Warning: Cooper writes underground literary fiction, but real underground stuff; the kind Burroughs might’ve written if he could get a little more coherent and stop with the stupid origami experiments. Cooper’s world is almost exclusively male, almost exlusively gay, and a little more out-there than ‘Queer As Folk.’

“I’m definitely weird, Nicole. My main dad – the one I still live with – has been beating me up, raping me since I was, uh . . . ten, and my other dad just wrote me this letter that was like . . . obviously sort of a, uh, love letter, and I guess . . . uh, I wrote one back, and now we’re gonna sleep together, which is probably this huge mistake.”

That’s our main character, Ziggy, speaking. Ziggy’s sixteen and has had a tortured existence. Besides the two unsavoury dads – Brice is the violent one, Roger the letter-writer - mentioned above, he also has an uncle, Ken, who shoots porn films with underage boys. The only light in Ziggy’s life comes from his best friend, Calhoun, and the platonic love he feels for him. Calhoun is a wannabe writer and actual heroin addict, scared of feeling.

In most other novels the above would be treated in shock-horror! terms, you’d be hearing the strings at the sad parts and in the end Ziggy might get a stable relationship and a nine-to-five job. This isn’t most normal novels, though, and the novel, like Ziggy – an extraordinarily loveable, heartbreakiong and real character, said to be based on a real boy - accepts the horrific as commonplace.

Take the case of Robin, a young, vulnerable, ‘Metal Kid’ . . . and Ken’s latest victim. Throughout the scenes –including an interview with Ziggy for Ziggy’s zine – you can almost hear the blaring heavy metal music, and feel the terror on Robin’s behalf. A sort-of lost boy with some kind of yearning in him, Robin ends up in a vision of Hell more terrifying and disturbing than anything horror writers could dredge up. Then it ends:

“Night sounded distant and soft.

Robin, flat on the ground, so fucking lost, like a kid in a ‘dead body’ Halloween costume, but worse, more realistic, not endearing at all.

Ken spaced out on the body a while.”

So, if you like writing, you have to read Dennis Cooper. Never mind the subject matter (and even I have to skim some of the more graphic details) stay the course for the energy, the style, the characters and the plain-brilliant writing. This sounds like hyperbole and film-poster stuff, but there really is no-one else like him in the whole world.

Iain Bahlaj lives in Fife, Scotland. His short stories have appeared in Front & Centre, Fife Fringe, Chapman, Pulp.net and The Macallan Shorts 3 and 5. His novel, 'Tilt' was published in 2003 (Pulp Books, London). The short story 'Sugar' is a prequel to 'Tilt.' Iain currently works as a night-shift shelf-stacker, while working on a novel about vampires, in this spare time. To read more about Iain on the Showcase section of this site, click here

© 2004 Laura Hird All rights reserved.