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Una educazione sentimentale alla rovescia, fatta di droga, deliri omicidi, sesso estremo. Il discusso romanzo americano in cui convivono orrore e innocenza. Cooper racconta storie di squartamenti, sevizie, carneficine con un linguaggio crudo, secco e incisivo.
157 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1991
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9233 people want to read
About the author
Dennis Cooper
109 books1,805 followersDennis Cooper was born on January 10, 1953. He grew up in the Southern California cities of Covina and Arcadia.
He wrote stories and poems from early age but got serious about writing at 15 after reading Arthur Rimbaud and The Marquis de Sade. He attended LA county public schools until the 8th grade when he transferred to a private school, Flintridge Preparatory School for Boys in La Canada, California, from which he was expelled in the 11th grade.
While at Flintridge, he met his friend George Miles, who would become his muse and the subject of much of his future writing. He attended Pasadena City College for two years, attending poetry writing workshops taught by the poets Ronald Koertge and Jerene Hewitt. He then attended one year of university at Pitzer College in Claremont, California, where he studied with the poet Bert Meyers.
In 1976, he founded Little Caesar Magazine and Press, which he ran until 1982. From 1980 to 1983 he was Director of Programming for the Beyond Baroque Literary/Art Center in Venice, California. From 1983 to 1985, he lived in New York City.
In 1985, he moved to Amsterdam for two and a half years, where he began his ten year long project, The George Miles Cycle, an interconnected sequence of five novels that includes Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, and Period.
His post-George Miles Cycle novels include My Loose Thread, The Sluts and God, Jr.
Other works include the short-story collections Wrong and Ugly Man, poetry collections The Dream Police and The Weaklings, as well as the recent Smothered in Hugs: Essays, Interviews, Feedback, and Obituaries.
Dennis Cooper currently spends his time between Los Angeles and Paris.
He wrote stories and poems from early age but got serious about writing at 15 after reading Arthur Rimbaud and The Marquis de Sade. He attended LA county public schools until the 8th grade when he transferred to a private school, Flintridge Preparatory School for Boys in La Canada, California, from which he was expelled in the 11th grade.
While at Flintridge, he met his friend George Miles, who would become his muse and the subject of much of his future writing. He attended Pasadena City College for two years, attending poetry writing workshops taught by the poets Ronald Koertge and Jerene Hewitt. He then attended one year of university at Pitzer College in Claremont, California, where he studied with the poet Bert Meyers.
In 1976, he founded Little Caesar Magazine and Press, which he ran until 1982. From 1980 to 1983 he was Director of Programming for the Beyond Baroque Literary/Art Center in Venice, California. From 1983 to 1985, he lived in New York City.
In 1985, he moved to Amsterdam for two and a half years, where he began his ten year long project, The George Miles Cycle, an interconnected sequence of five novels that includes Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, and Period.
His post-George Miles Cycle novels include My Loose Thread, The Sluts and God, Jr.
Other works include the short-story collections Wrong and Ugly Man, poetry collections The Dream Police and The Weaklings, as well as the recent Smothered in Hugs: Essays, Interviews, Feedback, and Obituaries.
Dennis Cooper currently spends his time between Los Angeles and Paris.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 530 reviews
July 4, 2014
Frisk is the gay American Psycho, and like that horrendous novel it revels in grossly repellant violence, and just like American Psycho, you have to ask yourself what the point is. And it's hard to say. Ellis's novel was supposed to satirise the yuppie greed-is-good 1980s. Okay, it does. But the violence towards women in that book goes on for page after page after page. And after say 15 pages, the reader is justified in saying Okay Brett, I Get The Point Already!! But on and on the violence goes. And so I get to figure that what's happening is that Ellis actually LIKES writing this stuff. Otherwise why go on at such length? And why does he like it, all that describing women being chopped up and tortured in so many disgusting, amusing ways? Well, I have to leave that to each reader to answer, and likewise answer why the reader likes reading it as well, and why so many many readers (vastly male it seems from the Amazon reviews) think American Psycho ROCKS! So, Dennis Cooper writes about gay sadomasochistic sex and murder. And in this book, plenty of coprophagy. The style he uses to do this is uniformly dull, lifeless, enervated, flat, affectless. It's... oh, I dunno, whatever. One critic describes it as "cool, immaculate prose [which] manages to convey intense romanticism alongside the macabre temptations of taboo." Yeah, right. Does that make it good, this breaking of taboos? Dennis Cooper does step out of his cool, immaculate style and gets quite excitable when he gets to the part about carving up teenaged boys. But then he lapses into a kind of boredom again. And the Los Angeles Times Book Review critic says in the blurb on the front "destined to classic status". And I say, these critics are degenerates. This book serves no purpose, except maybe, you know, if people like to read about torturing boys to death. I mean, some people might. So to them, it's good. Might even be a classic, I guess. Do I have the right to say that people shouldn't get their fun reading about pain and death and sadistic torture for page after page?
October 8, 2014
Years ago this book would’ve repulsed me, and not because of its extensive rimming, its deep digital anal probing, its examination of others’ turds, its languid sadism, or even its graphic sexual torture. It would have repulsed me because of its offhanded nihilism, its obsession with image, and its cult of youth.
I used to ask so much of books – new worlds promised, religious and philosophical issues probed, mysticism - and now here I am reduced to reading about violent gay sex fantasies and scarred morbid youths with perfect asses.
