An Analysis on an Excerpt:

03.03.2014

‘A Georgia Story’ from Wormwood written by Poppy Z. Brite (1994).

Poppy Z. Brite writes to entertain. She takes readers away from ‘safe’ storytelling to the grungy underbelly of social outcasts, weirdos and the ‘freaks’ of society, and her stories, as with these lives, often don’t have happy endings. ‘A Georgia Story’ revolves around one of four main characters as he returns home after a friend’s death drove him from it a few years prior.

Some people can’t ‘be normal’ and these are the characters Brite writes about. We see Sammy’s life through someone who has ‘made it’. I like that Brite gives a voice to these characters. They are far more interesting and she certainly doesn't make them out to be anything they aren't. There is no happy ending.  She writes, ‘Sometime Gene laughed and was human.’ Her characters don’t feel as though they are part of the human race.

This piece is purely emotive. Poppy Z. Brite wants you to be in the character’s place – right there with him, not only seeing what he sees but being in his mind as well, as he reflects on his past. She does it perfectly with her descriptions and character narration.

She takes us from the immense descriptions of what the character is seeing and pulls us, as the character, back to reality with Ben’s character – rather than have him explore the freaks in his own narration in his head. Her dialogue bit with Ben talking to both the main character and to Sammy, she switches effortlessly between. It is easy to follow because of the punctuation and sentence structures. She uses exclamation points and short sentences to talk to the geek – as if he can’t understand anything else, like a child, or an animal.

The main character tells us, ‘I knew that later, before this fresh blood dried, the geek's fingers would find it and use it to create more tracings, new legends to decorate his cage.’ Because he knows this of their past – it’s what Sammy did. But he doesn't say ‘Sammy’. It’s ‘the geek’, because this is who Sammy is now. He compares the make-up Sammy wore, to the gore he's decorated himself with now. You get the feeling of who Sammy was and feeling awful for what he is.

‘Take me with you’, Sammy whispers but there is no hope. He is not saved. There is no ‘feel good’ moment – except maybe for the voice of the story. He has come back to his home town as a tourist. He can leave any time.

When he puts his hand into the cage and says, ‘Sammy reached up to take it, I drew back’, is the point when the main character forgets his friend. It was no longer Sammy and he can move on. That is what he has come back for, an ending of longing for his youth as addressed in the final sentence.

Poppy Z. Brite writes in a mixture of long and short sentences. Her longer sentences are giving descriptions or longer chunks of information and usually followed by short statements to ram in your face, so to speak. This works to transport you to where the narrator is. The carny, Ben, speaks the way he would talk – not in perfect English; ‘Let go that stick, you!’

The introduction for this short story collection is written by Dan Simmons. He describes when he first met Poppy Z. Brite, by chance, while doing a reading and he says, ‘I may have been the only member of the audience not wearing black leather and chains.’ I think to say Brite's target audience is only alternative/goth types is a gross underestimate. Brite writes about characters and subjects that these groups might find more interesting than the general population, but the target audience broadens to young adult – adult, perhaps with a darker attraction, which is why she is so often wrongly categorised as horror.

I chose to analyse this piece because it's one of my favourite short stories by this author, but I could have chosen any of her earlier work.  This one in particular, I love her subject matter, I love the descriptions of the four characters and I relate to the dark, macabre subject matter and how she effortlessly expresses it. As I said, she gives voice to the social outcasts of this world, a voice not heard enough, I voice I relate to, and a voice I think I mimic quite a lot.