Poppy Z. Brite

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Billy Martin (born May 25, 1967), also known as Poppy Z. Brite, is an American writer.

He first became well-known in the gothic horror genre of literature in the early 1990s by releasing a string of lucrative books and short story collections.

With many stories set in the New Orleans restaurant world, his later work ventured into the field of dark comedy.

Martin's books are usually standalone books, but they may have repeating characters from previous novels and short stories.

A large part of his art depicts explicitly bisexual and gay characters.

Personal life

Martin was born at Western University Hospital in Bowling Green, Warren County, Kentucky. He is a trans man and has written and spoken extensively about transgender rights and his own gender dysphoria. "I've been gay for as long as I was old enough to know what gay guys were," he wrote, "I've been a gay man who appears to have been born in a female body, and that's the point I'm coming from." Martin wrote "I'm just me" in 2003, although gender theorists like Kate Bornstein would call him a "nonoperative transsexual." He began hormone therapy in 2010 and in 2011 said he would like to be addressed by male pronouns.

Martin was arrested on January 6, 2009, as part of a nonviolent march in which churches in the city's Uptown neighborhood were packed to protest their closings. Martin was ranked second in second place as the second best local author in August 2009, according to Gambit Weekly's New Orleans newspaper.

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Career

Martin is best known for writing gothic and horror books as well as short stories. His trademarks include cartoons, graphic sexual descriptions, and a slew of gruesome events. Lost Souls (1992), Drawing Blood (1993), and Exquisite Corpse (1996); Martin has also published the short fiction collection Wormwood (originally published as Swamp Foetus; 1993). (Because of being published as Self-Made Man): (also published as Self-Made Man in 1998), Wrong Things (with Caitlin R. Kiernan, 2001), and The Devil You Know (2004). His book "Calcutta: Lord of Nerves" was chosen to represent the year 1992 in the Century's Best Horror Fiction anthology.

In a 1998 interview, Martin said that Southern writers Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Flannery O'Connor, Harper Lee, Thomas Wolfe, and William Faulkner all inspired his writing. He also included "Bradbury, Nabokov, W.S.," when answering a query about his literary influences. Stephen King, Ramsey Campbell, Shirley Jackson, Thomas Ligotti, Kathe Koja, Dennis Cooper, Dorothy Parker, Thomas Ligotti, Kathe Koja, Douglas Campbell, Dennis Cooper, Douglas Smith, Peter Straub, Baudelaire, Poe, Lovecraft, John Lennon... I could rattle off ten or twenty more quickly; they're all in there somewhere."

Martin wrote Courtney Love: The Real Story (1997), a biography of singer Courtney Love that had been officially "unauthorized," but he admitted that the project was carried out at Love's request and with her cooperation, which included access to Love's personal journal and letters.

Martin pushed away from horror fiction and gothic themes in the late 1990s and early 2000s when still writing about gay characters. The critically acclaimed Liquor books, Liquor (2004), Prime (2005), and Soul Kitchen (2006), three New Orleans restaurant legends, are dark comedies set in the New Orleans restaurant world. Value of X (2002) depicts the beginning of the Liquor series's development —Gary "G-Man" Stubbs and John "Rickey" Rickey; other stories, including many in his most recent collection The Devil You Know (2003) and the novella D*U*C*K (2002) chronicle events in the lives of the extended Stubbs family, a Catholic family whose roots are deeply embedded in New Orleans' traditional culture. Martin says he hopes to write three more books in the Liquor series, including Dead Shrimp Blues, Hurricane Stew, and Double Shot. However, he stopped publishing with Three Rivers Press, the Random House's trade paperback division that published the first three Liquor books in late 2006, and he's currently on a break from fiction writing. "If not my last book ever, then it will be my last one for some time," he said of Antediluvian Tales, a short story collection published by Subterranean Press in November 2007, "if not my last book ever." He also writes short non-fiction pieces, including guest editorials for the New Orleans Times-Picayune and a food review for Chile Pepper Magazine.

Martin has often stated that although he would allow certain of his films to be shot under the right circumstances, he has no enthusiasm for films and is not keen to see his work being shot. One segment of episode 209 of The Hunger, a short-lived horror anthology series on Showtime, featured his short story The Sixth Sentinel (filmed as The Dream Sentinel).

In Supernatural Fiction Writers: Contemporary Fantasy and Horror (2003) by Brian Stableford and The Evolution of the Weird Tale (2004) by S. T. Joshi, critical essays on Martin's fiction appear.

Martin officially announced that he was fired from writing on June 9, 2010, in a blog titled "I'm Actually Retired (For Now)" on his Livejournal. He said he had "completely lost the ability to communicate with [his] body of work" after which he went on to state that business problems were a partial explanation. He also mentioned that he was unable to escape from certain aspects of his life related to Hurricane Katrina. He ended his argument by saying that he disliked being friends with his characters but that he did not feel the urge to write for publication. Martin has since created a series of works focusing on New Orleans and voodoo.

Martin revealed in 2018 that he would return to writing with the non-fiction book Water If God Wills It: Stephen King's Spirituality and Spirituality.

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