“A major new voice in horror fiction”, the cover says. And it sure is modern: three hundred and fifty pages of slash, an unbearably pompous and precious style utterly devoid of any humor, teenage characters of all ages existing only to produce and absorb each and every body fluid you can think of, boys raping their girlfriends and sucking their boy-friends off… oh yeah, it definitely is modern, and it could only be written in the nineties by an authentic livejournaler, no contest.

In short, even though it becomes more readable around the middle (either the reader gets used to the style, or the writer is out of original physiological exchanges and has to resort to writing a story, however anecdotal),I guess Poppy Z. Brite isn’t an author you can discover at 28 29. I wouldn’t have gotten past page 30 if I had been by myself, but I was reading across half a dozen years over the shoulder of someone who wasn’t too old to enjoy it — and that was a fascinating experience I won’t often have a chance to renew.