156. "Wormwood" by Poppy Z. Brite

So, as I was driving from Georgia to North Carolina, I decided I needed to reread Wormwood, Poppy Z. Brite's first short story collection. Most of the stories are set in the rural South, although there are also some New Orleans entries. Brite was between 18 and 24 when he wrote these stories, and that comes through in both positive and negative ways--there's freshness, enthusiasm, and excitement, but also an overly dramatic and adjective-ridden prose (these are faults I still fight, so no harsh criticism here). I first read this collection as a goth graduate student at Penn State, which isn't the South but does have lush vegetation, humidity, and quirky, isolated mountain towns, so I could kind of relate to the world in the stories. I'm not sure I'd ever read the book in its entirety since then. Rereading it was a fun little jaunt into nostalgia and also helped me wrap my head around a few issues in my own writing.