His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood and Other Stories by Poppy Z. Brite

It shaped Symbolism, Surrealism, Modernism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism and Cubism. Absinthe solidified or destroyed friendships, and created visions and dream-like states that filtered into artistic work. During the Belle Époque, the Green Fairy – nicknamed after its distinctive colour – was the drink of choice for so many writers and artists in Paris that five o’clock was known as the Green Hour, a happy hour when cafes filled with drinkers sitting with glasses of the verdant liquor. The spirit was a muse extraordinaire from 1859, when Édouard Manet’s The Absinthe Drinker shocked the annual Salon de Paris, to 1914, when Pablo Picasso created his painted bronze sculpture, The Glass of Absinthe. It’s hard to overstate absinthe’s cultural impact – or imagine a contemporary equivalent.

That is where the legendary aromatic drink that came to symbolise decadence was invented in the late 18th Century. Brite books are awesome.Arthur Rimbaud called absinthe the “sagebrush of the glaciers” because a key ingredient, the bitter-tasting herb Artemisia absinthium or wormwood, is plentiful in the icy Val-de-Travers region of Switzerland. I am happy to take this very good advice. Somebody, probably the author, made fun of me for it by saying I should stick to Poppy Z. The last story in this collection, while plenty violent, reminded me more of Ligotti than anything else.Ī few years back, I wrote a fairly critical review of a book of Vampiric black magic. Brite associated with Splatterpunk but I don’t know why. I realised about halfway through ‘Xenophobia’ that I had read it before in the second Splatterpunks anthology. I know that Brite’s 2nd novel also features characters from that Lost Souls, and I intend to read that one soon too.

‘His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood’ might be my favourite story of the bunch, but I also really enjoyed reading about Steve and Ghost from Lost Souls in ‘How to Get ahead in New York’ and ‘Angels’. They encounter geeks, zombies, corpse thieves and other freaks. These are mostly stories about skinny, sensitive, gay goth boys who drink too much. This reminds me so much of people I used to hang out with when I was younger that it made me quite nostalgic.

I’m a straight guy in my mid 30s, and I enjoyed the Hell out of this book, but if, by chance, you’re a queer goth teenager, throw whatever the fuck you’re reading in the garbage and read this instead. Brite’s novel, Lost Souls, a few years ago, and this, his first collection of short stories, is more of the same. Penguin Books – 1995 (Originally published 1993)

His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood and Other Stories by Poppy Z. Brite