But I probably wouldn’t be reading Frisk if that’s what Dennis Cooper is all about. This book is actually about obsession and how the desires stemming from that obsession are satisfied (or not) in the world. The particular obsession in Frisk does originate in a mere image (a snuff still), but Cooper does a fantastic job of portraying how an image seen in one’s youth can so deeply inhabit one’s psyche that for decades to come one’s larger actions are determined by it. But for Cooper it doesn’t end here, because the obsesser finds out years later that the haunting image was actually a fake, which sets up some interesting metafictional pyrotechnics and much narrative ambiguity. The narrative itself becomes a reflection of this snuff still, whopping the reader with horrifically violent descriptions before revealing the fakery; and what’s interesting is that the fact that it’s fake doesn’t lessen the impact one iota.
This project of Cooper’s, the five novel George Miles cycle, might be just another post-modern self-reflexive romp, but there is a powerful streak of authenticity through all the excessive drug use, the wild sex, even the murder; though even with the authenticity comes a feeling of detached intention, of an intellectual remove, a theme also explored in this slender novel as the narrator (Dennis) spends part of this book writing from an airplane, flying high over it all.
I used to ask so much of books – new worlds promised, religious and philosophical issues probed, mysticism - and now here I am reduced to reading about violent gay sex fantasies and scarred morbid youths with perfect asses.
But I probably wouldn’t be reading Frisk if that’s what Dennis Cooper is all about. This book is actually about obsession and how the desires stemming from that obsession are satisfied (or not) in the world. The particular obsession in Frisk does originate in a mere image (a snuff still), but Cooper does a fantastic job of portraying how an image seen in one’s youth can so deeply inhabit one’s psyche that for decades to come one’s larger actions are determined by it. But for Cooper it doesn’t end here, because the obsesser finds out years later that the haunting image was actually a fake, which sets up some interesting metafictional pyrotechnics and much narrative ambiguity. The narrative itself becomes a reflection of this snuff still, whopping the reader with horrifically violent descriptions before revealing the fakery; and what’s interesting is that the fact that it’s fake doesn’t lessen the impact one iota.
This project of Cooper’s, the five novel George Miles cycle, might be just another post-modern self-reflexive romp, but there is a powerful streak of authenticity through all the excessive drug use, the wild sex, even the murder; though even with the authenticity comes a feeling of detached intention, of an intellectual remove, a theme also explored in this slender novel as the narrator (Dennis) spends part of this book writing from an airplane, flying high over it all.
September 24, 2022
For those who subscribe to the cult of language (ie, without beautiful language a book can’t be beautiful; the bricks are all, the architecture is irrelevant; this whole kneejerk anti-plot perspective that seems to be all the rage in our corner of Goodreads), I’m here to tell you: there are other cults. Other criterion for excellence. And they’re valid.
Me, when I was a lad, I subscribed to a cult of structure. Probably stemming from my reading of Slaughterhouse Five as a teenager (remember that zig-zag chronology?), and climaxing with my Borges obsession in my twenties, my philosophy of fiction was anti-language. Other writers’d ask me didn’t I love language and I’d say I hated it, because it got in the way. Structure, as I saw it, was language – a deeper language than words and sentences, which were surface play. And to an extent, I still think that way. I mean, I can take pleasure (great pleasure) in words and sentences, but especially if I sense they’re taking me somewhere. So too I love a good guitar solo, but not if it’s stuck in the middle of some pedestrian Steve Miller tune. But I can live without a guitar solo altogether, if its absence is part of the architecture of a My Bloody Valentine or a Slint song.
Dennis Cooper, now he is defiantly MBV-esque. When he wrote his first novel Closer, he said he wanted to make a Psychocandy (debut album by the Jesus and Mary Chain, MBV forebears) in prose. That is, a cacophony: voices levelled, virtually into one. No lead instrument. No main character. No plot throughline. To my tastes a little too unstructured (certainly moreso than Psychocandy), Closer is nevertheless successful, because by throwing everything at the wall with an absence of histrionics Cooper levels its jangled contents to a smooth patina, something reflective and even refined, despite its screeching discord. But to my mind, Frisk is better. Yeah, it’s multi-voiced, and though one of those voices is labelled Dennis and speaks in the first person, it still (almost) lacks a lead instrument. (Or rather, it passes the lead around like a Joy Division record before settling back on the frontman.) But this one would have pleased my younger self. This is – carefully – structured.
I’ve been thinking on Frisk’s epigraph. A place of safety: fiction. And: all the images in language. Cooper takes it literally: he’s out to find and protect and gather those images he seems uniquely suited to collect. And three-quarters of the way through Frisk he hits you with them, in an extended first-person description of rape, murder and mutilation at least as thorough as American Psycho yet somehow responsible in execution. Surrounding this peak of horror (rendered flatly – the opposite of Poe’s or Ligotti’s histrionics) is a hall of mirrors as baffling as Borges, and hingeing on two deceptively simple devices: (1) the inclusion of a (faked) snuff photo in the opening chapter, which harkens back to a pivotal scene in Closer and in doing so encapsulates that first book of the cycle as Beckett’s The Unnamable encapsulated what went before it; and (2) the freakish and, at first, plain wrong-seeming omniscient first-person perspective of sometimes-narrator Dennis, who somehow sees through the eyes of other characters he himself interacts with, as they’re interacting. And then we tweak: so much here is fantasy; does this viewpoint signify fantasy too? Dennis (the character) imagining himself into memories that (maybe) never happened? And if that viewpoint is fantasy, how can we trust the revelation, from within that viewpoint, that another viewpoint (Dennis’s prose reconstruction of the killings via letter) is fantasy?
