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The Horror Show had an influential readership, and Brite was an industry sensation by the time she enrolled at the University of North Carolina, where she lasted ''about a minute,'' dropping out to write a novel about teen alienation and French Quarter vampires. Lost Souls was finished when, in 1991, Brite was shyly eyeing one of her heroes, Harlan Ellison, across the greenroom at a writers' convention. Before she could muster the courage to introduce herself, he saw her and shouted that he loved her work. ''Poppy was in one of her heavy Goth phases,'' Ellison remembers. ''The hair was half vermilion. She had this cute little face, but she clearly understood the dark inner heart of American degeneracy.'' He got her an agent; the agent got her a deal -- three books, six figures. Brite was soon famous and cocky and self-mythologizing -- autographing her books in blood and boasting of reading The Bell Jar at age 5.

Her second book was as much about jazz and comics as haunted houses, and Brite wanted to call it Birdland. Her publisher insisted on Drawing Blood, a title redolent of hackwork, which it was anything but. ''Poppy gets compared, erroneously, to Anne Rice,'' says the writer Douglas Brinkley. ''She's much closer to Henry Miller or Hunter S. Thompson.'' However apt the comparison, her third novel, Exquisite Corpse, was extreme even by the standards of modernist filth or gonzo derangement. Dropped by a scandalized Dell, it landed at Simon & Schuster. Upon its 1996 release, Brite described the book as a ''necrophilic, cannibalistic serial killer love story.'' If you could stomach it, you probably admired it. ''It was beautifully written,'' Gaiman says, ''but written into the minds of people you really didn't want to be with.''

Certainly,'' Brite blogged last September, ''there is a part of me that wonders how rich I'd be today if I'd been the sort of writer who could crank out endless sequels to my successful debut.... I don't wish I'd done it.... I just wonder.''

Instead, flush with the $500,000 or so she earned for her Courtney Love bio, Brite spent years writing short stories and taking pleasure in putting them out through small presses. Such is the case with Triads, an upcoming novel about cross-dressers and mobsters. It's earned enviable advance reviews -- and it's available, in a limited edition of 1,250 copies, from the Subterranean Press of Burton, Mich. Brite would love to publish with them all the time, but a living legend's got to make a living.

''I had started another horror novel in the summer of 2000,'' Brite says. ''I didn't like it.'' She was fed up with her voice, bored by her subject matter, on the verge of thinking she didn't want to write anymore. ''One day, I said to Chris, 'I'm just so sick of my stupid depressing novel, I'm just gonna go upstairs and write something fun.''' Here was the story of two local boys, buddies and lovers, opening a restaurant whose every dish is prepared with liquor. Fun to write, hard to sell: Brite's agent, who'd warned her she was destroying her career, shopped Liquor to genre publishers who brushed it off. Once he was fired, her new agent got her a two-book deal. Brite's still nervously hoping she'll be able to keep writing about these characters. ''To do that,'' she says, ''I need Liquor to be -- not to be on the New York Times best-seller list -- but to do respectably well.... I really do feel like a first-time novelist.'' The book's done decently since its March release, but it looks to be a while before it earns out its advance.

Liquor is dedicated to John Kennedy Toole -- a tribute to Brite's idea that his farcical A Confederacy of Dunces is the perfect piece of fiction about her hometown and a nod to how hard taking the hard road can be. Toole, unable to sell his book, killed himself at 32. When his mother got it published posthumously, it won the Pulitzer Prize.

Brite has written of a ''shady past'' regarding the desecration of grave sites -- the stealing of offerings, markers, maybe even bones. These days, she cleans the Toole family tomb in the week before Halloween and picnics there every All Saints' Day.