YMMV / Lost Souls (1992)

• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Midway through the novel, the story breaks off for roughly two paragraphs to the inner monologue of an obese, unattractive, virginal convenience store clerk who feels a surge of sexual desire for Zillah. The point of the entire episode is that Zillah and the other vamps stop to buy Twinkies, and the scene seems to exist for no other reason than to show that Zillah is so supernaturally attractive that even lonely religious virgins can be tempted—a fact that (again) has already been established. The clerk plays no role and is never mentioned again.
• Moral Event Horizon: When Nothing is in the van and has the choice to participate in the murder of Laine, he participates at first out of self-preservation, but then because of his true nature, and it represents the beginning of his acceptance of a new life and new morality.
• Older Than They Think:
  • Angsty bisexual vampires hanging out in New Orleans? Hmmm...
  • Vampires are depicted here as a separate sub-species from humans, who are capable of interbreeding with them, and vampires are born as vampires rather than turned. The same is mostly true of the Vampire Hunter D novels, first published in 1983; there, vampires descend from purebloods, who generally have no human ancestry, and while there are some vampires who were humans turned by other vampires, those born as vampires are considered more powerful and prestigious. Going back even further, some traditional European folklore about vampires feature dhampir, half-vampires typically born of sexual unions between male vampires and female humans (the inverse is rarer), which is how Nothing came to be. Unlike these older stories though, Lost Souls's vampires cannot turn humans into their kind.
• Once Original, Now Common: A lot of elements of this novel — nihilistic sexy goth gay teen vampires in New Orleans — have been so done to death that Lost Souls may seem cliched, but the book was published in 1992 and was (along with Vampire: The Masquerade, the mainstream Trope Codifier for many of these concepts.
• Padding: There are several minor scenes in the book that read more like set pieces, added for atmosphere while either contributing nothing to the plot or simply reiterating points that have already been established. In short, they feel like they're just there for coolness or shock value and could have been removed without changing anything.
  • Jessy's father's rather squick-inducing memory of the time he had sex with his thirteen-year-old daughter. The father is a minor character whose contribution to the plot is pretty insignificant, and Jessy's purpose in the story has already come and gone, making the scene even less plot-relevant.
  • Nothing's hitchhiking scenes. When he leaves home, he gets a ride with an albino fundamentalist who makes him perform oral sex on him. Later, he hitches a ride with a junkie biker named Spooky, whose blood Nothing sucks while Spooky's on the nod. These scenes are arguably present to hint at Nothing's vampiric nature before The Reveal...except that the reader has known from the beginning that he's a vampire and that he enjoys the taste of blood. They add nothing new, introduce two new characters who vanish immediately afterwards, and nothing that happens in them is ever brought up again.
  • The entire story of the vampire twins and Arkady and Ashley Raventon seem to have been imported from a different story completely unrelated to this one (according to the acknowledgements, this might well be the case, as the author thanks another writer for allowing him to "borrow" the characters). Other than the fact that the twins are (yet another kind of) vampire and that Arkady helps Steve and Ghost with Ann's vampire abortion, it's so disconnected that it's difficult to justify it even as a subplot.
  • Ann's father Simon is killed off so casually, a careless reader might not notice it: in one scene, Ann's drugging his coffee so that she can sneak away to follow the vampires, an event that is not followed up until a short, easily missed sentence at the end of the book where we find out that Ann accidentally overdosed him and everyone assumes he killed himself after his daughter left him. Considering that the story initially appears to be setting the character up as an obstacle to the protagonists, he ultimately does nothing and is killed off without impacting either the main plot or the resolution. It's so casual, in fact, that it almost feels as if he was bumped off specifically so that the main characters won't have to face any consequences or answer any questions when they return home.
• Spiritual Successor: Some have pointed out that the novel - with its coming-of-age themes, displaced youth protagonists and attractive, trendy punk / goth vampires who spend their days engaged in violence and debauchery - can feel like a Darker and Edgier take on The Lost Boys, only set in the early 90s rather than the late 80s and with all the Ho Yay being explicitly canonical. The plot revolving around a group of drifter vampires who engage in gory mayhem is also reminiscent of Near Dark, which was released the same year as The Lost Boys, though Lost Souls is set primarily in the American South rather than the West.
• Squick: The eye for detail in this story is extreme and tends to describe very ugly, violent imagery in the most gloriously lurid terms and vice versa, so that even things that wouldn't normally be considered too terribly gross become distorted (memorably, in one case an innocent half-eaten piece of strawberry pie is compared to roadkill smeared across a plate), while human viscera might be described as "glistening" or "pearlescent." And that's not even counting scenes that describe actual violence, graphic sex, or gore.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: Some readers have a hard time caring about much that happens in the novel, or even struggle to finish it, due to the copious amounts of graphic violence, rape, incest, nihilistic angst, drug abuse, underage sex and other squicky content, all held together by a thinly-written plot. The vampires are far from the friendly kind and the majority of the characters are either murderous, hedonistic assholes, or helpless victims who suffer horrible fates.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Steve is intentionally written as a deeply flawed person, but some readers find it difficult to sympathize with his angst over breaking up with Ann, the woman he claims to love. Finding out your partner cheated on you sucks, but Steve's response was to beat and rape her, which is what prompted her to dump him; Ann is completely justified for this and Steve comes off as a far worse person. While Steve does eventually come to regret it, his attitude towards it is relatively minor and he never truly acknowledges he chose to violate her in one of the worst ways possible (Steve being drunk and angry comes off as a flimsy excuse at best, and the fact he did it because Ann cheated on him gives him Entitled to Have You vibes), nor does Steve seem to realize it was wrong until Ghost makes him feel bad about it (as opposed to Ann's distraught reaction). It doesn't help that Steve gets a happy ending with his best friend-turned-potential love interest Ghost, while Ann dies horrifically after being impregnated with a vampire fetus.
• Values Dissonance: Ann's rape is treated as just a shitty thing that Steve did to her, and that's it. Ann even still pines for Steve afterwards. These days especially, with more widespread understanding and criticism of sexual violence and domestic abuse, this comes off as pretty insensitive and problematic, and some modern readers have a difficult time sympathizing with Steve because of it.

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