TITLE: Drawing Blood
AUTHOR: Poppy Z. Brite
GENRE: Horror
PUBLISHED: 1993
RATING: ★★★★★
PURCHASE LINKS: Amazon
MOBILISM LINK: Drawing Blood
Description: This is the story of a New Orleans hacker (back when hacker meant something interesting) who meets the sole survivor of a gruesome family murder/suicide, 10 years later. It’s set in a ‘murder house’, in the tiny town of Missing Mile, North Carolina – a haunted house story like you’ve never seen.
Review: Any of the places described in this book immediately feel like home. The people you meet feel like friends, people you’ve already known but just haven’t found yet. Zach is the guy you kind of crush on a little, but it’s useless because you know he’d break your heart. Trevor is a comic book artist who grew up in foster homes after his father killed everyone but him in a mass murder.
Don’t mistake them for normal people, they are both so dreadfully broken. Zach is from a hideously abusive and disturbed family – it leaves him determined not to love and have sex with anyone because that gives them power over you. Trevor is in his twenties and has never had any intimate contact because he fears the madness that lurks inside his genes – his father went insane when he lost the ability to draw, and Trevor believes it could happen to him. He treasures the thought of suicide, but he vows he’d never take anyone with him.
They’re set on an inevitable collision course by Kinsey – a bar owner in Missing Mile who takes in broken children, who sets the stage with his all ages club and house band. Zach comes into town on the run from the feds, Trevor on the run from his demons, believing that if he stays in the house where his family was slaughtered, maybe he’ll understand why his father spared him.
There’s quite a lot of introspection, more than a little m/m sex, and some of the most amazingly written haunted house details. The idea of Birdland as a comic, as an inspiration for Trevor’s comic work and as the ultimate haunted house within Trevor’s childhood home tethers the strangeness to something of reality, but never quite seeming real.
Five year old Trevor:
From the living room he heard Charlie Parker run down a shimmering scale. Birdland, he thought again. That was the place where you could work magic, the place where no one else could touch you. It might be an actual spot in the world; it might be a place deep down inside you. Daddy could only reach his Birdland by drinking now. Trevor had begun to believe his own Birdland might be the pen moving over the paper, the weight of the sketchbook in his hands, the creation of worlds out of ink and sweat and love.
Drawing Blood is just as much a story about the redemption of love as it is about the way your mind can torture you. Almost all of the largest portions of action are motivated by love – Zach’s running away and eventual escape twines with Trevor’s terror and need to understand why his life is still his, and both of them eventually understand their places in the world. There aren’t really grand denouments, but there’s a satisfying climax.
Twenty year old Trevor:
“I don’t have plenty of time to get to Birdland!” Trevor cried. His voice sounded as if it were being pulled out of him, dragged over hot coals and rusty nails, tortured out of his throat. “I don’t have any time at all—and I’m scared—”
Drawing Blood dates from 1993 and I found it soon after. It’s an easy book to pick up and read but it’s not quite as easy to understand. Twenty years later, I find new facets of interest and marvel at how amazingly restrained much of the haunted house action is, despite the clarity of what it shows and explains. We may not need yet another book that explains that other people are the ones to keep an eye on, not the supernatural, but we’ve got one and it’s masterful.
Normally, it’s very easy to pick out a few pieces of text in a novel that serve a point in a review – a taste of the writing style, the direction of a story, a startling revelation. I’ve gone through Drawing Blood three times at this point and I just can’t pick blocks of text other than what I’ve outlined above – each sentence and paragraph flows into the next and all of them are equally important.
I rate this 5 stars. It may be nostalgia, but I don’t think so. I think that something I loved at nineteen can survive for all these years and be just as good and intense and strange and wonderful and strangely hilarious as the first time I picked it up. Warnings for graphic m/m sex and drug use and some pretty explicit violence.
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