Exquisite Corpse

Exquisite Corpse Plot Summary

Introduction

In a London morgue, something impossible happened. Andrew Compton, convicted serial killer of twenty-three young men, lay cold and still on the autopsy table. The doctors approached with their instruments, ready to dissect the notorious murderer who had died in his prison cell. But when the scalpel pierced his chest, Andrew's eyes snapped open. Death had been merely a performance, and now the Eternal Host was free. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic in New Orleans, another predator stalked the humid streets of the French Quarter. Jay Byrne, heir to industrial fortune and collector of beautiful corpses, refined his deadly appetites in the shadows of wrought-iron balconies and gas-lit alleys. When these two monsters collided in a city soaked with sin and secrets, their union would birth a nightmare beyond imagination. This is their love story—written in blood, sealed with flesh, and consummated in the most intimate act of all: the complete consumption of another human being.

Chapter 1: Escape from the Coffin: Andrew's Resurrection

The prison cell had been Andrew Compton's world for five years. Four stone walls, a narrow bed, and the constant glare of fluorescent lights had contained England's most notorious serial killer since his capture in 1988. Twenty-three boys and young men had died by his hand, each one carefully selected from London's lost and forgotten. Now, at thirty-three, Andrew faced a different kind of ending. The HIV diagnosis came as no surprise. His years of intimate contact with the blood and flesh of his victims had always carried risks. As his body weakened and death approached, Andrew discovered an extraordinary talent—his ability to slow his vital signs to nearly imperceptible levels. What had begun as a childhood game of playing dead became his key to freedom. On November fifth, Guy Fawkes Day, Andrew performed his greatest deception. Guards found him motionless in his cell, no pulse detectable, skin cold and gray. The prison doctor pronounced him dead, and his body was transported to a nearby hospital for autopsy. Dr. Drummond and his young assistant, Waring, prepared to examine the corpse of the Eternal Host. But when the scalpel pierced Andrew's chest, death released its hold. His eyes flew open, meeting the shocked gaze of Dr. Drummond. In one fluid motion, Andrew seized the blade and drove it through the doctor's eye and into his brain. Young Waring tried to flee, but Andrew's hands found his throat, opening it with surgical precision. The taste of fresh blood after five years of deprivation was intoxicating. Now dressed in Waring's medical clothing, Andrew walked calmly through the hospital corridors. Staff members nodded respectfully at the doctor making his rounds. In the parking lot, he found Waring's Ford and drove toward London, leaving behind two corpses and a mystery that would confound authorities for days. The dead had risen, and Andrew Compton was hungry once again.

Chapter 2: Predators Recognize Their Own: Andrew Meets Jay

Andrew's journey to New Orleans came by chance and necessity. Using the identity of Sam Toole, an American physicist he'd killed in a London lavatory, he boarded a plane to Atlanta and then took a Greyhound bus south. The city called to him with its promise of anonymity and abundance—four thousand bars for seven hundred thousand residents, a ratio that spoke of dissolution and opportunity. The French Quarter at night became Andrew's hunting ground. Its narrow streets and wrought-iron balconies reminded him of London's Soho, but with a tropical decadence that excited his senses. The Hand of Glory bar drew him in with its grotto-like atmosphere and diverse clientele. He sat in shadow, waiting for the right victim to present itself. Instead, he found Jay Byrne. Tall, elegant, with cold mint-green eyes and an aura of barely contained danger, Jay approached Andrew's table carrying two bottles of cold beer. Their conversation began as casual pickup banter, but both men sensed something deeper—a recognition that transcended ordinary human interaction. When they shook hands, each instinctively grasped the other's wrist, testing, measuring, claiming. "What brings you to New Orleans?" Jay asked in his soft Southern drawl. "The climate," Andrew replied. "Moral and meteorological." In the alleyway behind the bar, they kissed with desperate hunger. Jay's tongue tasted of blood and rage—flavors Andrew knew intimately from his own mouth. When Jay invited him home, Andrew felt the dangerous thrill of walking into another predator's lair. But he was no longer the cautious killer who had hidden in London's shadows. Death had baptized him, and now he feared nothing. Jay's house on Royal Street was a Gothic fantasy of brocade and shadows. In the kitchen, over cognac and casual conversation, Jay handcuffed Andrew to a chair. It was meant to be a test, perhaps a prelude to murder. But Andrew had faced worse restraints than these. When Jay produced a frozen human head and demanded Andrew retrieve a key from its mouth, he complied without hesitation. The touch of dead flesh held no horror for one who had loved corpses longer than most men loved the living.

