Exquisite Corpse
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4.1 • 145 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
From the acclaimed author of Lost Souls, Drawing Blood, and Wormwood comes the provocative and thrilling serial killer novel that #1 New York Times bestselling author Peter Straub calls “a guidebook to hell.”
To serial slayer Andrew Compton, murder is an art, the most intimate art. After feigning his own death to escape from prison, Compton makes his way to the United States with the ambition of bringing his art to new heights. Tortured by his own perverse desires and drawn to possess and destroy young boys, Compton inadvertently joins forces with Jay Byrne, a dissolute playboy who has pushed his own art to limits even Compton hadn’t previously imagined. Together, Compton and Byrne set their sights on an exquisite young Vietnamese American runaway, Tran, whom they deem to be the perfect victim.
Swiftly moving from the grimy streets of London’s Piccadilly Circus to the decadence of New Orleans’s French Quarter, Poppy Z. Brite dissects the landscape of torture and invites us into the mind of a killer. With “intelligence, sweep, nerve, knowledge, and deeply unsettling erotic power” (Dennis Cooper, author of Frisk), Exquisite Corpse is a novel for those who dare trespass where the sacred and profane become one.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Blood-soaked sheets, cannibalism, rotting, half-dissected corpses: this gruesome psychological horror novel has all the grue a reader might--or might not--want. Brite (Drawing Blood, 1993), the reigning queen of Generation-X splatterpunks, pulls out the stops in this ghastly tale of two serial killers who find true love over the body of a murdered and mutilated boy in the historic French Quarter of New Orleans. Londoner Andrew Compton, imprisoned for the necrophiliac slayings of 23 young men, escapes from prison by (rather unbelievably) faking his own death and killing the coroners gathered to autopsy his body. Fleeing to Louisiana, he hooks up with Jay Byrne, slacker scion of a wealthy old family, a man whose murders are even more fiendish than Compton's own. Brite is a highly competent stylist with a knack for depicting convincing, if monstrous, characters. Her plot development rests too heavily on coincidence, however, and on an excess of details drawn from the life of real-world serial killer and cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer. Though Brite shifts point of view throughout, she always returns to Compton's first person. This technique gives the narrative rhythm and emotional force but also seems aimed toward intimating the reader in Compton's acts of dehumanization ("the aesthetics of dismemberment") and depravity. And so what Brite really presents here is, ultimately, yet another crimson leaf in the literature of the pornography of violence.
Customer Reviews
See AllHorrific
The most grotesque book I have ever read. I’m almost ashamed to talk about it! If you want to be pushed to the verge of vomiting, having to take several needed breaks, and push past your moral boundaries to find out what happens…this is something you need to pick up. The contents of this book are disgusting, soul crushing, devastating and unsatisfying. Trigger warning on this book!! Not for the faint of heart.
Eh
Interesting point of view but the numerous errors in the book are embarrassing and distracting. For the money I paid for a digital book, they could have hired a proofreader to make sure, in the least, that the correct character names were used through out. Someone was sleeping when they published this one.
Wow.
Hands down the saddest and most horrific book I’ve ever read. Horror usually doesn’t phase me, especially while reading but this book..wow. I’m not sure if I’m allowed to say it’s beautiful because of how gruesome it was but it was definitely a very poetic read. I’ll remember this one for a while.