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Saturday, July 19, 2008

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A ghostly city of the imagination

Antediluvian Tales offers magical noir portraits of New Orleans before the flood

By Gili Warsett
Published: January 7th, 2008 | 2:35pm

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“The world as I knew it ended on August 29, 2005,” Poppy Z. Brite writes in “The Last Good Day of My Life” in her new book, Antediluvian Tales. Born in New Orleans, Brite has responded to Hurricane Katrina with a collection of short stories that are written before the storm. “Antediluvian” is a Biblical reference, which means “before the flood,” and never in Brite’s stories does this title seem exaggerated or out of place. Like many writers who are also personalities, Brite has built a strong following and fan club for her writing and her outspokenness (most recently about her opinion that people should not have abandoned New Orleans after Katrina).

In the forward, Brite reflects, “For better or worse, my life, my outlook, and necessarily, my work has changed forever… Someday I hope to move on to non-diluvian work, to somehow get beyond all this and concern myself with other things… For now, I’ll treasure my antediluvian tales for the things they do not know lie ahead of them, for the relative happiness and mental health of the person who wrote them, and for the city that exists in them.” Like a shadow, these notes in the forward cast a contemplative mood across the subsequent stories. Brite and her work are rooted in New Orleans, and her love of this city is reflected in each of them.

Maybe this book wouldn’t seem quite as poignant if not for what New Orleans went through and are still going through since Hurricane Katrina. In “Crown of Thorns,” Hank, who is a produce specialist, considers the landscape. “Across the long causeway bridge that connected New Orleans to points north of Lake Pontchartrain, it was a different, colder world… Or so he imagined; he was sick of New Orleans’ relentless greenness, of the soft clammy air that sucked at his face and brushed the back of his neck like an unwanted lover’s touch.” The innocence of Poppy Z. Brite’s appreciation for her home brushes the back of our necks like a reminder, not of an unwanted lover, but of a lover that is in some sense gone forever.

Brite’s alter ego, a coroner in New Orleans by the name of Dr. Brite, makes a few appearances here, as he has in her previous works. He’s a man who “always carried the faintest scent of death with him like traces of the devil’s own fabric softener.” The strongest stories in the collection reveal more of Dr. Brite in creepy and humorous situations. There’s no denying Brite’s enjoyment in writing these stories. Though other pieces in the collection come off as rushed or underdeveloped, “Crown of Thorns,” in which Dr. Brite discovers a gourd growing inside a dead man’s chest cavity in place of a heart, takes its time and lingers.

Brite’s writing has shifted over the years. Originally an author that almost solely focused on horror and vampires with works like Lost Souls and Exquisite Corpse, with a few side projects along the way including Courtney Love’s biography, Queen of Noise, the year 2000 brought Brite back to the short story. She is fond of certain characters including the aforementioned Dr. Brite and two male line-cooks that are involved in a romantic relationship, who first appear in her book, Liquor: A Novel.

In “The Working Slob’s Prayer (Being a night in the history of the Peychaud Grill),” the famous line-cooks are back. Gay characters are normalized in their social context and their sexuality is rarely the main focus of the story. A non-gay character, Paco says of the two men, “Ricky and G-man were just regular guys, not faggy or P.C. or any of that shit, and after a while he stopped caring what they did when they weren’t at work.” This comfort with sexual exploration is a theme that threads itself through many stories in this new collection.

Many of the stories break genre lines, which is typical Brite. There is almost a Christian science-fiction theme that runs through her work. In “The Devil on Delery Street,” a golden crucifix attaches itself to a young girl’s back. In “Wound Man and Horned Melon Go to Hell,” Dr. Brite writes a letter to Jesus and asks if he has gone to hell. Brite comes back to themes of God’s presence, the contrast of death and youth, and complex sexualities and gender identities in the form of realism that often borders on the magical and fantastical. This is New Orleans, a place of ghosts and haunting characters. The city breathes with the presence of the past.

Even though there is a strong magical realism present, Brite’s stories have an eerie believability, as though she is insisting, “No really, these are true accounts of life in New Orleans.” Every story insists that we not settle into our comfort of predictability and pleasantries. Brite invites us into her surreal and skewed vision of the world. In “The Devil of Delery Street,” the little girl has decided to diet for Lent. “She was already planning to make the Rosy Perfection Salad she’d found on a Weight Watcher’s card, even though the picture looked like a bad car wreck garnished with parsley.” This strange humor, which Brite never lets go of, is addictive, and we’re eager to keep reading.

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ABOUT THE BOOK
Antediluvian Tales (Subterranean Press)
By Poppy Z. Brite
116 pages
List Price: $25