Rating: 4/5, good
“Sometimes a man grows tired of carrying everything the world heaps upon his head. The shoulders sag, the spine bows cruelly, the muscles tremble with weariness. Hope of relief begins to die. And the man must decide whether to cast off his load or endure it until his neck snaps like a brittle twig in autumn.
Such was my situation late in my thirty-third year.”
That’s how this novel begins. I read that and decided to try to finish Exquisite Corpse before I turned thirty-four (I ended up finishing it three months later).
Those lines are written by EC’s first protagonist, Andrew Compton, a man who is five years into a life sentence for murdering twenty-three young men (mostly one-night stands) in England. Andrew is based on Dennis Nilsen.
Jay, the second protagonist, is a gay serial killer and cannibal from New Orleans. Jay is based on Jeffrey Dahmer.
Tran, the third protagonist, is a young Vietnamese-American man who first gets involved with Jay and later with Andrew. He’s loosely based off of Jeffrey Dahmer’s 13th victim, a 14-year-old Lao boy named Konerak Sinthasomphone. Tran is aged up in the book (it says he was nineteen when he first met Luke a few years ago on page 84).
Luke is Tran’s ex-boyfriend who gets introduced later. He is HIV-positive and runs a pirate radio station where he rails against heteronormativity and the government’s failure to address the AIDS epidemic.
The plot of EC brings these four gay men together in a somewhat contrived but satisfying fashion.
The beginning put me off because of Andrew’s somewhat edgy and pretentious monologue, but once the other characters came on the scene it started to grab my attention.
I slightly preferred Jay over Andrew… Andrew seemed very focused on the murder, where Jay seemed to take more pleasure in seducing his victims. Jay’s voice rang more authentic to me as well, which makes sense since the author is from New Orleans. The British voice sounded a bit too stereotypically eloquent to me to be believable.
EC is well-known for being gory, but I was a little surprised by how sexy it was.
There is definitely a lot of gore, and there were plenty of points where I winced in sympathy for the victims, but I found the more I read of it the more desensitized I got to it. By the time it got to the end… well, there were two parts that were still pretty gross and memorable, but I didn’t find myself really traumatized by anything in it the way certain gory scenes from other books (mostly Ryu Murakami novels like Almost Transparent Blue and Coin Locker Babies) have stuck with me. The strongest response I had was being slightly nauseated by some parts, but it faded quickly.
As the novel goes on, the tone becomes more sexy than scary. The book puts you in the position of sympathizing with the serial killers and construing the victims’ passive responses as consent to being murdered. This is pretty problematic when you think about it, especially considering it’s based on real murders and real victims. It makes the experience of reading EC easier, but that could be a good or a bad thing (good because it’s more fun, bad because it could be seen as disrespectful to the victims). I suppose it is a testament to the power of literature to make the otherwise unthinkable attractive.
There are increasingly more scenes of consensual, loving, passionate gay sex as the book goes on and that also makes it feel less gruesome the further it gets in. I do kind of wish it weren’t based off real people (or at least not a real victim, the killers being real doesn’t bother me as much), because some of the sex scenes are wonderful and the idea of two serial killers getting together is a lot of fun.
There are some humorous parts mostly due to the contrast between the absurdity of the murders and the mundanity of the real-world setting, like the part where Tran tries to visit Jay while he’s laying amongst the remnants of a night full of sex, drugs, and murder and Jay says “Uh… can you come back in an hour? I’m kind of busy.”
Exquisite Corpse doesn’t take itself super seriously, unlike Hanya Yanigahara’s A Little Life. I would say that A Little Life feels more disturbing than Exquisite Corpse even though Exquisite Corpse is objectively bloodier because the abuse in A Little Life seems crueler, and it invites you to sympathize with the victim instead of the abuser.
A Little Life is sad, painful, and cathartic where Exquisite Corpse is pleasurable if off-putting. I don’t know if I would ever want to reread A Little Life, but I immediately flipped back to the beginning of Exquisite Corpse after finishing it to see if I missed any foreshadowing. I would be down to reread it sometime in the future or at least revisit certain sections.
EC has some interesting commentary on mortality since each character has a different attitude towards their own mortality. Luke is outwardly angry, but internally frightened. Tran has a goth sensibility of romanticizing death, but Luke calls his bluff when Tran pulls away from him after he gets HIV. Andrew seems to kind of worship death. Jay doesn’t seem to feel as strongly about it as the others.
Exquisite Corpse is not for everybody (I would be a little bit hesitant recommending it to most people because of the heavy sex and violence and it’s definitely 18+), but if you like horror and gay erotica, you’ll probably get a kick out of it.
I generally don’t have much interest in serial killer media, so I was surprised that something that’s basically serial killer fanfiction held my attention as much as it did. It has a very different vibe than serial killer documentaries, I think because it aims to titillate more than chill. It puts you right in the middle of the action in a very visceral way, where serial killer documentaries tend to be more detached and spooky (dry details of the crimes mixed with “Oooh, they’re gonna get you!” type narration).
It was oddly comforting to read this during the early days of Trump’s second term when he issued his executive order basically saying that trans people don’t exist (or trans people will not be recognized as trans by the government).
Luke (Tran’s ex) has a pirate radio station where he does rants as the character Lush Rimbaud about how the government is allowing gay people to die of AIDS and not treating it like a serious public health crisis. It is sobering because a lot of people did not make it through, but it also shows the resilience of the gay community and how much societal acceptance of gay people has improved since then. I really hope that progress continues.
LGBT people are not a threat to the general population, no matter what homophobes and transphobes say.
There has been some controversy about how Exquisite Corpse portrays gay men as violent. I see the violence as more of a fantasy and a metaphor for the consumptive, taboo, and visceral aspects of sex, though I understand the objection. I don’t think those stereotypes are as prevalent anymore, though, at least in my experience. EC came out in 1996, so almost 30 years ago, and I think the perception of homosexuality has changed a lot since that time.
I think we need both light and dark stories about LGBT people and good and bad LGBT characters. LGBT folks are people, and some people are bad. Authors should be able to portray the full spectrum of human experience. I see a lot of people online complaining about too much light or too much dark, but I think balance is the ideal.
Speaking of balance, I started Just Shy of Ordinary by A.J. Sass after finishing this. It’s a middle grade novel about a genderfluid 9th grader starting their first year of public school after being homeschooled (they’re also Jewish and a trichotillomaniac, so of course I had to read it). After Exquisite Corpse, I needed something light and wholesome and it’s really hitting the spot.
I was also watching the new AMC show Interview with a Vampire on Netflix in between reading this and it complemented very well because it’s also gay, dark, and set in New Orleans. I tried to read the 1976 Anne Rice novel in high school but couldn’t get into it. Exquisite Corpse was published in 1996, so I wonder if it was influenced by Interview with the Vampire? I bet, though they are pretty different, and I think EC is more overtly queer. I wonder if the new show was influenced by EC? That would be a funny circle-of-art moment!
Poppy Z. Brite transitioned to Billy Martin and uses he/him pronouns. You can find his new blog posts and stories on his Patreon.
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