This afternoon, I looked at Poppy Z Brite’s Livejournal for the first time in god know’s how long. I definitely looked at it in the aftermath of Katrina, because I wondered how Brite, a writer seriously identified with New Orleans, had been affected by the hurricane.

As of today, it’s safe to say that something is desperately, horribly wrong with Poppy Z. Brite. I’m not being glib. I’m hard pressed to think of Internet reading as consistently shocking as her last few months of entries, in which she admits to being unable to eat, having her weight drop to below 100 pounds, being unable to sleep, trying to kick her addiction to prescription painkillers (while retaining some tramadol use?), semi-involuntarily abandoning fiction, SMOKING CRACK THAT SHE FOUND ON HER NEIGHBOR’S PORCH and, finally, doing very serious damage to her career.

Brite is an interesting case– for years, she’d been one of my rhetorical bete noirs. There was something truly offensive about her early-to-mid 90s cutesy, gothy interviews, her pictorials in Propaganda, and how her sexualized persona turned the elder statesmen of SF/Fantasy/Horror into (unknowingly) creepy perverts. She seemed to relish the attention, although if the last 5 or so years are any indicator, she’s been trying really hard to get away from the image that she created.

With good reason. Talent of real merit was buried beneath her self-inflicted caricature. (There’s a lesson for the kids.) Her first novel, Lost Souls, centered around a relationship that was genuinely felt and real; a feat doubly amazing because it takes place inside a novel about sexy goth kid vampires. More than a few of her short stories were pretty good, as far as short stories go. She is, as far as I know, the only writer clever enough to equate the non-Euclidean geometry of Lovecraft’s Yuggoth cycle with the abysmal & nightmarish New York Port Authority Bus Terminal building, my personal vision of Hell on Earth. I assure anyone who has not read Lovecraft or not suffered through a wait in the terminal that this is as keen an insight as horror fiction has ever produced.

I haven’t had a chance to read her latest series about the lives of gay restauranteurs in New Orealns– but as she has (finally) dropped the horror and focused in entirely on relationships, which was always her subject anyway, I would imagine that the books are, at the least, pretty good. I would be surprised if they were bad.

Anyway, I’m a little concerned that her persona as the laughing, sexy madcap is again doing Brite an injustice– from her journal, which is an admittedly very limited view, and from the response amongst her fans, it doesn’t seem as if anyone is concerned that this behavior is unhealthy and self-destructive. So let me just give everyone a little primer: if you can’t eat and as a result, you’re losing weight rapidly, something’s wrong. If you’re so addicted to painkillers that you think you need rehab, something’s wrong. And while I ain’t gonna be all anti-hard drug hysterical and say that smoking crack, in itself, is wrong, I absolutely have no hesitation in saying that DRUGS YOU FOUND ON THE STREET DO NOT GO INTO YOUR BODY. They just don’t. It’s a recipe for disasters untold.

I have no idea how the hell to get in touch with Poppy Z. Brite, and honestly, if I could, I wouldn’t– what a person on the downward spiral needs the least is a total stranger being like YO WHAT’S WRONG SNAP OUT OF IT– but I would ask that anyone with sway over the woman to get in touch with her and have a long talk about the possibility of, at the very least, counseling. Something is terribly wrong, and I would truly prefer a world where Poppy Z. Brite was not another casualty of Katrina.