Lost Souls Book

5 Would She Even Recognize Me Stars



I think it's time I try to review this novel…. This will likely be a disaster.

"I still recall the taste of your tears.
Echoing your voice just like the ringing in my ears.
My favorite dreams of you still wash ashore.
Scraping through my head 'till I don't want to sleep anymore."

Like so many young people before me, I always thought that sixteen was going to be my year. I was absolutely convinced that my life was going to irrevocably change within those 365 days. And it did! My life changed exponentially that year, it just didn't change quite the way I always dreamt it would.

I was at a friend's party when he walked into the room. Ruggedly handsome, with startling blue eyes, slightly crooked front teeth and a shock of dark brown hair artfully spiked up in the fashion of the day. A singer in a local metal band; he had tattoos, scars and an almost palpable aura of anger. He fascinated me, and when he turned those gorgeous blue eyes my way he would change my life forever.

It was this beautiful, angry young man who first put a copy of Lost Souls by Poppy Z. Brite into my trusting hands. (Like Jess's ex fiancé this was his favourite book and he talked about it constantly.) In great sleep-depriving bites, I devoured it. This deranged novel about a teenage boy who meets a trio of vampires and becomes consumed by them. I don't remember feeling the irony at that time, but in hindsight it's undeniable, that this larger than life creature would put a book about a troubled young man named 'Nothing' into the hands of a sixteen year old girl who felt like nothing.

"You always were the one to show me how
Back then I couldn't do the things that I can do now.
This thing is slowly taking me apart.
Grey would be the color if I had a heart."

I could never figure out what he saw in me back then. When I looked in the mirror all I saw was a reflection of disappointment in resigned grey eyes, limp blonde hair and too-wide hips. Here was this God of a man (I taste bile in my throat even thinking this now but at the time it was true) telling me he loved me - a hundred times a day - and that I was his everything. This man who turned heads in every room we entered, who commanded so much attention that there was rarely any left for anyone else.

And he had this way of making me feel guilty if anyone paid more attention to me than him, he was poisonously jealous. Any time a boy talked to me, even if he was a mutual friend of ours, he would become crazed. Quizzing me about it at the best of times. Screaming into my face and punching walls at it's worst.

I fell in love with Lost Souls the same way I fell in love with him, entirely and without precedent.

This dark, deranged parody of love.

Consuming because it is both foreign and familiar. It's a story as old as time. Obsession. Destruction. Dark monsters that come out of the woodwork when you are too exhausted to fight them, so instead you embrace them. Call them lovers and friends, when really they are eating you alive. Just like the darkness inside you.

I don't think I've done a very good job of explaining why I love this novel, and always will. I think rather I may have inadvertently explained why I SHOULD probably hate this book. And all the poison and toxicity that even thinking of it brings back, like a dark blue bruise that is slowly fading to greens and yellows along the edges but still hurts like hell when you stare too hard at it. But I don't hate it and I can't hate it; any more than I can hate the sad-eyed girl with the fake smile staring back at me from pictures I keep in a box in my closet.

This book is a part of me, and maybe that part is a little ugly and a lot terrifying but I can't deny that whenever I see this book on my shelf I run my finger along its binding and remind myself of that innocent sixteen year old girl. And what happened when she let someone make her their everything….

Night is the hardest time to be alive, and four a.m. knows all my secrets.

"In this place it seems like such a shame.
Though it all looks different now,
I know it's still the same
Everywhere I look you're all I see.
Just a fading fucking reminder of who I used to be."

(Lyrics from 'Something I Can Never Have' by Nine Inch Nails)