As I said, there’s little of prose virtuosity here. But virtuoso at juggling images and levels of reality Cooper just might be. Also, he’s brave. I can’t think how some readers must have reacted to this. By identifying (or appearing to identify) so strongly with his first-person psychopath he’s leaving himself wide, wide open. And that’s the thing: he’s stepping into the ring. He’s owning this stuff. And it’s intense. He doesn’t back down, he doesn’t sugar-coat it in the least, and whatever he asserts as to what’s fantasy and what isn’t is irrelevant once you’ve let these images into you. Frisk is – truly – subversive. And dangerous, maybe for its author most of all.
Me, when I was a lad, I subscribed to a cult of structure. Probably stemming from my reading of Slaughterhouse Five as a teenager (remember that zig-zag chronology?), and climaxing with my Borges obsession in my twenties, my philosophy of fiction was anti-language. Other writers’d ask me didn’t I love language and I’d say I hated it, because it got in the way. Structure, as I saw it, was language – a deeper language than words and sentences, which were surface play. And to an extent, I still think that way. I mean, I can take pleasure (great pleasure) in words and sentences, but especially if I sense they’re taking me somewhere. So too I love a good guitar solo, but not if it’s stuck in the middle of some pedestrian Steve Miller tune. But I can live without a guitar solo altogether, if its absence is part of the architecture of a My Bloody Valentine or a Slint song.
Dennis Cooper, now he is defiantly MBV-esque. When he wrote his first novel Closer, he said he wanted to make a Psychocandy (debut album by the Jesus and Mary Chain, MBV forebears) in prose. That is, a cacophony: voices levelled, virtually into one. No lead instrument. No main character. No plot throughline. To my tastes a little too unstructured (certainly moreso than Psychocandy), Closer is nevertheless successful, because by throwing everything at the wall with an absence of histrionics Cooper levels its jangled contents to a smooth patina, something reflective and even refined, despite its screeching discord. But to my mind, Frisk is better. Yeah, it’s multi-voiced, and though one of those voices is labelled Dennis and speaks in the first person, it still (almost) lacks a lead instrument. (Or rather, it passes the lead around like a Joy Division record before settling back on the frontman.) But this one would have pleased my younger self. This is – carefully – structured.
Put all the images in language in a place of safety and make use of them, for they are in the desert, and it’s in the desert we must go and look for them.
Jean Genet
I’ve been thinking on Frisk’s epigraph. A place of safety: fiction. And: all the images in language. Cooper takes it literally: he’s out to find and protect and gather those images he seems uniquely suited to collect. And three-quarters of the way through Frisk he hits you with them, in an extended first-person description of rape, murder and mutilation at least as thorough as American Psycho yet somehow responsible in execution. Surrounding this peak of horror (rendered flatly – the opposite of Poe’s or Ligotti’s histrionics) is a hall of mirrors as baffling as Borges, and hingeing on two deceptively simple devices: (1) the inclusion of a (faked) snuff photo in the opening chapter, which harkens back to a pivotal scene in Closer and in doing so encapsulates that first book of the cycle as Beckett’s The Unnamable encapsulated what went before it; and (2) the freakish and, at first, plain wrong-seeming omniscient first-person perspective of sometimes-narrator Dennis, who somehow sees through the eyes of other characters he himself interacts with, as they’re interacting. And then we tweak: so much here is fantasy; does this viewpoint signify fantasy too? Dennis (the character) imagining himself into memories that (maybe) never happened? And if that viewpoint is fantasy, how can we trust the revelation, from within that viewpoint, that another viewpoint (Dennis’s prose reconstruction of the killings via letter) is fantasy?
As I said, there’s little of prose virtuosity here. But virtuoso at juggling images and levels of reality Cooper just might be. Also, he’s brave. I can’t think how some readers must have reacted to this. By identifying (or appearing to identify) so strongly with his first-person psychopath he’s leaving himself wide, wide open. And that’s the thing: he’s stepping into the ring. He’s owning this stuff. And it’s intense. He doesn’t back down, he doesn’t sugar-coat it in the least, and whatever he asserts as to what’s fantasy and what isn’t is irrelevant once you’ve let these images into you. Frisk is – truly – subversive. And dangerous, maybe for its author most of all.
May 2, 2024
Let's face two facts: This piece of extreme transgressive psychological fiction is unratable, and I'm endlessly fascinated by the work of Dennis Cooper. This author is strongly influenced by Jean Genet, George Bataille, and Arthur Rimbaud, and in "Frisk", the connection to Bret Easton Ellis (particularly Less Than Zero) becomes more than apparent. Our narrator is a guy called Dennis (oh-oh), who, as a 13-year-old, is granted access to gay porn by an alcoholic kiosk owner, which then escalates to the kiosk creep handing him snuff pictures of a naked, tied up teenage kid who appears to have been murdered. This lays the groundwork for a lifelong obsession...
