LOST SOULS BY BILLY MARTIN (WRITING AS POPPY Z. BRITE) [13 FOR HALLOWEEN]

10/11/2021

PictureLOST SOULS BY BILLY MARTIN (WRITING AS POPPY Z. BRITE)

We are the lost children, the lost souls of society and tradition. We are the evolutionary dead-ends, the deaths of familial lines, the sybarites who are denied the meta-narratives of family, parent, child, spouse.

Thirteen For Halloween 2021

Lost Souls By Billy Martin (Writing as Poppy Z. Brite)

Article by George Daniel Lea

Expect Billy's name to be quite prominent in this series, my loves, as, when it comes to pioneering LGBTQ representation in horror fiction, there aren't many that compare. Randomly dive into practically any work Billy has ever been involved with, and you'll find representations of queer experience so intimate and sincere, they are quite unlike anything else on the market. One must also bear in mind, for the most part, Billy was publishing most of his work during the mid-to-late 1990s, a time when LGBTQ representation in any fiction -let alone genre- was almost unheard of.

As a result, for many of us who were children or young adults at the time, Billy's work -amongst a rare few contemporaries most of whom we'll get to, by and by- was amongst the very first that not only explored our lived experience, it also demonstrated that it was possible to do so within genres that, whilst much beloved, are traditionally heteronormative and often extremly culturally conservative, especially when it comes to sex, relationships and gender identity.

For my part, Billy's work was a cataclysm: like Clive Barker's before it, it ripped away scales that I didn't even know had formed across my eyes, wounded me in ways so deliriously intimate, I never realised that there could be pleasure in such mutilation.

Like many of us who dare trespass on the sacred grounds of certain proscribed genres, Billy pays very little mind to templates, tenets or proscription: he acknowledges them, fleetingly, then shrugs and strides on through them, as though they have no more weight or substance than smoke. There is no hesitation in Billy's work; no sense of the forbidden or the taboo; everything that we lust and fear and desire and take joy in is laid bear, often in the most delectably lurid sensory detail. Everything from sex to food to the most graphic scenes of violence and mutilation are all portrayed and lingered over with painterly delight, every sensation acute in a way I've rarely come across in any author's work. When Billy describes the smell of food frying in New Orleans air, the reader smells it. When Billy describes the taste and texture of a lover's body, the reader is there, in that moment of sensual consumption. And when Billy describes pain. . .oh my. There are moments in his work that have had me actively drawing away from the page, closing the book and groaning, the descriptions of pain not some dry, documentary thing a la Lovecraft or Bram Stoker: here, pain is intimate and immediate and acute, and Billy clearly feels it important for the reader to experience it, not just read about it, but feel it.

In his 1992 debut novella, Lost Souls, Billy effectively establishes a queer horror manifesto: whereas others might obscure or apologise for aspects of queer existence, Billy goes for the throat -and other areas of anatomy- without pause, without ambiguity and without any attempt to accommodate the tastes or moral assumptions of hs readers:

Here, Billy makes it quite clear that there will be no softening of the edges, no “easing in” for the sake of readers suited to more conformist stuff: this is a queer book for queer readers. Whilst there's nothing actively denying straight experience here, it is primarily concerned with the experience of being a young, gay male in 1990s USA. That it conflates that experience with the necessarily alienating tropes and traditions of vampirism is a stroke of genius: as queer people in general were still very much demonised and “othered” by mainstream society, politics and culture, the vampire provides a ready and recognisable metaphor; a freight of significance that already boasts numerous parallels and concerns ready to be explored, applied and inverted.

Here, the eponymous “Lost Souls” are the queer youth of conservative America; they are the children who have no place or purpose in their families, who are not loved and do not love in their turns, save for the extended families they cultivate (again, very much in the vein of vampires). The portrait drawn of those early 1990s queer teenagers who were just blossoming into sexual awareness and some semblance of identity is so acute for those of us who were going through similar experiences at the time (albeit, in my own case, from across the pond). Whilst there are the base political commentaries on prejudice, ignorance and familial rejection, the book primarily concerns itself with a form of dark celebration: just as we queers explode into a kind of luminous identity, a new and better incarnation of ourselves, upon our self-realisation and acceptance, so too do the protagonists of Lost Souls upon discovering their vampirism. Whereas so much fiction before it explores nothing but the Bram Stoker-proscribed monstrosity of the condition, the horror of “The Other,” Lost Souls tales an entirely different stance:

