In New Orleans he’s about to find that, so much more. He’s also always on the lookout for his next victim. Compton is disturbingly smart and extremely self-aware, making his tightly controlled manner and homicidal personality that much more frightening to read about. With nothing to lose, and a vow to die before he’d ever go back to prison, he quickly becomes one of the most dangerous men in the world. In what may be one of the most tense first chapters of any horror novel ever written, his break out and subsequent flight to America leaves a ghastly trail of blood-soaked victims in its wake. But, rest assured, he’s not there for long. Compton has already been languishing in jail for 5 years for his crimes when we first meet him. All the time I was in prison, I knew if they ever let me out I would continue killing boys.”Īndrew Compton should be a name as infamous as Hannibal Lector, only necrophilia isn’t quite as sexy as cannibalism (but more on that later).

I was seventeen years old when I began, twenty-eight when they caught me. Between 19 I killed twenty-three boys and young men in London. The book switches between four uniquely intimate points of view.

Deemed too extreme for publication at first, it got tossed around to different publishing houses before finally getting a release in the UK and the US in 1996. Not only a horrifying portrait of heinous evil, but also a lushly crafted imagining of the serial killer’s victim. Well, you’re about to find out.Įxquisite Corpse is a no bars tour de force of the physiological depravities, gore, immorality, debauchery, and fatalism of two horrifying serial killers in the early 1990s gay scenes of London and New Orleans. If you’ve ever played a game of exquisite corpse where one artist or writer starts a picture or story and another adds to it to inevitably end up with something that’s both terrifying and surreal, odds are you’ve still probably never wondered what would happen if that artistic method was applied to serial killers. Brite ( Lost Souls, Wormwood, Drawing Blood).

Happy Transgender Awareness Week, horror fam! To celebrate we’re doing a look back at a book by one of horror’s iconic trans authors, Poppy Z.

Exquisite corpse book poppy z brite