Death is easy...
For the MUD, see Lost Souls (MUD)
Lost Souls is a 1992 vampire novel by Poppy Z. Brite.
Fifteen years ago, a trio of vampires breezed into a New Orleans bar on the last night of Mardi Gras. Their leader, the charismatic and murderous Zilliah, seduced and abandoned a teenage girl named Jessy, leaving her pregnant with a vampire child who devoured her from the inside out. The baby was left in a basket on an anonymous doorstep in the hopes that he might find an ordinary life.
In the present day, a teen who calls himself Nothing lives in a boring middle-class town where he hungers for things he can't explain. Running away from his adoptive parents, he finds himself in a van with a trio of mysterious strangers as they careen across the country in search of hot blood and cheap thrills. For the first time, Nothing feels he's found where he belongs...and he'll do anything to stay there.
Best friends Steve and Ghost make up Lost Souls?, a band maybe a little too talented for the tiny town of Missing Mile, North Carolina. Steve can't hide anything from Ghost—not his drinking problem, not his rocky relationship with his girlfriend Ann, not his self-destructive thoughts. Because Ghost can see the past. And the future. And Ghost has seen dark times coming.
When a van full of vampires pulls into Missing Mile to take in a Lost Souls? show, it seems that the dark times have finally arrived. Steve must race to save Ann from the vampires, while Ghost hopes to save Nothing from himself.
Tropes used in this novel include:
- Accidental Murder: Ann accidentally kills her father Simon with an overdose, having intended only to knock him out so that she could escape him. The town assumes he committed suicide.
- Aerith and Bob: Steve and Ghost, specifically, but also applies more generally to the full cast. Almost everyone has an unusual name—Ghost, Nothing, Molochai, Twig, Zillah, Kinsey Hummingbird, Arkady, Spooky—to the point that ordinary names (Steve, Ann, Christian) sound like outliers.
- Agent Peacock: Zillah is androgynous and outwardly delicate and beautiful, but is prone to spectacular violence.
- The Alcoholic: It could be argued that a lot of the cast are this to some degree—the vampires drink copious and constantly without consequence, and even Ghost likes to tie one on-but only Steve has developed a serious problem: he can't stop once he's started, and he does dangerous, violent things while drunk. (The vampires also do a lot of dangerous, violent things while drunk, but they also do dangerous, violent things while sober.)
- All Girls Want Bad Boys: The two story-relevant female characters, Ann and Jessy, are both immediately attracted to and impregnated by Zillah.
- The Big Easy: The book begins and ends in New Orleans.
- Creepy Twins: The unnamed vampire twins that killed Arkady and his brother.
- Death by Childbirth: Any woman who becomes pregnant with a vampire child will die horribly trying to give birth to it.
- Disposable Woman: The only significant females in the cast are Jessy, who dies in the prologue, and Ann, who mainly exists to force Steve and Ghost to pursue the vampires to retrieve her. (Ann isn't even introduced until Chapter 12, nearly a third of the way through the book.) Both die due to their vampire pregnancy. The only female vampire ever mentioned (via flashback) likewise dies of a self-administered abortion.
- Domestic Abuse: After finding out she cheated on him, Steve beat and raped his girlfriend Ann in a fit of rage, prompting her to break up with him.
- Doorstop Baby: Christian literally leaves Nothing on a doorstop as an infant, complete with note.
- The Empath: Ghost is this, among other things.
- Everyone Is Bi: The entire cast, almost without exception.
- Family of Choice: Zig-zagged. Nothing's family of choice includes his biological father, Zillah. He doesn't care for his adopted parents.
- The Family That Slays Together: Zillah's coven, particularly when Nothing participates in the murder of his biological grandfather.
- Fetus Terrible: Vampire fetuses are deadly to their mothers, no matter what: they're born by chewing their way out of their mothers' bodies, and it's strongly implied that if the mother attempts to abort, regardless of what stage of pregnancy she's in, the fetus will sense her intentions and try to make a break for it.
- Gender-Blender Name: Zillah is a Biblical, female name used for a male vampire.
- Gratuitous Rape: There's quite a bit of rape in the book, mostly to demonstrate how depraved the vampires are and how little they respect human life. There are two instances of sexual assault unrelated to the vampires that stick out as particularly superfluous:
- While Steve raping Ann resulted in them breaking up and Ann running off with the vampires, the rape itself isn't that necessary for the plot; Steve and Ann were already having a rough patch due to infidelity, and it's treated more as just a bad break-up than a serious incident of domestic violence, so they could just have easily gotten into a fight and broken up to hit the same plot beats.
- Jessy's father recalls having sex with her long after Jessy has disappeared from the narrative. We see the event from his point of view, and in the moment he believes that she is seducing him (possibly just in order to feed on him). Later, however, he becomes convinced that he assaulted her and is racked with guilt. We never find out if vampirism and/or pregnancy with a vampire child creates incestuous parent-child desire, or if he is just an abuser and Jessy put up with his attentions because she desperately needed blood.
- Incest Subtext: Arkady's recollection of his brother Ashley's beauty, and his description of their relationship, strongly imply that Arkady was sexually drawn to him and that the feeling might have been mutual. (Theirs is the only relationship in the novel where the incest stays subtextual.)
- Jumped at the Call: Nothing is thrilled to be a vampire, and the only thing he's mournful about is his lack of fangs. (Actually, most of the vampires are shown to enjoy their powers and near-immortality, or at least are resigned to it.)
- Living Emotional Crutch: Steve internally admits to himself the only reason he wants to keep living is Ghost.
