I first read Lost Souls as a high school freshman, when I was just discovering The Cure and Bauhaus and when I snuck a tube of black lipstick to school in my coffin-shaped purse, because my mother would make me wipe it off if I applied it at home. Lost Souls was to me a riotous and wonderful thing that spoke like magic to all my deepest and loneliest longings. Reading it now, I notice things that I glossed over as a teenager, cruelties that seemed less sharp to me then. I find myself loving Ghost far more than the vampires, nearly all of whom now strike me as petty and stupid. But I can still see the glimmers of magic clinging to PZB’s prose, which profoundly influenced me and my own writing and style. It’s still a favorite, though a flawed one.