His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood - and Other Stories

Poppy Z. Brite

Penguin 60s

1996

88 páginas

2h 56m

ISBN-10: 0146000501

Life holds no taboos for Howard and Louis. They have tried everything, music, drugs, sex with girls, then sex with each other but nothing seems to give their empty young lives meaning. Eventually they go to Louis’s ancestral home, a large plantation house on the edge of a swamp near Baton Rouge, where they come up with the idea of making a museum of death in the basement to alleviate their boredom.
Grave robbing provides Howard and Louis with some new grisly excitement in their lives (and a case of Absinthe that they find in a New Orleans tomb). Ever wanting to find a better thrill, they hear of a white voodoo priest buried in a long forgotten Negro graveyard out in the bayou. The priest was rumoured to have been buried with a powerful charm that can enable the wearer to hex his enemies to a painful death. This object is irresistible to Louis, who decides he wants it for himself.
Getting the charm proves easy; he digs up the grave and takes the fetish from around the neck of the corpse. Later that night a teenage girl is found dead by the river, all grey and dried out like the meat had been sucked out of her and Louis meets an irresistibly attractive young man who seems to know all about voodoo and the charm….