Lost Souls

Lost Souls is the debut novel of the American writer Poppy Z. Brite, published in 1992.

Much of it happens in Missing Mile, North Carolina, where the children of the night gather at a club in black clothes and looking for somewhere to belong: Ghost, who sees things other people do not; Steve, his friend and bandmate; and Ann, who wants to be loved. Into their town come three wandering vampires, Molochai, Twig and Zillah, and the boy they take with them, who has just left a suburban house in Maryland. Zillah is drawn to Nothing because Zillah is his father, though the novel keeps that fact from some of the people it matters most to. What follows is a long drive south to New Orleans, a city the book treats as the vampires' ancestral ground, with Ghost following because his visions will not leave him alone, and the group's appetite for blood making the road trip as dangerous for its own members as for anyone else. The novel grew out of a short story, The Seed of Lost Souls, and its Steve and Ghost characters had appeared in Brite's earlier stories; they were the only ones to carry a full-length novel, though some of the vampires return in Brite's second book, Drawing Blood.