Frisk By Dennis Cooper Scary And Dazzling Thrill Kill Gay Action_________________________________________________________Part two of the George Miles Cycle by Dennis Cooper we reviewed his first book Closer a little while ago.George doesn’t appear in this 2nd volume which is mostly about Dennis, a very upset person who fantasizes about murdering others usually boys or young men of a certain age and look.Dennis is joined by his best friend Julian soon into Frisk they befriend a young dope addict Henry, who they both enjoy sexually. Julian’s brother Kevin is even younger than his brother and disturbed, but attractive. He is a voyeur and watches as the two friends have very ritualistic sex with Henry.Henry knew it. His feelings, thoughts, etc., were the work of people around him. Men particularly. The first made a weirdly detached person out of his body and mind when he was thirteen or something. The next man corrected his predecessor’s mistakes. The next changed other stuff. The last few had only tinkered because Henry was perfect, aside from some bad habits.“We’ll … see …” The guy’s face made a rocky landing on Henry’s crotch. “Oh, okay, go ahead.” Henry let his head drop. The guy started painting the cock with his tongue. The room felt cozy. Or the pills Henry took that afternoon left him cozy, and the room was just there, a movie set. He shut his eyes, tried to restart a favorite porn daydream. “Shi-i-i-it.” His history had been reduced to a simplistic blur, like the trails in the air left by people on fire.There’s also a story about Joe who likes to be beaten up while having sex or some such. He and his friend Samuel work at Sears.An old man was strangling a boy. He winced, squealed, gulped, pleaded. A shorter old man held a knife an inch or two from the boy’s chest. It was sporting an Iron Maiden T-shirt. The men laughed and eyeballed each other. One winked. Then the shorter man shoved the blade into Iron Maiden’s intricate logo. Joe opened his eyes after what felt like seconds but could have been hours. The cigarette had burned out. At the spot where its nub came to rest on the fabric, smoke rose in a wavering column. Far off, his TV set framed some completely uninteresting static.Pushing his jockey shorts down to his knees, he started studying the hipbone, digging into its hollows and nooks with his fingertips. He bent over, spread his legs, knelt, squatted … He’d never realized how inventive his skeleton could be. It had just been in storage inside him for twenty-six years, like a piece of unfashionable sculpture. He pulled up his shorts, hit the kitchen, dumped chilly coffee, and washed out the cup.“Too bad.” Samuel snorted. “That actor you look like, Keanu Reeves, was getting physically fucked up by psychopaths.” “How come?” “How come what?” “How come they fucked him up?” “I don’t know, who cares,” Samuel muttered, yawned. “Obviously because he was so fucking cute.”Over the years I’ve decided or figured out that there’s a strain of the human race I’m uncontrollably drawn to. Male, younger, lean, pale, dark-haired, full-lipped, dazed looking. I think the lineage stretches back to those pictures of Henry at Gypsy Pete’s. He, or they, were the original. Every guy I’ve wanted since has had his same basic look. I suppose in a sense it’s like being involved with the same person over and over without getting bored. That’s how I think of it. Anyway, it’s the closest I’ll get to a long-term relationship. But finding cooperative guys isn’t easy, at least since I’ve grown so obsessed with the idea of murdering someone.“… because I don’t know if I can…” Samuel slapped Joe’s ass lightly. “Like this?” he squeaked, and spanked Joe again. Joe rested his cheek on the knuckles of one hand and relaxed. Slap. His ass stung innocuously. Up his asshole the feeling was much more complex and kind of itchy. Slap, slap. It made Joe imagine a beehive. Slap. Still, he tried not to focus because any image would soften the blows. Slap, slap, slap. He had to be right in the middle of it. “Yeah. Right. Higher, harder.” Etc. Thud. Joe felt a very dull pain in his lower back. Thud. Another pain higher up. By the third he could tell they were fists. Finally. Thud … thud, thud. Neck, ass, rib cage … The violence petered out. “What’s up?” Joe squinted over his shoulder. Samuel’s silhouette was just visible at the foot of the bed, hunched over in the dark, a Rodin. “Why’d you stop?” Joe thought he tasted blood. So he poked his tongue around inside his mouth in search of rough spots or dents. “I mean, that was great.” He couldn’t find anything wrong. Samuel shook his head violently. “I’m … very, very .. . sorry.” “Look,” Joe sighed. He arched his hips, tugging his slacks and shorts over them. “I guess I’m self-destructive. Except I don’t see it that way.In the end Dennis get’s to know a Porn Star Pierre