Chapter 3: Beautiful Prey: Tran's Descent into Danger

Tran moved through the French Quarter like a beautiful ghost, his Vietnamese features and androgynous grace turning heads wherever he walked. At twenty-one, he carried the weight of two worlds—the traditional expectations of his immigrant family and the dangerous freedoms of New Orleans nightlife. His trade in LSD kept him connected to the city's underground, while his beauty attracted predators of every variety. The confrontation with his father had been inevitable. T.V. Tran discovered the letters—explicit, passionate, disturbing correspondence from an older lover who signed himself Luke. The pages detailed drug use, sexual experimentation, and a relationship that violated everything T.V. held sacred about family honor. "Are these things the truth?" his father asked, and Tran could only nod. Cast out from his family home in Versailles, the Vietnamese community east of the city, Tran drifted toward the Quarter with nowhere else to go. His history with Luke Ransom—novelist, radio host, and HIV-positive romantic obsessive—had ended in mutual destruction eight months earlier. The breakup left Tran gun-shy about relationships, but desperate for connection and shelter. Jay Byrne represented everything Tran found compelling: mystery, danger, and the promise of experiences beyond his sheltered existence. When Jay invited him to pose for photographs, Tran saw opportunity. When that invitation became something more intimate, he accepted despite his instincts. Jay's house on Royal Street was a temple to refined decadence, all velvet and candlelight and shadows that seemed to breathe. Their first encounter ended in frustration. On the verge of consummation, Jay suddenly withdrew, claiming he couldn't continue. Tran spent the night in Jay's bed, untouched but not unwanted, sensing currents of desire and restraint he couldn't understand. The next evening brought a different invitation—dinner with Jay and his visiting cousin Arthur, recently arrived from London. Tran accepted, hungry for whatever these dangerous men might offer. He had no way of knowing that he was walking into a trap designed by two of the world's most accomplished killers.

Chapter 4: Love's Toxic Remains: Luke's Desperate Pursuit

Luke Ransom's rage had sustained him through the eight months since losing Tran. The HIV diagnosis had transformed what might have been heartbreak into something more virulent—a poisonous blend of grief, fury, and accelerating physical decline. His pirate radio station, WHIV, became the vessel for his venom, broadcasting anti-establishment rants across the New Orleans airwaves under the persona of Lush Rimbaud. The affair with Tran had been Luke's attempt at redemption—love with someone young enough to represent possibility rather than just another conquest. But love, for Luke, had always been a form of possession, and possession bred the need for control. When his HIV status became a death sentence, he tried to drag Tran down with him, literally attempting to inject the young man with his infected blood. Now, after months of separation, Luke learned through a mutual acquaintance that Tran was involved with Jay Byrne, a wealthy Quarter eccentric with a disturbing reputation. The news shattered Luke's careful equilibrium. He abandoned his radio show mid-broadcast, walked away from everything he'd built, and set out to reclaim what he considered rightfully his. Finding Jay's house required patience and careful observation. The property on Royal Street was a fortress of privacy—high walls topped with razor wire, electronic surveillance, and the aura of serious money protecting serious secrets. Luke watched from the shadows, noting the pineapple finials on the wrought-iron gate, the single corner of the house visible through the bars. When he saw Tran on the street—naked, bleeding, barely conscious—being led away by Jay under police protection, Luke's world collapsed into pure fury. The cops had been bought, their palms greased with enough cash to overlook whatever had been done to the beautiful Vietnamese boy. Luke tried to intervene, but found himself pinned against a brick wall while his former lover was carried away like a piece of damaged property. That night, Luke scaled the walls surrounding Jay's compound, following the sound of screams that cut through the humid air like razors through silk. What he found in the slave quarters behind the house would haunt him for the brief remainder of his life—if the images didn't drive him to end it first.

