He begins with a cross-country Greyhound bus trip to Missing Mile, North Carolina, the home of his favourite indie rock band Lost Souls?, which is fronted by Steve Finn and Ghost. Courtesy of a note pinned to his basket the night he was left on their doorstep, he at least knows his real name. He’s bored with his hometown, frustrated with his adopted parents (who seem uniquely unable to understand him) and is eager to skip town to find his real parents. In the case of Lost Souls by Poppy Z Brite, it became a cult classic and launched a career that, so far, comprises eight novels and four short-story collections. (Nov.The runaway success of a debut novel always interests writers who are looking to make a similar breakthrough in their own careers. Rather than horror, Lost Souls prompts disgust mixed with morbid titillation, but it will surely be devoured by genre aficionados. More regrettably, the story lacks a moral center: neither terrifyingly malevolent supernatural creatures nor (like Anne Rice's protagonists) tortured souls torn between good and evil, these vampires simply add blood-drinking to the amoral panoply of drug abuse, problem drinking and empty sex practiced by their human counterparts. Brite creates a convincing, evocative atmosphere in which youthful alienation meets gothic horror, but her prose sometimes turns purplish (for example, both sperm and the liqueur Chartreuse are likened to altars). Together they seek out Nothing's favorite band, Lost Souls, for an explosive meeting that leads to a bloody, somewhat overdone climax back in New Orleans.

In this case the answer is that he's really a vampire, a fact he discovers when he runs away from home and meets up with none other than Zillah, accompanied by sidekicks Molochai and Twig.

Fifteen years later, their offspring, who calls himself Nothing, is living with adoptive parents in the suburbs and wondering, like many other teenagers, why he feels so different. Three bloodsuckers who might pass for rock stars roll into New Orleans for Mardi Gras and then disappear again, but only after their handsome leader, Zillah, has impregnated an adolescent girl. Launching the Abyss imprint for Delacorte, this stylishly written, daringly provocative first novel plays on the appeal of vampires as romantic antiheroes.

Lost souls brite