This is my third Cooper (after Closer and The Sluts), and what renders his texts so haunting is how he dissects psychological frailty and obsession: This man really digs into the darkest recesses of the mind, often amalgamating desire and violence, never giving any easy explanation for the drives he depicts in graphic detail. The results are novels that read like fever dreams. "Frisk" focuses on the line between fantasy and reality when it comes to, buckle up, sexually motivated torturous murder connected to the destruction of beauty: What do the characters obsess over in their minds, what does the obsession do to their lives, and what does it take for them to act upon their impulses. Set between 1969 and 1989 (and first published in 1991), the constant death threat otherwise known as HIV/AIDS looms over the many sexual escapades the characters indulge in.
The character of Dennis who narrates "Frisk" is especially fascinating, as his voice moves back and forth from a person who plays a major role in the text to an omniscient narrator who somehow knows about events he does not partake in as well as emotional movements and thoughts within other people, and in the end, it's his language that indicates the level of dehumanization and alienation he has reached.
"Frisk" is the second installment of Cooper's George Miles Cycle, a pentalogy based on a real person the author encountered when they were both teenagers. Cooper, who lost touch with Miles, always hoped he would read the cycle, and even tried to reach him, but couldn't - he later learnt that Miles had killed himself two years before the publication of Closer.
I will go on reading some more Cooper, plus I definitely need to get my hands on Wrong: A Critical Biography of Dennis Cooper.
This is my third Cooper (after Closer and The Sluts), and what renders his texts so haunting is how he dissects psychological frailty and obsession: This man really digs into the darkest recesses of the mind, often amalgamating desire and violence, never giving any easy explanation for the drives he depicts in graphic detail. The results are novels that read like fever dreams. "Frisk" focuses on the line between fantasy and reality when it comes to, buckle up, sexually motivated torturous murder connected to the destruction of beauty: What do the characters obsess over in their minds, what does the obsession do to their lives, and what does it take for them to act upon their impulses. Set between 1969 and 1989 (and first published in 1991), the constant death threat otherwise known as HIV/AIDS looms over the many sexual escapades the characters indulge in.
The character of Dennis who narrates "Frisk" is especially fascinating, as his voice moves back and forth from a person who plays a major role in the text to an omniscient narrator who somehow knows about events he does not partake in as well as emotional movements and thoughts within other people, and in the end, it's his language that indicates the level of dehumanization and alienation he has reached.
"Frisk" is the second installment of Cooper's George Miles Cycle, a pentalogy based on a real person the author encountered when they were both teenagers. Cooper, who lost touch with Miles, always hoped he would read the cycle, and even tried to reach him, but couldn't - he later learnt that Miles had killed himself two years before the publication of Closer.
I will go on reading some more Cooper, plus I definitely need to get my hands on Wrong: A Critical Biography of Dennis Cooper.
January 2, 2012
What Dennis Cooper is on about here, beneath all the porn and violence, is actually pretty subtle and articulate. This is sort of his deal, and it explains the sharp polarization in the reviews he gets. Here, Cooper's program is a total de-romanticization and dismemberment of the idea of sexual desire, particularly in its potentially destructive aspects. For his characters, particularly narrator "Dennis", desire doesn't actually help anyone connect with anyone else. More the opposite. Desire here is a kind autistic obsession for arbitrary details, like knowing the specs of cars from the 1950s, or stamp-collecting, but with so much more potential threat in it. That most cases don't go anywhere near so far as the primary one here -- Cooper micro-dissecting his own basest urges, it seems -- in no way lessens the piercing insight. The other major theme here, as with Closer, is with images and representations of things in narrative, film, etc. Sometimes the image is more important than the reality, sometimes they warp eachother. This is worked so deeply into the fabric of the novel that it would cease to exist with out it.
Among the other unique traits here: Cooper's bizarre first-person omniscient viewpoint that largely casts himself (or "Dennis" at least) through others' eyes. So if you, reading this, question his sanity or taste in writing something like Frisk, you're in good company with several of the characters in the novel itself. And as Eddie W, observes in his review, you can't get much more "narrative distance" from the subject than Dennis, writing his horror fantasies from an airplane (over middle America, ironically).
Among the other unique traits here: Cooper's bizarre first-person omniscient viewpoint that largely casts himself (or "Dennis" at least) through others' eyes. So if you, reading this, question his sanity or taste in writing something like Frisk, you're in good company with several of the characters in the novel itself. And as Eddie W, observes in his review, you can't get much more "narrative distance" from the subject than Dennis, writing his horror fantasies from an airplane (over middle America, ironically).
September 24, 2022
Gutsy; iniquitously ruminative.
February 21, 2024
This is what desire and obsession looks like when carefully examined, you can see its pores, the smell is foul, the colors are blurry, intense; rationality stumbles clumsily in the fields of emotion. You wonder what lurks in the elusive shadows of the unconscious, what sort of cognitive distortions rise from the chaos of living. The blood stain spreads, but it's so dark inside you're never sure it is really blood or a figment of your frail mind. An audacious narrative unfolds, multiple perspectives point to the same obsession. A reflection of a reflection, a fabrication of carefully constructed gruesomeness.
A boy-shaped cloud raining.
May 6, 2018
This novel isn't rated five stars because I enjoyed the experience. Make no mistake, you will hate Dennis Cooper at some point during this book, probably multiple times. I certainly did. But what makes this book so special and unique is the WAY it takes you to the dark, horrible places it inhabits, and its agenda for doing so. Despite being about the way American culture connects violence and sex, it doesn't fetishize sexual violence. Its characters have fetishes around violence, but the book itself doesn't dwell on violence just for the sake of shock value. It does it to make a point about victimization, and cultural obsession with objectification, and where/how we draw the line between a consensual (if violent) act and a grisly crime.
