Poppy Z Brite - Swamp Foetus

[Calenture]

Photo by Fernando-Mercedes

First published by Borderlands Press 1994, this edition is from Penguin, 1995. Originally it had some illustrations by Rodger Gerberding, regretably not included here.

Angels
A Georgia Story
His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood
Optional Music for Voice and Piano
Xenophobia
The Sixth Sentinel
Missing
Footprints in the Water
How to Get Ahead in New York
Calcutta, Lord of Nerves
The Elder
The Ash of Memory, The Dust of Desire

This one has an introduction by Dan Simmons, A Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics of Poppy, a title written with tongue firmly rammed in cheek as Simmons addresses himself to the task of introducing self-made legend and enfant terrible Brite ("Born 1967 - I have ties older than this kid...")

The stories are all dated, but not presented in chronological order. The book is dedicated

To the memory of alcohol, my dear lost love

...although a recently posted photo on her Amazon Blog suggested they might be reconciled: P.Z.P. at Amazon.

Her live journal documenting post-hurricane Katrina money problems, and a move to a new house, is more up to date docbrite.livejournal.com/.

And while she's worrying about cash, she's made a little voodoo doll and put it on e-Bay...here.I think it's sort of cute.

She's also put a banknote from Hell and an empty tranquiliser bottle on auction!

Back to the book:

The intro is worth quoting from but I'll do that in appropriate moments. Behind with reviews and reading too much at once, I'll just post as I write 'em (but please interrupt).

Xenophobia: This one’s great, Poppy’s mischievous exploration of the xenophobic schoolboy’s belief about the difference between oriental and occidental women. Two young Chinese Americans get off the bus at the wrong stop, and find themselves in the porn district of Chinatown. They don’t have enough money for girls, and Robert wonders if what he’s heard about Chinese women is true, that their c**ts open sideways. An elderly man in a restaurant offers to pay them $5 and “unlimited use of a bottle of good cognac”. The old man is an undertaker, and he wants someone to sit up with a middle-aged woman’s corpse while he slips out to drink with another undertaker. For anyone familiar with Brite’s fiction, the possibilities of two slightly addled young men, a woman’s corpse and a bottle of cognac, are endless. And that’s before they find the opium pipe and the dried mushrooms. Wicked stuff.

[andydecker]

Poppy Z. Brite - Wormwood: A Collection of Short Stories (Dell, 1996, 225 pages; accord to the small print: Formerly titled Swamp Foetus)

Content see post above. Two stories have variant titles compared with the original Borderlands edition from 1993.

This paperback has 3 illustrations included, maybe from the Borderlands edition. In this edition they are uncredited.