Chapter 5: The Final Communion: Flesh, Blood, and Possession

The slave quarters behind Jay's house had been converted into a temple of death. Fluorescent lights illuminated shelves lined with skulls, preserved organs floating in jars, and the carefully arranged remains of dozens of young men. On a metal table in the center of the room, Tran lay strapped and helpless while Jay and Andrew prepared for their ultimate feast. Andrew had recognized Tran immediately as the perfect victim—beautiful, vulnerable, and utterly trusting despite his dangerous lifestyle. Jay's initial reluctance crumbled under Andrew's insistence. Together, they had lured the young man to dinner, plied him with alcohol and champagne, then carried his semiconscious body to their killing floor. The torture began with calculated precision. Jay, the more experienced of the two, guided Andrew through the delicate process of opening a living victim without killing him too quickly. Hemostats clamped to Tran's nipples, a screwdriver driven into his rectum, teeth marks in his tender flesh—each violation carefully calibrated to maximize pain while preserving life for as long as possible. But their ritual was interrupted by the crash of breaking glass. Luke Ransom burst through the window, razor in hand, driven by desperate love and homicidal fury. He found his former lover split open like a sacrifice, his entrails exposed to the teeth of two cannibalistic predators who fed on his living flesh. The battle was brief but decisive. Luke's razor found Jay's throat, opening it in a single stroke that sent arterial blood fountaining across the room. Jay died with a frozen grin, his eyes reflecting the madness that had consumed his final moments. Andrew, strangely calm in the face of his lover's death, made no attempt to defend himself or retaliate. Instead, he recognized in Luke a kindred spirit—another predator marked by death and driven by hungers the civilized world could never satisfy. Tran died as his killers spoke, his last breath escaping in a bubble of blood while the two monsters who had destroyed him negotiated the terms of their own survival.

Chapter 6: Aftermath: Exquisite Transformations

Andrew carried Jay's body into the house, away from the carnage of the slave quarters. In the civilized surroundings of the bedroom, he performed his final acts of love—bathing the corpse, preparing it, consuming portions of the flesh that had once housed his brief but perfect companion. This was communion in its truest form, the complete absorption of another being into oneself. Before leaving New Orleans, Andrew prepared a sandwich from Jay's meat, wrapping it carefully for the journey ahead. He dressed in his dead lover's clothes and walked calmly through the French Quarter to the train station, purchasing a ticket on the first westbound train. As the silver cars pulled away from Louisiana, carrying him toward the desert, Andrew consumed his final meal of human flesh and felt Jay's essence merging with his own. Luke remained behind in the city that had witnessed so much death. The heroin he'd avoided for years called to him now with promises of peace and forgetfulness. In a shabby motel room, he filled a syringe with brown Mexican tar and sent it coursing through his veins. The drug offered temporary escape from the images burned into his memory—Tran's opened body, Jay's feeding mouth, the taste of human blood on his own lips. In the slave quarters, two corpses embraced in the final stages of decay. The New Orleans heat accelerated their decomposition, transforming what had once been beauty into something else entirely. Tran and Jay melted together in a grotesque parody of love, their flesh feeding clouds of flies and generations of maggots that cleaned the bones with patient efficiency.

Summary

What emerged from the crucible of that blood-soaked November was not love as the world understands it, but something far more primal and eternal. Andrew Compton had found in Jay Byrne a perfect complement to his own monstrous nature, while Luke Ransom discovered that even justified revenge carries its own form of damnation. Tran, beautiful and doomed, served as both catalyst and victim in a collision between predators that left none unchanged. The train carried Andrew into America's heartland, where new hunting grounds awaited and Jay's voice would whisper guidance from within his transformed flesh. Death had been not an ending but a doorway, transforming mere serial killing into something approaching sacrament. In consuming his lover, Andrew had achieved the ultimate intimacy—a union that transcended the crude mechanics of murder and ascended into genuine, if monstrous, transcendence.

About Author

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Poppy Z. Brite

Martin delves into the intricate interplay between identity and environment, exploring themes of gender, decay, and belonging in his literary work. As an author who self-identifies as a homosexual male, his writing often reflects his personal experiences with gender dysphoria and the complexities of self-identification. These elements are particularly evident in his horror-tinged narratives, which are set predominantly in New Orleans and the American South. In crafting stories like "Lost Souls" and "Drawing Blood," Martin provides pragmatic portrayals of homosexual relationships, while also delving into themes of death and the macabre.\n\nThrough evocative prose and deep character development, Martin's books not only entertain but also challenge readers to engage with unconventional and often unsettling topics. While he achieved early success by selling his first story at 18, Martin’s career has continued to evolve, marked by a deliberate shift toward more authentic representations of New Orleans. This evolution is evident in later works like "The Value of X," where he moves away from stereotypical depictions of the city to offer a more nuanced perspective.\n\nReaders who appreciate narratives rich in atmosphere and complex emotional landscapes will find Martin's work particularly rewarding. His ability to intertwine personal themes with broader societal issues makes his stories both impactful and thought-provoking. For those interested in a more in-depth exploration of his journey and contributions, this short bio highlights the pivotal moments and themes in Martin's literary career. By pushing the boundaries of traditional storytelling, Martin invites his audience to reconsider their own perspectives on identity and place.

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