If you like slasher movies, this might be the only book I've ever read that captures the way good B horror makes me feel: that weird mixture of revulsion, hilarity, and guilty satisfaction. Frisk takes that feeling and unpacks it, and by the end of the book you're left feeling like the victim, monster, and final girl all at once.
If you like slasher movies, this might be the only book I've ever read that captures the way good B horror makes me feel: that weird mixture of revulsion, hilarity, and guilty satisfaction. Frisk takes that feeling and unpacks it, and by the end of the book you're left feeling like the victim, monster, and final girl all at once.
February 25, 2025
Aside from making one hell of a racket and ending up with a fucked-up blender, Frisk just might be the aftermath if you chucked in some Georges Bataille or de Sade, an underground homosexual porno tape, and a slasher movie, before pressing the on switch. The thing is, I was expecting this to be nothing more than an excuse to go gung-ho and indulge in writing sick and depraved masochistic acts just for the sake of it; but I was wrong. Cooper seems very much wired in when it comes to the marginalized, and the ideas of linking death and sex. So, I didn't hate it like I thought I would, found it somewhat profound; bizarrely so, but I am glad it was only a short read. With descriptions like an asscrack resembling a crater after a bomb had just gone off in it you can see why. I preferred it less for its graphic nature when depicting violent sex, and more for its sinister atmosphere, which was brooding as hell. If a book shop had a horror shelf and a gay lit shelf, I'd be standing there for ages trying to decide where to put it, as it belongs in both.
February 3, 2021
God, human bodies are such garbage bags.
Viscerally violent, kinky Cooper. Fantasy made flesh.
Gay boys make good victims and victimizers. Most by choice.
Viscerally violent, kinky Cooper. Fantasy made flesh.
Gay boys make good victims and victimizers. Most by choice.
April 12, 2024
Just as I was starting to feel like I was finally getting a handle on Cooper’s work, all emotional tone he’d built up was shattered by the “and he woke up and it was all a dream”–type ending.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 5, 2017
This book is amazing!!! It basically has all the disturbing shit that I love to read: violence, rape, inappropriate sexual relations and a whole lot of disgusting human beings.
This book is definitely not for everyone, and I honestly believe it has only been written to make everyone as uncomfortable as possible. There's barely any plot, the characters are literally there to be a part of the sex acts, and it might has well been written as a couple of short stories. But I love it!
I also love the fact that the most disgusting part of this book was not the anus licking, or the shit eating, or the murdering. Nope. I was grossed out by the fact that the main character SWALLOWED a glob of saliva that someone had spit into his mouth.
I guess that says more about me than I would like, but I suppose I can relate more to having to swallow gross spit (which we probably all have done at some point) than eating someone's shit.
Dennis Cooper is a genius and he basically said fuck you to the entire literary world by getting this published.
Well played, mr Cooper, well played.
This book is definitely not for everyone, and I honestly believe it has only been written to make everyone as uncomfortable as possible. There's barely any plot, the characters are literally there to be a part of the sex acts, and it might has well been written as a couple of short stories. But I love it!
I also love the fact that the most disgusting part of this book was not the anus licking, or the shit eating, or the murdering. Nope. I was grossed out by the fact that the main character SWALLOWED a glob of saliva that someone had spit into his mouth.
I guess that says more about me than I would like, but I suppose I can relate more to having to swallow gross spit (which we probably all have done at some point) than eating someone's shit.
Dennis Cooper is a genius and he basically said fuck you to the entire literary world by getting this published.
Well played, mr Cooper, well played.
September 24, 2022
Not going to spew some faux academic bullshit, DC writes fivers and that’s fact. His shit is so gellid, and no cracks. “What’s it like being murdered by someone?”…”it’s sssooo gross.” Seriously same. Some of the best writing I’ve ever read left to right. The whole conception of the trauma inducing staged/not staged sadist photos at the beginning was one of the most gripping literary ploys I’ve ever experienced. Double Howl! and also…Roar?
February 22, 2018
Dennis brings me back to my high school days when I was genuinely convinced that the thoughts I had and the emotions I felt were truly, at their core, beyond any immorality and level of shame that any other teenager was going through. It is sad to think of how much happier I would have been during those years to have a book like Frisk, passing me notes, telling me "it's okay--fantasy isn't reality, I think those things too"
Beyond the shock value and aesthetics of transgression that appear in Frisk, I'm in awe of the way he uses and positions the narrator, who, by no coincidence, is also named "Dennis." "Dennis" is an omnipresent narrator that also occurs carnally in the book, which is not necessarily inventive in itself, though what is so striking is that the book is already swimming in the shaky waters between fantasy and reality and what constitutes a thought or event to be placed in either category. So by facing this dialogue head on, as a reader it is too hard to not try to pick away at the positioning of the narration as some addendum, or fuel, for this conversation itself.
*An omnipresent narrator who is also physical in the book narrating a daydream of another character happening in a separate room that Dennis is not in, but is only a hallway away from*--this type of dimensional structuring in both the spatial and mental is really really interesting to me.
