Dennis Cooper “God Jr.”
Originally published in the Portland Mercury, Nov. 2005
Rather than a deserved reputation as an innovative stylist, Cooper is best known for the deviant subject matter of his previous novels—fisting, erotic snuff films and violently victimized teens—and critics have long pleaded with him to turn his prodigious talents to other topics. In answer, he offers God Jr., perhaps the first truly great literary treatment of playing videogames stoned.
Having never put much effort into understanding his teenage son Tommy until after he kills him in a car crash, Jim seeks posthumous connection by constructing a massive monument to a drawing he has discovered in his son’s notebook. His marriage and financial stability already suffering, Jim learns that Tommy had copied the image from his favorite videogame and receives an intellectual property lawsuit from Nintendo’s attorneys. It’s a funny and disturbing moment as a father attempting to understand his dead son finds nothing but mass-produced fantasies handed down from pop culture—Tommy’s closest emotional connection seems to have been to Thrasher magazine, Christina Ricci and his heavy metal action figures.
Read the complete article at the Portland Mercury.
Dennis Cooper Interview: Fourteen Hills
Originally published in Fourteen Hills, Summer 2005
Filled with bored kids, heavy metal, violence as communication and brutal sex, Dennis Cooper’s books read like a bloody head-on collision between Georges Bataille and Christopher Pike on the only strip of highway in a vast arid teenage wasteland. There are no survivors in the mangled vehicles, but the car’s tape decks are still blaring raunchy guitars.
The George Miles cycle, Cooper’s five-book magnum opus (Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, Period) aren’t sequels to each other but instead are linked more by obsession than plot line. Each book in the cycle is a complete stylistic makeover from the others, fluxing from sensual to cartoonish. A touring rock band that murders their dimwitted fans; a young zine writer sexually abused by both his gay adoptive fathers; a narrator, disturbingly also named Dennis, who dismembers beautiful young men who resemble an old love he can’t shake. Awful things happen in Cooper’s books, but they are also oddly revelatory and imbued with a strange kind of tenderness and compassion.
A longtime resident of Los Angeles, fame is as much a part of the air he breathes as the carbon monoxide particulates. As a journalist, Cooper has interviewed Keanu Reeves, Leonardo DiCaprio, Courtney Love and John Waters. His most recent novel, My Loose Thread, began as a non-fiction examination of high school shootings before taking on a life of its own.
