Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #210860 in Books
• Published on: 1994-06-10
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Synopsis
Zach is a computer hacker who looks like Edward Scissorhands, and Trevor, a comics artist, is traumatized by his father's murder of his mother and brother 20 years previously. Both on the run from their pasts, they end up as lovers in the town of Missing Mile. By the author of "Lost Skulls".

Customer Reviews

worth the buy
In 1972, underground cartoonist Bobby McGee murders his family in Missing Mile, North Carolina, leaving only five-year-old Trevor alive. Twenty years later, hoping to understand why it happened, Trevor returns to the abandoned house where his family died. He's joined there by Zachary Bosch, a New Orleans computer hacker on the run from the FBI. Together they try to unlock the secret of Bobby McGee's madness, encounter the presences still in the old house, hang out at the Sacred Yew (Missing Mile's nightclub, home of Steve and Ghost's band Lost Souls?, though they're on the road for this one).

I'd read Lost Souls before this one and enjoyed it so much I had to send away for this too. It's not about the same characters, but set in the same place, mentioning some old characters.

Straight away I loved the new characters, and hearing about the old ones. Zach and Trevor are both so troubled, and had bad childhoods, that it was so surprise (but still nice) that they ended up together. They really helped and supported each other beyond the normal relantionship.

At first I wondered why it was named a horror but it soon did get a little spooky. The house itself was weird, and then you got to Birdland.

Recommend for horror and erotic novel lovers.

an unbelievable mess of a book
I picked this up after hearing Poppy Z.Brite's name used in conjunction with other 'shock' writers such as Bret Easton Ellis and Matthew Stokoe, and I have to say I was deeply unimpressed.

The novel begins strongly, with the sights and sounds of New Orleans brought to life wonderfully. The trouble begins when the two protagonists, Zachary and Trevor meet. All realistic and sensible characterisation goes out the window, the two fall in 'love' in about three minutes flat. Trevor, after 25 years to think about it, realises he's gay even. Then follows much painful dialogue between the two, as they pontificate about love etc etc etc. Oh yeah, the house is haunted or something.

Zach is a super computer hacker, hence the adolescent fantasy of a character with unlimited cash, wanted by the law, bad childhood and gets to be in a rock band for one night. Poppy seems to be pandering to the immature fantasies of teenage goths, and it made me want to laugh. A shame really, as when the Trevor and Zach weren't being so pretentious you wanted the kill them, Poppy's writing actually showed promise of achieving something greater and more literary than this unbelievable mess.

A good grasp
Drawing Blood shows vast improvement on Lost Souls, her first novel, in that there is an unmistakable ring to it. No matter how atmospheric Lost Souls may have been, the premise was absurd and the characterisation sketchy at best. In Drawing Blood, Brite grasps the truth behing why homoeroticism and horror are such good bedfellows, in that the natural distrust between men is doubled when the men in question are in love with each other. As such, only a hint of the supernatural is needed to create a truly original work of horror. Although the ending is somewhat rushed and fails to sate the hunger of readers who have been allowed to choose to care for the characters, the only true fault of this novel is in it's own originality: one wonders if Brite will be able recreate this atomosphere in her later works.