LOST SOULS

Bloodfest first novel written by acid-crazed vampires cooling off on marijuana. Brite's novel also kicks off the Abyss horror line, which is not likely to find as strong a follow-up for many moons to come. This is not for everyone, even hardened horror lovers. It creates its own genre, taking sadistic, bisexual splatterpunk to places it has never been. Steve and Ghost, a psychic two-man band known as Lost Souls?, are lying around drunk on White Horse scotch: ``Behind them the river passed in silence; the lowest-hanging branches brushed the water, and the eaves rotted on the bough. The moon spread like butter on the black river....'' They live together at the dead end of Burnt Church Road in Missing Mile, Louisiana, not far from New Orleans, where vampires roam during the throes of Mardi Gras. The story's plot is none too clear, but it involves 16- year-old Jess: Raped first by her father, she seduces Christian, a vampire bar-owner, then dies giving birth to Nothing, a vampire orphan left to be brought up by alcoholic Father and Mother. Nothing, now a bisexual teenager hooked on a Lost Souls? tape, decides to leave home and visit his idolized band at Missing Mile. Meanwhile, a trio of the rattiest white-trash vampires ever seen in fiction—Molochai, Twig, and Zillah—burn up the countryside in a van, draining hitchhikers and filling up whiskey bottles with blood. Christian too goes on the road, looking for Molochai, Twig, and Zillah, who are different types of vampire from him—meanwhile, there are the Raventon twins, a third kind of vampire. These folks bathe in blood and sperm and alcohol, and clearly Lost Souls? is not about to wipe out three strains of vampires—though they try. Brite tosses out any idea of good taste and remakes the language of horror with a bloodlust that reduces all competitors to dust.