"His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood"

by Poppy Z. Brite
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.

"The Curious Case of Miss Violet Stone"

by Poppy Z. Brite and David Ferguson
originally published Shadows Over Baker Street, 2002

Holmes and Watson are summoned by Thomas Stone to investigate his sister, Violet.  Three years ago, she went swimming in a lake in Greece, and came out not herself - amnesiac, emotionally absent, and unable to eat food.  She's been wasting away for three years but, impossibly, is still alive.

Holmes and Watson find her debilitated but functioning.  She grabs Holmes arms and demands that he take her "diary", which is full of technical diagrams and instructions, and have some things made by machinists and lens manufacturers.  After reading the diary, Holmes suprisingly agrees, telling Watson that the girl's touch made him aware of a race of advanced beings, living in earth's distant past, who could send their consciousness forward through time to study different eras.  It seems Violet is a victim of the Great Race.  But this, an early experiment in the process they will later perfect, has gone awry.

Holmes has a strange device manufactured, and returns to the Stone home with it.  He secludes himself in her bedroom, with no witnesses, and does something with the machine.  Violet's consciousness is restored to her body, with no memory of her strange experience.  Holmes never explains what happened.

Though entertaining and with an interesting concept, this story is little more than a trifle.