Mindful horror

A maggot in the slaughterhouse dines only on the flesh of those who died in pain; an unloved teenager finds salvation - and self-immolation - in the arms of a transvestite prostitute named Jesus; the author turns coroner and pokes about inside the bloated body of a drug dealer. You might not like what Poppy Z. Brite writes about - in fact, unless you're one sick dude, you couldn't possibly like it - but before you've turned very many of her blood-soaked pages, you have to admit that Poppy Z. Brite is a very good writer indeed. Is it something in the New Orleans air? Brite's vampires get up to stuff which would make Anne Rice's Lestat blench, while her personal publicity - she claims, among other things, to be a gay man in a woman's body - must have Rice gnashing her teeth in the upstage shadows.

Whatever the opposite of mindless horror is, this is it. Human beings at the edge of humanity: sentient creatures whose brains and bodies have been blasted open, as often as not, by misery and fear. Despite all the devastation, however - and Brite isn't a woman to shy away from the gory detail, whether erotic or horrific - these stories are anything but downbeat. Some, like the title piece, luxuriate in a length of 20-plus pages; others, like that conscientious maggot, snap shut in a page-and-a-half ("a bubble of pure inspiration", Peter Straub calls it in his arty introduction, and it's hard to disagree).

The exuberant use of language, the finely-tuned sense of irony, the sheer variety of subject matter and frames of reference (who else could bring a dead rock star and the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, he of the assassination at Sarajevo, back to life in the same volume?) combine to make this a dazzling demonstration of out-there fin-de-siecle fiction.

Arminta Wallace is an Irish Times journalist