Young traumatized drifter and comics artist Trevor McGee returns to the house where his father had killed Trevor's mother and brother and then himself to finally get rid of the shadows of the past and find an answer to the question why his father did leave him alive.
There, in the small town of Missing Mile, he not only meets the very literal ghosts of his past, but also Zach, a hacker from New Orleans whose own traumata are nearly as bad as Trevor's. Obviously, they are going to fall in love.
Usually, I am not one of Brite's detractors, but Drawing Blood left me as cold as a book can. Besides some formal problems I have with it - especially a sub-plot in Zach's home of New Orleans that does not have a function in the book which could not have been filled more elegantly and less book-bloatingly in very different ways - the novel falls down flat for me in its core.
While reading, I was never able to believe Trevor and Zach as the traumatized and hurt people they were supposed to be; it felt mostly like Brite was going through the motions of oh-so-sexy pain and telling me how hurt her characters were, without ever writing about truly damaged people.
The patness of the ending did not much to change my mind about the characterization here either. I am sorry, but this is not the way pain works - actually, it's not even an effective romantization of pain.
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