...also, I never thought that the objectification of a body could be as intriguing as as subject as it is in this book. Dennis takes the notion of the body as a thing separate from the person, and ramps it up tenfold. Many of these characters, "dennis" the most, literally look and worship certain bodies as though they were their temple. There is no superficiality in this objectification. It is holy, religious, and divine to them, so much that when they have their hands on it, the desire to devour is so intense that it comes at the price of erasure. And this topic is interesting to me... how on a much smaller scale, there is a subtle tendency in the human soul to want to destruct something that is beautiful--whether it be telling a baby that you want to eat it up because it is so cute, or spending your life mining and ripping apart the land of this planet. Dennis just places this feeling into the sensation of sex and fantasy.
I don't know what else to say. Mostly writing this for myself to hash out thoughts.
Makes sure not to read this too close to cooking or cutting up raw meat...or do if you twisted.
Beyond the shock value and aesthetics of transgression that appear in Frisk, I'm in awe of the way he uses and positions the narrator, who, by no coincidence, is also named "Dennis." "Dennis" is an omnipresent narrator that also occurs carnally in the book, which is not necessarily inventive in itself, though what is so striking is that the book is already swimming in the shaky waters between fantasy and reality and what constitutes a thought or event to be placed in either category. So by facing this dialogue head on, as a reader it is too hard to not try to pick away at the positioning of the narration as some addendum, or fuel, for this conversation itself.
*An omnipresent narrator who is also physical in the book narrating a daydream of another character happening in a separate room that Dennis is not in, but is only a hallway away from*--this type of dimensional structuring in both the spatial and mental is really really interesting to me.
...also, I never thought that the objectification of a body could be as intriguing as as subject as it is in this book. Dennis takes the notion of the body as a thing separate from the person, and ramps it up tenfold. Many of these characters, "dennis" the most, literally look and worship certain bodies as though they were their temple. There is no superficiality in this objectification. It is holy, religious, and divine to them, so much that when they have their hands on it, the desire to devour is so intense that it comes at the price of erasure. And this topic is interesting to me... how on a much smaller scale, there is a subtle tendency in the human soul to want to destruct something that is beautiful--whether it be telling a baby that you want to eat it up because it is so cute, or spending your life mining and ripping apart the land of this planet. Dennis just places this feeling into the sensation of sex and fantasy.
I don't know what else to say. Mostly writing this for myself to hash out thoughts.
Makes sure not to read this too close to cooking or cutting up raw meat...or do if you twisted.
July 12, 2021
Relatively unadorned prose meets horrific violence in this taut little book. Even for someone constantly looking to push the boundaries of their literary experience into new areas of sex and violence, this is extreme.
There's a lot to be said about Dennis Cooper's writing, which is interesting because so much of it is based in efficiency. He's there to get the content across, and it's sparsely functional in that minimalist postmodern way. That said he still has banger lines, stingers that make you suck the air in past your teeth, and the concision is in service to the narrative instead of leaving it to wither. A lesser writer would probably obfuscate their own story with a style like this, whereas Cooper carves around it, casting it into relief.
What story there is horrifies the sensibilities with a gradual build towards truly upsetting material. Even the most seasoned gorehound might want to treat this one with respect. That said, it's not meaningless violence: It's thematically sound and moves what plot there is forwards. This is the kind of novel that asks questions instead of presenting story points, to its credit.
It's impossible to recommend this sort of thing to friends because of the content, and that's another notch in its favor. A true classic of the genre, to be read by those who take the term "transgressive" to heart and seek out its adherents.
There's a lot to be said about Dennis Cooper's writing, which is interesting because so much of it is based in efficiency. He's there to get the content across, and it's sparsely functional in that minimalist postmodern way. That said he still has banger lines, stingers that make you suck the air in past your teeth, and the concision is in service to the narrative instead of leaving it to wither. A lesser writer would probably obfuscate their own story with a style like this, whereas Cooper carves around it, casting it into relief.
What story there is horrifies the sensibilities with a gradual build towards truly upsetting material. Even the most seasoned gorehound might want to treat this one with respect. That said, it's not meaningless violence: It's thematically sound and moves what plot there is forwards. This is the kind of novel that asks questions instead of presenting story points, to its credit.
It's impossible to recommend this sort of thing to friends because of the content, and that's another notch in its favor. A true classic of the genre, to be read by those who take the term "transgressive" to heart and seek out its adherents.
June 5, 2015
This book was actually less cruel than I anticipated. In the end Cooper seems to say murder & mutilation are really no solution to the human predicament. It's a book about the relationship between fantasy and reality. You think the first necessarily aspires to the second, but that's not always so.
January 5, 2008
My fourth favorite novel of Cooper's (after Guide, Try, and The Sluts). I wouldn't say that Cooper is an acquired taste; he's a rarefied taste. Not "decadent," though there's something dandyish in Cooper's precise prose, and of course death and decay themes pervade Cooper's novels, as they do "decadent" literature. What distinguishes Cooper's work from "decadent" writing is Cooper's urgent need to work out these (admittedly disturbing) issues of violence and pedophilic sex. And he does so without sloppiness or, god forbid, sentimentality. No single sentence dazzles -- Cooper mines ordinary speech -- but his prose is mysteriously hypnotic, rhythmic, cinematic in its pacing.