- Luke, I Am Your Father: Christian reveals that Zillah is Nothing's biological father.
- Karma Houdini:
- The worst thing that happens to Steve after raping Ann is that Ghost makes him feel mildly crummy about it.
- Nothing never gets any kind of comeuppance for helping the trio kill Laine, despite the fact that he was supposedly his best friend. He never even seemed to feel sad.
- While Ghost and Steven kill the vampire responsible for Anne's fatal pregnancy (and also kill a vampire who had nothing to do with it), the rest basically get off with a warning, while the guy who actually administered the abortifacient that directly led to her demise, and who, it is hinted, may have deliberately botched it out of revenge, is killed off by unrelated characters for a completely unrelated reason. No one else even knows she died and are left to assume she's alive and well somewhere.
- Lecherous Licking: Arkady licks Ghost's eyelashes, much to his dismay.
- The Man They Couldn't Hang: Zillah was hanged back in the early 20th century, but survived thanks to his regenerative abilities.
- May–December Romance: Zillah is decades older than Nothing.
- Missing Mom: A running theme.
- Due to the fatal circumstances of vampiric birth, none of the vampires have mothers.
- Ghost was raised by his grandmother. There's no indication of what became of his mother, although it's assumed she's dead.
- Ann's mother died when she was young, leaving her to be raised by her weird, controlling father.
- Steve's mother (and father) are never mentioned at any point in the novel. It's unclear if they're dead or alive, or what sort of relationship Steve might have with them. They're just...not there.
- Kinsey's mother died in a horrific industrial accident when he was a young man. Prior to that, their relationship wasn't the greatest, and Kinsey's mostly grateful that her life insurance money allowed him to purchase the Sacred Yew.
- Morality Pet: Ghost is the only person Steve treats with any tenderness.
- Mystical White Hair: Ghost's delicate white hair seems to be linked to his psychic powers. His mystical mother and grandmother both had the same color.
- Only One Name: In this novel and in the other subsequent short stories in which he appears, Ghost is never given a surname. Considering that all the other human characters have surnames, the omission is a little odd.
- All the vampires are only known by their first names, too, but it makes a little more sense considering they're ageless immortals whose mothers all died in childbirth.
- Our Vampires Are Different: Notably, you're not turned into a vampire, you're born one. Vampires are a predatory subspecies of humanity that have been living alongside, breeding with, and preying upon humans for eons. In fact, the four main vampires in the book (Zillah, Molochai, Twig, and Nothing) have so much human ancestry that almost all the 'classic' vampire traits have been bred out of them. In one scene, a much younger vampire envies Christian, who is several hundred years old, because he has fangs. It seems it's possible to have a vampiric heritage without becoming a vampire. When Christian leaves Jessy's child on a random doorstep, he does so in the hope that the baby will grow up as an ordinary human—but he isn't surprised to learn, fifteen years after the fact, that Nothing's vampiric nature inevitably asserted itself in spite of his mundane upbringing.
- Parental Incest:
- Jessy either raped, or was raped by her father.
- It's revealed that Zillah and Nothing are father and son after they became lovers.
- Pretty Boy: The eternally young and preternaturally gorgeous Zillah. Ghost is also described as "lovely".
- Psychic Powers: Ghost was raised amid Appalachian folk magic, speaks to nature and to the dead, can feel others' pain, and sees into the future.
- Questioning Title?: The band Lost Souls? (Nothing describes the question mark as the only thing "that kept the name from being stupid.")
- Relationship Upgrade: Steve and Ghost get theirs in a short story ("Stay Awake") set after the novel. They do kiss in the book, but their relationship is left ambiguous.
- Sexual Extortion: Arkady tries to get Ghost to sleep with him to save Ann. Steve arrives in time to shut it down.
- Single-Target Sexuality: Ghost has only ever shown interest in Steve.
- Southern Gothic: The book takes place in North Carolina and New Orleans. There's a lot of kudzu, moonlight, and whispering spirits.
- Staking the Loved One: Subverted. The only staking is done by Ghost, as he takes out Zillah. And Zillah is stabbed through the head, not the heart.
- Surprise Incest: Zillah and Nothing begin a sexual relationship and are then informed they're actually father and son; Zillah didn't know he had a son due to abandoning Nothing's mother shortly before she found out she was pregnant, and she subsequently died. Unusually, they continue their sexual relationship even after learning this, which they justify as them being vampires and therefore not subject to the laws and social norms of humans.
- Threeway Sex: Zillah, Twig, and Molochai engage in this regularly.
- Twincest: The creepy twins are ultimately interested in sex only with one another, to the point that they've starred in porn together.
- Vampires Are Rich: Inverted. The trio ride around in a van and are basically murderous, opportunistic hobos. Christian supports himself by bartending.
- Vampire Bites Suck: These vampires fall on the gorier end of the scale; at one point, the trio reminisce about dismembering a woman in a bathtub.
- Vampire Procreation Limit: Vampires are a separate species who cannot turn humans into their own kind; you must be a born a vampire. Vampires can interbreed with humans, although it's implied that it's not guaranteed that the resultant offspring will be a vampire. Another complication is that vampire pregnancies are pretty much always fatal to the women carrying them, even if the woman is also a vampire, due to the fetuses devouring their mothers from the inside. As such, there aren't very many vampires because procreating is so unpleasant; one of the few female vampires mentioned in the novel tried to avoid ever having sexual intercourse out of fear of pregnancy, but got pregnant anyway after being raped.
