originally published Borderlands, Maclay and Associates, 1990
Louis and his unnamed buddy hang out in Louis' inherited Louisiana plantation mansion (crumbling of course) and live an idle life of forbidden pleasures including but not limited to Goth music, heavy drinking, heavy drug use, sex with anything and everything that moves, grave-robbing and dabbling in black magic.
One night Louis leads them to a graveyard where they dig up a corpse with a curious amulet around its neck. They take the amulet.
By the next night, a dried-out, mummified corpse of a young woman has turned up. Louis and his bud meet a particularly fascinating young androgyne at a nightclub and take him home. The next morning, our narrator awakes to find Louis now a mummified corpse. And he knows their one-night-stand, and the amulet, had something to do with it.
This is obviously a blatant re-write of HPL's "The Hound". Whether its a ripoff or a "reimagining" depends on your taste for it. My own is a bit mixed. Brite writes well - a wedding of Clark Ashton Smith and Anne Rice, that, in less skillful hands, could have been embarrassing. Still, the way this thing sprays around Goth/Anne Rice clichés borders on comical - ooooh - hallucinogenics! Gay sex! Straight sex! Bestiality! S&M! Dark nightclubs with booming Goth music and heavily made-up demimonde! Shit, the instigator's even named Louis!
Brite pulls it off - but just barely.
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