Editor's Note: Jason Louv is Webmaster of the excellent site King Mob. Check out his Grant Morrison interview "Flick The Switch."

Counterculture diva Poppy Z. Brite sold her first story when she was 18 and spent the next decade or so writing some of the most elegant and heartbreaking novels the horror genre has seen. Although her particular brand of southern gothic has been highly appreciated by both Southerners and goths (who have also been her main subject matter), Brite is currently aiming to expand her writing out of the niche it has been placed into. Her early genre work--Lost Souls, Wormwood, Drawing Blood, Exquisite Corpse, and The Lazarus Heart (not to mention a biography of Courtney Love)--has recently been superceded by more experimental novels like Plastic Jesus and her soon-to-be-published The Value Of X and Liquor. I spoke with her about her upcoming work via e-mail to her home in New Orleans.

JL: You have a couple of new novels coming out in the next couple of years. Can you give us any specifics as to their plots?

PZB: Well, I have two novels coming out about the same set of characters. The Value Of X, which will be out from Subterranean Press in a couple of months, takes place in the early 1990s and follows the two boys as they grow up in a poor neighborhood in New Orleans and figure out what they want to do with their lives. There's more information and an excerpt on Subterranean's Web site.

Liquor, the second book, probably won't be out until early 2004--such are the vagaries of Big Publishing. It rejoins the boys about ten years later, when they're experienced cooks who have become disillusioned with working in other people's kitchens and decide to start their own restaurant. Among other things, it's a bit of a send-up of the bitchy, incestuous, highly political New Orleans restaurant scene. So these are two very different books about the same two characters.

JL: Are you having any of the same problems with publishers as you did with Exquisite Corpse? How do you expect the new books to be marketed?

PZB: If anything, when Liquor began being shopped to U.S. publishers, it ran into problems that were the opposite of Exquisite Corpse--that is, it wasn't extreme enough. It's not at all like my previous work, and publishers hate that--once you've had some success in a particular genre, they want to keep you there forever. I ended up changing literary agents, because my previous agent, while very good, was also very dedicated to genre fiction and thus uncomfortable with the direction my work is taking. My new agent has been able to get the book in front of editors who didn't have so many preconceived ideas about my work, and consequently understood it on its own merits rather than expecting it to turn into a psychosexual horror story halfway through.

It's far too early to comment on how I hope to see Liquor marketed--this is a case where I'll need to work closely with my publisher and incorporate their expertise with my own experiences. Of course it helps that I already have a loyal readership. I can't take for granted that they will like this new work, but I hope and believe that they will.

JL: Will Liquor also be coming out from Subterranean?

PZB: No–as much as I like working with small presses, I just can't afford to continue doing so exclusively. They don't have the money, and most of them don't have the kind of distribution I need. Subterranean may do a limited edition, but the book's primary U.S. publisher will be Three Rivers, a division of Crown. I've just signed a deal with them for Liquor and an untitled sequel.

JL: So The Value Of X and Liquor will be the first two parts of a planned trilogy?

PZB: Well, sort of. The Value Of X is quite different from Liquor in style and mood. I can't speak definitely about the third book since it isn't written yet, but I think if you eventually lined up the three books and sang that Sesame Street song "Which of these things is not like the others?", The Value Of X would be the freak. It's about the characters' early lives and relationships. Liquor and the sequel are closer to each other in tone and in time--they only take place about two years apart, while The Value Of X takes place ten years before Liquor. (Confused yet?)

JL: As your husband Chris DeBarr is a chef, is this culture of New Orleans restauranteurs, cooks, barflies, etc., one you've found yourself writing about from the inside?

PZB: There wouldn't be much point to writing about it from the outside. I've read attempts to do so, and they are truly pathetic--"culinary mysteries" where the heroine ends up falling off a wrought iron balcony into a giant king cake and such.

Certainly I've learned a great deal about the local restaurant scene (and kitchen culture in general) from Chris, who's been in the business for 25 years. But I might never have met him in the first place if I hadn't been so interested in food and restaurants. It's a common fascination for native New Orleanians--probably it would be more unusual if I wasn't interested.

JL: Lost Souls is about to be republished in a tenth-anniversary edition. How do you feel about it now as compared to when it was first published, especially now that goth has become such the institution in Middle America that it wasn't in 1992?

PZB: As I said in my foreword to the new edition, I mostly feel it's a souvenir of a person I'll never be, or even much want to visit with, again; still I'm glad it is there. I don't feel that the status of goth culture has much impact on the book itself, though it has certainly affected the sales.

JL: I've heard Lost Souls called a "goth Catcher in the Rye" and it was certainly embraced by the young and disaffected (and continues to be–I was on a Greyhound about a month ago and there was a homeless goth couple in the back, dressed up just like Nothing might have been, passing the book back and forth). I would guess (correct me if I'm wrong) that the main audience for Lost Souls is lonely and alienated goth teenagers looking for (and finding) identification. What's it been like interacting with this fan base, especially ten years on, when you might not particularly identify with that culture or mind-set anymore?

PZB: I've not found this (or any other one group) to be the main audience for Lost Souls. You'd expect it to be, certainly, but I'm always surprised by the diversity of my readership. I've spoken elsewhere about one of the most hardcore collectors of my work–an Alabama grandfather who also collects Confederate memorabilia. So you just never know.