucrece saves the day - what left there is to save - by coming back from the dead with her own crow, a giant fucker who is leader of the death crows to boot, and finally helping Jared finish off Benny's killer. Brandon Lee he ain't. None of this really matters in the end because Lucrece is such a strong character. Perhaps she should have been the Crow from the beginning.
At its core, rather than a simple Crow vengeance story, the novel is a biting statement about the persecution and hatred of gay people, transsexuals and transgender people in mid-nineties New Orleans. Not only are they charged with murders they did not commit, left to bleed out by fellow cops and ridiculed and attacked at their workplaces, they're hunted by a sadistic lunatic who takes them apart piece by piece. This makes the novel both harrowing and thought-provoking despite the gothic beauty of the prose. The burgeoning onslaught of the eerily-like-Katrina hurricane also ramps up the sense of threat to pulse-quickening levels. Would re-read (but of course, it's a Brite novel...).
A side note: I found a Russian website with a series of beautifully shot photos, crafted to look just like the ones described at Jared's gallery show and they are fucking amazing. www.poppyzbrite.ru
Jared Poe rises from the dead inside his own mausoleum and embarks on a quest to exact vengeance against those who pinned the blame on him for his husband Benny's murder, sending him to prison where he ends up stabbed to death in the exercise yard. This isn't a cut-and-dried Crow story, and that's a good thing. Jared is warned by Benny's twin, a voodoo dabbling telepath called Lucrece, not to go after the men who hurt him but to instead focus on the man responsible for Benny's murder. Unfortunately the crow, Jared's link to the world of the living, is unable to discover this man because he is shielded by his lunacy, the very thing that has driven him to hunt and kill members of New Orleans's transgender and transsexual community.
It's a Brite novel, so obviously it's beautifully written and stunningly gory, but the book does suffer because of its length (just over 200 pages). Interesting characters are introduced and then never revisited while others have so little input they could have been done away with all together. Aaron, owner of the Eye of Horus, was a particularly strange choice for the epilogue as he'd only been in one previous scene. Everyone had been killed by that point though so I suppose Brite was limited in his character choices. I would have preferred to revisit Robin, a "gutterpunk" who watches her friend Michele be led to his doom in a narrow alley over the top of a "ratty paperback novel" called Silk, a nod to Caitlin R. Kiernan (The Lazarus Heart was also dedicated to her). These gutterpunks are only introduced in one scene and I was left wanting to know more about them. I'm wondering now if there is an overlap with Silk and maybe those characters show up there too - wouldn't that be amazing?
The fate of poor Michele is the one scene I can't seem to get out of my head but perhaps that's because despite the level of gore in this book, it is the most detailed murder. This is the line that lingers:
"The scalpel clangs loudly into the metal tray with all the other instruments and the man's red latex hands pass between Michele's eyes and the parts that have been cut loose and hang on hooks above the table where he can see them, has to see because the man took his eyelids right at the start."
Yeesh.
One character, Frank Gray, a gay detective teetering on the brittle edge of alcoholism, is given almost too much backstory considering what little he eventually adds to the plot. The same could be said of another cop character, a homophobic detective (most of the cops are depicted as homophobic - even the gay detective which proves to be his downfall) called Jim Unger. We see quite a bit of Unger's life - his relationship with his former partner who has recently committed suicide, his reaction to Benjamin DuBois's murder and his feelings about coroner Pam Tierney, a "dyke" who was "currently shacked up with some artist chick from New York City" - yet all we really needed to know was that he has no sympathy for gay people and was more than willing to point the blame at Jared, an S&M photographer who looks "guilty as sin". In Jared's mind, Unger deserves to die for his part in sending him to death row. If Unger had less backstory, perhaps it would have freed up space to concentrate on Benny and Jared's relationship.
Despite this being a Crow story, wherein the protagonist's relationship to their brutally killed loved one is usually central, we do not get to see many glimpses of Benny and Jared together and in love. We are shown their first meeting, which - although intriguing - is pornographic rather than romantic, and we know they were married (in their eyes, if not in the eyes of the bigoted law) and lived together, but that is really about all we do know. Benny is a very interesting character, an orphaned waif who runs away to New Orleans with his twin brother (later to become his sister) after burning down their dead grandmother's house and hopping on a bus. I would have loved to read more about Benny's life in New Orleans and with Jared but instead we have pages and pages of crooked cops drinking themselves into stupors and waking sweaty from nightmares. This is a Brite novel, though - none of this information is boring. I just wish the book could have been long enough to explore more of the world and the characters it creates.
Another point that may sound like a criticism but really isn't: Jared barely seems to be the protagonist (I would instead bestow that honour on Lucrece who is far better fleshed out and hence more sympathetic) and is in reality a crappy Crow. He is so invested in his side quests of finding and killing Jim Unger and District Attorney John Harrod (whose death is brilliant by the way, naked in the front seat of his car, his head blown clean off leaving a "...jagged few inches of spine jutting out between dead shoulders"), he allows Lucrece to be captured by the very serial killer he's attempting to track and is so physically damaged by the time he finds him, he has been slowed down and Lucrece is already dead. Then his crow is easily killed and Jared flops to the floor like a wet, useless fish. Lucrece saves the day - what left there is to save - by coming back from the dead with her own crow, a giant fucker who is leader of the death crows to boot, and finally helping Jared finish off Benny's killer. Brandon Lee he ain't. None of this really matters in the end because Lucrece is such a strong character. Perhaps she should have been the Crow from the beginning.
At its core, rather than a simple Crow vengeance story, the novel is a biting statement about the persecution and hatred of gay people, transsexuals and transgender people in mid-nineties New Orleans. Not only are they charged with murders they did not commit, left to bleed out by fellow cops and ridiculed and attacked at their workplaces, they're hunted by a sadistic lunatic who takes them apart piece by piece. This makes the novel both harrowing and thought-provoking despite the gothic beauty of the prose. The burgeoning onslaught of the eerily-like-Katrina hurricane also ramps up the sense of threat to pulse-quickening levels. Would re-read (but of course, it's a Brite novel...).
A side note: I found a Russian website with a series of beautifully shot photos, crafted to look just like the ones described at Jared's gallery show and they are fucking amazing. www.poppyzbrite.ru
sarahconnor89757's review
5.0
If Poppy Z. Brite and James O'Barr had a baby, that baby would be too good for you.
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