The Sluts [Paperback]

I remember reading my first Dennis Cooper novel when I was like 19 or 20, an assignment, believe it or not, for my Gay Fiction class. I devoured Frisk while curled up on a couch hidden in some corner in some alcove in some University office somewhere. It captivated and terrified me, and when I walked outside into the blazing sunlight afterward, I felt like the world I had known and grown accustomed to had melted away, leaving exposed the ragged skeleton of whatever reality had always been there, breathing furtively, one eye coolly surveying, waiting to be discovered.

If the world wasn't populated with so much detritus in the name of art, literature, film, and music then maybe Cooper wouldn't be as fragile and desperately invaluable as I think he is. Truth be told, Frisk and the rest of the early books of what came to be known as the George Miles Cycle is some of the most effective and dangerous writing I have ever happened upon. And that's really what great writing, what great art really should be about: dangerous, disturbing, disquieting, and diligent about the first three d's. Right?

I'll be honest, I haven't thought much of Cooper's last coupla efforts. God Jr. read like a bad WB movie of the week, and Period and My Loose Thread were slight and hesitant. The Sluts is the first of his books in a long while that finds and reaps the true power of Cooper's bleak vision and fiery writing. The Sluts is for intelligent people. Not puffed-up hysterics who can't see the (pitch) black humor masquerading as horror. That's not to say it is for all tastes. Some will hate this book: it is compelling and aggressively unpleasant, ugly and hilarious, deeply effective and yet cause for concern.

I'll admit it, I have always found Cooper's relentless obsessions and intertwinings of violent sex, death, and pedophiliac fantasy a bit suspect...maybe I'll go so far as to say Cooper makes me UNCOMFORTABLE--meaning I don't necessarily trust what goes on in that man's mind, nor do I really want to know the complete picture. Know what I mean? But what I've always liked about Cooper was that he was never unafraid to re-imagine the concept of DESIRE, especially gay male sexual desire, as something sick and consuming, violent, twisted, and profane, an engorged monster writhing on a battlefield.

What I also admire about Cooper is his ability to find and tweak the basest aspects of humanity, and somehow make evil seem somewhat fallible, and most importantly to steal the sing-songy plastic fabulousness of Gay Culture and show it for its smudgy disaffected malice, its vicious preoccupation with its own Lust and Doom.

The Sluts is an ingeniously-sructured "novel" that concerns the gossipy goings-on in a demented online community that reviews and comments on Gay Male Escorts. Such websites really exist. One such escort in general, Brad, captivates the community and begins to spin an endless web of lies and obsessions, even after the source of all the intrigue has long since been dissembled and becomes something of a ghost.

No other work of art that I've ever encountered has so accurately portrayed the Internet, and more specifically, humanity as it is currently evolving online, as a conglomeration of such wicked perversions, loneliness, and deceit. It's almost as if Cooper has seen our future, seen the future of humanity as it clutters up technology and loses all sense of self and morality. For that, this book is ingenious. Its tales of self-hating, utterly insane seriocomic sexual fantasy are very well-written and totally scary.

In terms of the larger picture here, the tale of a Lost Boy gone cold, eaten up by the predators of the world, stretched to the level of myth, but never given love, it's all rather mesmerizing but Cooper has gone down that route before. I never felt much affection for all those pretty waifs Cooper worshipped and wanted to tear apart with his lust, I never cared much for those characters, or for the desire they create. Blah blah blah. I appreciate Cooper's dark comic gifts and his daring, but sometimes I wish he could just show us the other side as well, at least to just engender something of a counterpoint. For all his wounded observations, and biting truth-telling Cooper never seems courageous enough to give us any hope.

Then again, maybe he doesn't have to...after all, look at this world we live in.

Dennis Cooper's new novel, The Sluts, opens with an online review of a hustler named "Brad" who has mental problems. A second review follows, and then a third. The novel is told through these reviews and through emails and posts on a website devoted to reviewing hustlers. The posts by these reviewers mix the empty, repeated, imitative language of pornography with a series of straightforward, honest sounding voices. And they lie.

They lie, and they admit to lying when they think it will help you believe their next lie. The saga of "Brad" on this website gets stranger and stranger and it becomes clear that the reviewers are obsessed. They are writing themselves into the story. We only rarely hear from Brad himself, who might have a brain tumor, who might be fourteen or eighteen or something in between, who might be real. The story that you piece together conflicts with itself and sprawls. He's in prison. His boyfriend has hired him out for violent sex and a man pays to break his legs during the act. Another man pays to cut his face and murder him. Only, maybe not.

In the end, what's real is unimportant. This is a novel about the reviewers themselves. It's about their obsessions and about their ability to live inside their own heads. The sex described is brutal and graphic and unreal and maybe none of it ever happens and maybe some of it does. In any case, The Sluts is good. It's interesting and perverted and boring and relentless and numbing and I felt like throwing the book across the room a dozen times in anger. This is a frustrating and worthwhile book about voyeurism and fantasy and you are a pervert for even reading a review about it.

Outside of his short, different-genre "God Jr.," which was brilliant, I found Cooper's last few efforts disappointing. Mostly it seemed like Cooper was disengaged and even bored by his own writing (he hinted at this a bit in some of his meta-fiction). "The Sluts," though, is one of Cooper's best, and he seems fully invigorated. Maybe the style of the book -- chat postings and E-mails -- tweaked things just enough to get him interested, or maybe it's just that that stylistic decision works so well with his acoustic prose.

Or maybe it was just that Cooper has such a fun time with his twisty plot. The novel tells the story of a typical Cooper character -- a young, androgynous kid with a lot of problems -- and all the older men who want to use and exploit him. The setting and denizens are all typical Cooper. So is the extreme sex and violence. Cooper's genre is of the pedophile-and-child-killer variety, but he gives vibrant life to these deviants, and his prose is so beautifully unadorned and perfect that he can make these ungodly subjects fascinating. Cooper's brand of evil is the scariest kind: blunt and matter of fact. Cooper is one of the few authors who can still make me shiver and wince, and "The Sluts" does that plenty.

"The Sluts" -- even with its pretzel plot -- once again explores man's primal, violent urges, which exist in all of us, and reveals how we lose ourselves in our dark fantasies.

To those who are shocked that this book contains "graphic images": what did you expect? Even a few seconds of research will tell you that Cooper is a very intense author who holds nothing back.

If you're like me and felt Cooper's last few books -- "Period," "My Loose Thread" -- weren't as good as his earlier novels, "The Sluts" is a must. It is a deliriously assured return to form.

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