In terms of subject, Frisk is probably Cooper's most directly autobiographical novel, and also his most disturbing. If I remember the set-up correctly, a figure named Dennis (a writer) acts out his murderous sex fantasies on hustlers while living in an ersatz Amsterdam windmill. (For two or three years, Cooper actually did actually live in Amsterdam, where he did lots of drugs and wrote his first novel, Closer). I think that what also makes Cooper's subject matter palatable and even affecting is his (light) use of various postmodern "new narrative" techniques. In Frisk, for example, Cooper plays with whether the violence is real or "fictional." And why should that question matter, since it's all occurring within a fiction -- a novel -- in the first place?
In terms of subject, Frisk is probably Cooper's most directly autobiographical novel, and also his most disturbing. If I remember the set-up correctly, a figure named Dennis (a writer) acts out his murderous sex fantasies on hustlers while living in an ersatz Amsterdam windmill. (For two or three years, Cooper actually did actually live in Amsterdam, where he did lots of drugs and wrote his first novel, Closer). I think that what also makes Cooper's subject matter palatable and even affecting is his (light) use of various postmodern "new narrative" techniques. In Frisk, for example, Cooper plays with whether the violence is real or "fictional." And why should that question matter, since it's all occurring within a fiction -- a novel -- in the first place?
June 7, 2021
A disturbing horror novel, an intriguing structural experiment, an ethical inquiry into the tug-and-pull between desire and morality: Frisk is many things, but it is first and foremost a wrenchingly personal exploration of the author’s own admitted fascination with sexual violence and torture. I admire Cooper’s courage in putting out such a (seemingly) revealing and honest book. Of course, not all of us will be able to directly relate to these highly specific fantasies of rape and manual disembowelment, but most people (especially queer people) will recognize something of themselves in the confused sexual awakening, the pained longings, the objectifying lusts, and the lasting loneliness. Like Closer, the preceding volume of the George Miles Cycle, Frisk contains moving explorations of knotty interpersonal relationships and alienated sexuality; it’s also written in the same direct, pared-down language, which makes for a layered but entirely accessible experience. Cooper’s definitely more focused on structure than on the sentence (much like the content, another legacy of Sade), so those looking for showy stylistics will be dissatisfied, but a reader with a keen eye for formal precision will have a ball. And, of course, for those coming to the book out of morbid curiosity more than anything else, there’s an ample amount of distressing violence to sate your transgressive appetite.
Reread from June 5th to 6th, 2021: rereading this, as with Closer earlier in the year, proved to be several times more rewarding and interesting than my first read was—and I loved it then. The original review I left above seems pretty shallow, as most reviews of this book kind of are, tbh. There’s so much going on here beyond just the lurid content. It’s quite simply one of the best examinations of the relationship between fantasy and reality; the text, its author, and its reader; complicity, artifice, blankness, sexuality...so much deeper than just a retreat into violent desires, which is what it’s commonly written off as. And as structurally complex and amazingly written as any of Cooper’s novels. So, so good.
Reread from June 5th to 6th, 2021: rereading this, as with Closer earlier in the year, proved to be several times more rewarding and interesting than my first read was—and I loved it then. The original review I left above seems pretty shallow, as most reviews of this book kind of are, tbh. There’s so much going on here beyond just the lurid content. It’s quite simply one of the best examinations of the relationship between fantasy and reality; the text, its author, and its reader; complicity, artifice, blankness, sexuality...so much deeper than just a retreat into violent desires, which is what it’s commonly written off as. And as structurally complex and amazingly written as any of Cooper’s novels. So, so good.
September 2, 2024
Lo terminé hace caleta, en realidad. Había olvidado registrarlo.
Me gustó harto. Cooper lleva el ejercicio de la autoficción a otro nivel y se relata como un violador y un asesino. Utiliza su literatura como una herramienta para construir un carácter público. Pienso en lo que dijo Charli XCX para GQ hace un par de meses: hoy, más que nunca, un artista tiene que presentarse como una extensión de su obra. En la era de la selfi, el público espera que el artista despliegue una mitología. Siempre ha sido así, en todo caso, pero las redes sociales lo hacen más evidente. Creo que esta novela de Cooper se conserva igual de punki que cuando se publicó; en el sentido de que si en este tiempo todos quieren figurar como el héroe de alguna causa social o cultural, lo rupturista es retratarse como el paria.
En una entrevista, Cooper explicaba que quiso escribir este texto para que pudiese ser leído como un cuerpo desmembrado: se entiende que las partes, aunque desconectadas, forman parte de un todo. Ese recurso hizo que me costara avanzar en la novela, eso sí.
Me gustó harto. Cooper lleva el ejercicio de la autoficción a otro nivel y se relata como un violador y un asesino. Utiliza su literatura como una herramienta para construir un carácter público. Pienso en lo que dijo Charli XCX para GQ hace un par de meses: hoy, más que nunca, un artista tiene que presentarse como una extensión de su obra. En la era de la selfi, el público espera que el artista despliegue una mitología. Siempre ha sido así, en todo caso, pero las redes sociales lo hacen más evidente. Creo que esta novela de Cooper se conserva igual de punki que cuando se publicó; en el sentido de que si en este tiempo todos quieren figurar como el héroe de alguna causa social o cultural, lo rupturista es retratarse como el paria.
En una entrevista, Cooper explicaba que quiso escribir este texto para que pudiese ser leído como un cuerpo desmembrado: se entiende que las partes, aunque desconectadas, forman parte de un todo. Ese recurso hizo que me costara avanzar en la novela, eso sí.