Here, the grace, beauty and appetite of vampirism is conflated with the young, gay man discovering sex and love for the first time, in all of its darkness, danger and complexity. It does not dismiss the montrosity or attempt to apologise for it in the manner of Twilight, nor does it shy away or simply focus on other aspects of the status: just as it is unabashed in its portrayal of LGBTQ experience, it is also unabashed in its portrayal of vampirism. Whilst the raw, youthful exuberance and eroticism of the condition is emphasised to the Nth degree, so too are numerous pitfalls, problems and diseases of the condition. For example, a particular vampire -poignantly for the setting and era- as AIDs after drinking from an infected victim. Whilst the disease cannot kill him, it means that he endures in a condition of almost perpetual pain, that waxes and wanes in response to certain factors. Likewise, the vampires experience a degree of ennui, as they are practically immortal -unless they are actively killed by various traditional means- and find that they must seek out ever more thrilling and outre experience to stir themselves. This ultimately leads to lives of incredible rarity and sensual excess, but ones that burn out very quickly, leaving an existential void.

Again, Billy cleverly conflates this with the experience of being a young, gay man discovering themselves in the early 1990s through the runaway Nothing, a character who is very much a proxy for Billy's own experience to a degree, but also an avatar of gay youth of the era: a creature that is almost spectral, that has no anchorage to the structures of family and society, as such spheres have always demonised and denied him for his affections and appetites. If we are to be monsters, as culturally-proscribed narrative and tradition insist, then fuck it! Let's be that, and find our own dark and bloody ways through the mire of existence.

We are the lost children, the lost souls of society and tradition. We are the evolutionary dead-ends, the deaths of familial lines, the sybarites who are denied the meta-narratives of family, parent, child, spouse.

So be it! Billy Martin proclaims in this manifesto; fuck it all, and fuck everything. We will explore, we will stray beyond the picket fences, the paths through the woods, and we will meet others, monsters like us, who we will make our strange, incestuous families, who will be our lovers and our guardians and our mentors.

There is a “rock and roll” nihilism to the status of the outcast LGBTQ youth of the early 1990s here; a “live fast, die young” celebratory descent into sensualism and transgression that is presented without judgement, often celebrated in its raw and actinic beauty, even its spiritual qualities, but also not ornamented or exaggerated in terms of its ultimate trajectory:

Whilst the vampire youths are creatures of celebratory atavism, of pleasure for the sake of pleasure without any of the concerns or parameters that bother heternormative culture or the dictates of tradition, they are also lost, directionless and without any wider purpose or poetry; a fact that leads to a state of ennui and ultimate dissolution. The moments of intimacy and sex and self-revelation are profound, but so too are the instances of self-destruction that ultimately result. Billy does not come down on any one particular “side” in this dynamic, nor does he present any overt judgement or implication one way or the other: it is easy to read this book as a manifesto of that same sensualist, 1990s youthful nihilism, the “Kurt Cobain” abandonment of a society and culture whose hypocrisies are overt, yet dares heap scorn and judgement on those seeking a little pleasure, who dare to find some intimacy and connection with one another.

The irony of the title is that: being a vampire, a creature that is literally inhuman; that, indeed, preys on human beings in a violent and parasitic fashion, is no more a basis for being an outcast from heternormative society than being LGBTQ. If anything, it's easier to “pass” and become accepted as a vampire than the latter. The dovetailing of the two states requires little in the way of mythological or narrative justification, and serves as a delightful inversion of traditional dynamics in horror fiction: here, the “monsters” are the sympathetic parties, in all of their ambiguity, monstrosity and violence, whereas agents of conformity, conservatism and slaves to the engines of culture are almost universally presented in a negative light.

This, in turn, serves as one of the early popular examples of the innate differences between straight and LGBTQ horror (not a universal application, but a general one): straight horror has a tendency to concern itself with the reinforcement of certain traditional norms and proscriptions or the bemoaning of their decay (a la Lovecraft), whereas horror from LGBTQ writers has a tendency to celebrate that phenomena, to explore how the interruption or subversion of tradition and assumptions of culture is no bad thing, how the monsters are so often far more identifiably human and engaging in their flaws than any protagonist or “hero” archetype.

The historical tendency to “other” or “monster” LGBTQ people (as is happening right now in British media and politics with regards to our trans brothers and sisters) has resulted in LGBTQ readers identifying positively and strongly with characters in fiction who are themselves “othered” or “monstered,” i.e. the villains. In Lost Souls, Billy Martin presents one of the earlier popular examples of that phenomena finding expression, and one that, despite exploring the status of LGBTQ youth of an earlier era, still has enormous significance and implication today.

Further Reading
THIRTEEN FOR HALLOWEEN 2021: GONE HOME [FEATURE]
IN THE HILLS, THE CITIES BY CLIVE BARKER [FEATURE]