Customer Reviews

Seed of Lost Souls

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is definitely a book for big Poppy fans. It's limited and signed and tells the story of her first book, Lost Souls. She gives some insight for writers and some of her opinions on such things as vampire stories. I recommend this book to ALL of you major Poppy fans.

This book was a good insite to Poppy's mind and ideas before the real evolution of Lost Souls. I think it was a wondeful Idea to release it the way it was, As a collectors item. So If you really Like Poppy and can find a copy now. I highly reccomend it.

"The Seed of Lost Souls" is a wonderful look inside the process of a writer's mind and the progress of a book from embryonic short story to modern classic. It contains the original story "Lost Souls" grew from, as well as a forward by Brite explaining how she expanded it into a book, an interview from the time of "Lost Souls" publication, and a book review containing her mixed feelings on vampire fiction. In response to the previous person's review, I found nothing condescending in it, but I guess some people just don't want to accept that the creator of Nothing, Ghost, and Zillah (unlike some of her readers) has grown up. Personally, I felt privleged at this chance to look behind the scenes of a favorite novel.

I dunno. Brite seems to have moved on to "cooler" things nowadays. This book makes it seem like she despises the "gothic" fan base that was intially responsible for her success. It is condescending to say the least.
If you are a fan of Lost Souls, you may enjoy it, if you can get over the feeling that Brite is patronizing you.

Poppy Z. Brite, The Seed of Lost Souls (Subterranean, 1999)

First off, there is more to this slight (forty-six pages) chapbook than simply the seed of Lost Souls; it also contains a book review she did of an anthology put out a few years back and an interview with a fanzine. So it wouldn't be fair just to review it on the basis of the short novella. But I'll probably lean too far in that direction, anyway. Be warned.

I've never been much of a Steve-and-Ghost fan; I became a Poppy Z. fan after reading Exquisite Corpse, and took an immediate liking to the new novels that some wags have been calling "food porn." I've never been sure what it was about Lost Souls (and the S&G story in Wormwood) that didn't grab me. I have to say, after reading this, that I still have no idea-- but I do know I was far fonder of this than either of the other pieces.

Brite says in the introduction that "the writing is that of a twenty-year-old, sometimes breathless with possibility but more often just breathless." And to be fair, it's certainly an unfinished piece; the characters never really gel, but are very good sketches; the two storylines come together in what can generously be called the most superficial of ways; there is a good deal of promising imagery, but too little of it is fleshed out for the deeper-looking reader to get involved in anything resembling textual analysis. But the prose itself just says "wow." Even in such a disjointed, embryonic piece, it's obvious to the reader-- this reader, anyway-- that the person who wrote these lines was going to grow up and be a very, very good writer. Of course, that's rather easy to say in hindsight, but when work oozes potential like this and you're given a chance to read it, you have to feel like you were one of the people on the novel-in-progress-prize board a few years ago who encountered Elizabeth Kostova's half-finished manuscript for The Historian.

A number of the reviews on Amazon for this chapbook (which are, interestingly, all of either the five- or one-star variety) seem to have missed the point of the latter two sections entirely. "This book makes it seem like she despises the 'gothic' fan base..." (Feb. 6, 2004) can only be referring to the interview at the end, which seemed to me to express quite the opposite sentiment, though Brite's parting shot is obviously drawn from rather painful personal experience, and someone who doesn't read that into it (maybe you have to have been one of the outcasts yourself to get it) could see it as condescending. More amusing is a comment from from May of 1999 that seems like it's going to get interesting, then tails off "it's not like Lost Souls was a masterpiece or anything." I'm guessing this guy (I'm inferring from the lack of grammar and the tone the review was written by a male; sue me for sexism, then) skipped the intro altogether. Whether or not a book is a "masterpiece" doesn't really have any bearing on the fanaticism of its readership; Brite says in the intro that Lost Souls "has spawned music, artwork, roleplaying games, devotion, contempt, and a church-sponsored book burning...." Anyone who has taken the book and done anything with it, it can be safely assumed, is going to love this.

I can attest that some of us who weren't overly fond of Lost Souls were just as happy to read it, thanks. *** ½

I was excited to pick up this book but I could barely finish it. It seems real self indulgent and it's not like Lost Souls was a masterpiece or anything. I wouldn't recemend it to my friends.