June 2, 2013
This is one of those books you'll likely not read again, but it is worth reading for the first time. The story is a bit slow at first and soon picks up in the middle only to conclude the way you would have probably predicted. It's sick, vile and absolutely unsettling, but I loved reading it and wanted to read the rest in this series after reading this one.
November 23, 2023
You can’t go home again… even if home is a series of fake snuff photographs you saw as a twelve year old, forever altering your concept of beauty and desire and physical relationships.
June 18, 2024
Quitando alguna escena bastante bestia el libro es un rollazo.
June 24, 2021
If you don't see the point of this novel, you didn't read it closely enough.
Frisk represents the ultimate experience of death, sexuality, and madness. Cooper pushes the limits again and again, repeatedly thrusting us beyond the line we last imagined with language as raw as his characters.
By the end of the novel, Cooper confronts you with none other than yourself. What do you want to happen? In taking you through the narrator's mind (who is at once omnipotent, omniscient, and first person), Cooper grants you catharsis, allowing you to read Dennis's letter as a free-write of your own. In doing so, he provides you with the space to exhale, to release.
Maybe you were repulsed. Horrified. Offended to the highest degree. But you kept reading, didn't you?
Just as Dennis says, "if you're still reading you must be the person I want you to be. God, I hope so."
Frisk represents the ultimate experience of death, sexuality, and madness. Cooper pushes the limits again and again, repeatedly thrusting us beyond the line we last imagined with language as raw as his characters.
By the end of the novel, Cooper confronts you with none other than yourself. What do you want to happen? In taking you through the narrator's mind (who is at once omnipotent, omniscient, and first person), Cooper grants you catharsis, allowing you to read Dennis's letter as a free-write of your own. In doing so, he provides you with the space to exhale, to release.
Maybe you were repulsed. Horrified. Offended to the highest degree. But you kept reading, didn't you?
Just as Dennis says, "if you're still reading you must be the person I want you to be. God, I hope so."
Read
July 20, 2023I don't think I can rate this exactly. Everything except the 2nd to last chapter is really good - pretty fucking dark but a serious examination of fucked up fantasies, how we see The Body, male sexuality, the sick way young boys are fetishised, self destructive behaviour and passivity, the start of fetishes and fixations... it's clever and the fucked up ness is used judiciously. Then the 2nd to last chapter is just a long, incredibly graphic description of raping and murdering some boys. I could not do more than skim it after the first couple of pages. Regardless of artistic intent, it's unbearable and sickening. And I Get It! But I never want to read anything like that again, you know? I should have checked going in but I thought I'd at least try one "extreme" work before not reading them. And yeah, it's not for me. If that chapter was excised, at least 3.5 stars. But yeah.
March 28, 2011
I love the feelings evoked from reading Dennis Cooper's work. Like a horrible car crash, I'm peeking through my fingers sometimes to see what's on the next page. Awe and repulsion at the same time. I really ask myself sometimes what I'm learning from Frisk. I guess rather than put it that way, it's more of a reflection of sensory assault. So, like The Human Centipede, once you know what it's about and you can handle it, you're set to experience it. It can't get any worse.
December 8, 2013
far better than American psycho and far more believable, will write a review soon.
November 5, 2013
Dennis Cooper is one of the most infamous cult authors around but Closer, the first book in his five-novel George Miles cycle, left me disappointed. Thankfully the follow-up, Frisk (great title, referenced in the text in enigmatic fashion), is a much stronger, more distinctive work. This is a provocative, sometimes disgusting (i.e. graphic coprophilia, mutilation etc.) read that operates on multiple intertwined levels: it’s a psychological portrait of an obsessive mind circling the abyss; a metafiction with a narrator named Dennis and texts-within-a-text; a philosophical/existential exploration of sex, death, the body, and the self; and a sort of gothic mystery involving murder and madness.
Churning like a vortex at the center of these layers is a brilliantly controlled first-person sequence describing the torture and killing of young boys. It’s a bravura piece of writing, gut-wrenching yet hypnotic, that’s unnervingly believable, like reading thoughts directly from the mind of a psychopath, and it’s given additional resonance from the multiple levels within which it’s nested.
Definitely looking forward to the rest of the cycle.
Churning like a vortex at the center of these layers is a brilliantly controlled first-person sequence describing the torture and killing of young boys. It’s a bravura piece of writing, gut-wrenching yet hypnotic, that’s unnervingly believable, like reading thoughts directly from the mind of a psychopath, and it’s given additional resonance from the multiple levels within which it’s nested.
Definitely looking forward to the rest of the cycle.
Read
January 12, 2024I honestly don’t even know what to say or how I feel about this book. While I did find the first book, Closer, dark and disturbing I also felt like I got more insight into the different characters. With this book, it was full of sexual violence and (I feel) a lack of character development.
There’s definitely some interesting stuff within the book about people idealizing brutality and queer men’s relationship to their sexuality in the midst of the AIDS epidemic. But for the most part I felt like I was being kept at arm’s distance from the inner lives of the characters. It jumped around from different people before I felt like I truly knew them.
There’s definitely some interesting stuff within the book about people idealizing brutality and queer men’s relationship to their sexuality in the midst of the AIDS epidemic. But for the most part I felt like I was being kept at arm’s distance from the inner lives of the characters. It jumped around from different people before I felt like I truly knew them.
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