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Hey, Lyre:
Yeah, I have to say that I haven't really been keeping up with PZB, and maybe her newest stuff will do more for me. I have to agree with Sypha and say that my problem with the post-Exquisite Corpse Poppy (and you can actually see it creeping into Exquisite Corpse a little) is not what *is* there, but what isn't. I read an interview with Poppy maybe two or three years ago where she seemed to feel a little dissed by horror fans; it's not an exact quote, but she said something along the lines of, "My gay readers never had any problems reading my horror. Why should my horror audience have such a problem with my gay fiction?" Which, um...kinda misses the point.
PZB's work has always been predominantly about gay men. Not being one myself, I was nonetheless drawn into her early work (and, for all of that, profoundly affected by it as a then very young writer) because of the way she wrote -- a very intense, evocative style -- and because of her attention to character. I could see and hear the people she was writing about (like...while I was reading the books, I mean); you got a strong sense of them (and their environment) as fully realized, as three-dimensional.
This is not the sense at all I've gotten from Brite's post-EC stuff. The style, once lush, now reads very slick to me, and I couldn't for the life of me name a single character in The Value of X, which I just barely recall reading. It's not the absence of horror (I read a lot of other things), though that probably doesn't help...like, I like Tim Burton, and I liked High Fidelity, but if Tim Burton had made High Fidelity (...whoa!), I'd probably be a little disappointed he hadn't made a Tim Burton movie instead...does that make sense? I honestly have no idea who directed High Fidelity, and it probably doesn't matter, because it's the kind of movie a lot of people could have made; not everyone can make Sleepy Hollow or Ed Wood, so to do something more mundane -- even more mundane but very good -- would seem like he was underperforming. Soooooo, getting back to PZB, part of it (for me) probably is the shift in subject matter away from something she put a unique stamp on to something less distinctive, but it's *also* that the less distinctive material just isn't (in her hands) all that captivating anyway. Frankly, regardless of subject matter, I don't think the writing itself is as good as it once was, and it could well be that genre fiction pushes her to certain effects (conscious of herself as a genre writer, and wanting to write above the pulp-fiction expectations people have for a horror novel) that she takes for granted when writing "mainstream" fiction. Or, I dunno, it could just be that she doesn't try as hard now. Whatever the case may be, I...
...I want my Poppy back...
...*sniff* |
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Personally, I felt that "The Value of X" was very much a character study/history, and plot was a bit beside the point. I recognize that many readers do not care for such stories, but on its own terms I found it well done, especially the boys' families, who weren't at all the stereotypical "demonic antigay" parents, and the older chef Rickey met in New York, whose name escapes me now...Cooper, I think?