Buisson in New York but eventually flies to The Netherlands where he writes scary realistic fiction about how he has killed a number of young dutch men and a boy, with two German men. And that’s why I’m flying to NYC. I keep thinking about this boy Pierre Buisson who I recently saw in a porn video, All of Me. He’s the most perfect human being I’ve seen since, well, Kevin at least. Like most porn stars these days he’s a hustler on the side. Available.Sometimes that’s plenty. I’m thinking of porn where a guy’s body may be exposed but you’re still only seeing an aspect of him. You still have to fill in a lot to desire him. For example, I’ve filled the Dutch boy’s big lips with the words, “Kill me, Dennis,” among other things. Obscenities. His eyes have grown dull and sleepy, or maybe hyper, or scared, but uncomprehending for sure, like I need eyes to look before I feel comfortable around them. His personality’s mechanical and calm, bordering on nonexistent, like a tool. Otherwise he reminds me of every guy I’ve wanted to fuck and kill.“No.” I shake my head. “You’re exquisite. I mean, there’s this mental transition you have to make-and I’m not saying you specifically, I mean the collective `you’ or whatever-when you’ve experienced someone as an image and suddenly he’s sitting here talking to you. You have to reevaluate him, but I’ve done that. And you’re great.” “Mm,” Pierre says, glances at his watch, which is all he’s wearing apart from a thin, gold bracelet. “But, uh, fourteen minutes are already up.” I nod vaguely. “It’s not always the case,” I add. “Certain people don’t translate. Like that pretty brunet in that porn video, Pleasure Mountain? Scotty was so `me.’ Ever see it? But when I actually bought him, well … maybe he’d just gotten older but. . .“That Scotty was similar. I mean, he looked vaguely like the star of the video I’d loved, but there was something wrong in his-” Pierre feels a grin sneaking up. “Weird,” he says. “Anyway, why don’t you suck my cock.” He hates spouting cliches like that. Still he checks my expression to see if it’s worked. I’m shaking my head. “Or lick my ass,” he adds. “Fuck me with a condom, uh…”This is very intricate real writing, Nihilism is surely at play here with young men at odds and ends with the world. The world is all about conformity, but these are holding onto something that isn’t altogether positive. Many troubles in such an area, will bring out the wolves a time or two. Cooper is very icy at the end of the book with the murders. Very terrible to read as a so called member of ‘civilized’ society, but realizing at the end that the character Dennis was making it up, may or may not take from the Horror of it. While reading the last chapters of Frisk it does seem real, as Cooper writes about Dennis hurting a little boy. Cooper could have played it for real but decides not to, interesting choice and perhaps there is a bit of Cooper himself in the book, his first name is Dennis after all. A writer’s prerogative and he can write anything his Imagination desires. Very Angry, Angry stuff… and very Scary! It’s really unfortunate while reading these passages because you know as a modern person that it probably wouldn’t surprise you if something like this were occurring… somewhere. This is not a book that is recommended for young readers, assuredly.I remembered some of this 2nd volume of the 5 book series. In fact I don’t think I went on to the 3rd, not that I wasn’t interested… I wasn’t ‘turned off’ because I’m afraid of the material is what I mean. “I mean, I know there’s no God. People are only their bodies, and sex is the ultimate intimacy, etc., but it’s not enough. Like you. I find what I know about you amazing, so amazing I can’t get beyond my awe. So part of me wants to dismantle that awe or whatever, and see how you work. But I know that’s selfish. Your life’s as important as anyone’s, including mine … so, I’m stuck.
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 de rigueur 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 (if you can imagine). 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 the screeching discord it contains. 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 GenetI’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 L’Innomable 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 perhaps 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, perhaps for its author most of all.
Do You like book Frisk (2002)?
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?
—Paul Bryant
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.
—Eddie Watkins
That's my friends' problem, not mine. Jealousy, that's what their idiocy is about. I'm more "experienced" than any of them. I've imagined scenes they couldn't even start to think up. And one of the things that goes on when you mentally explore a certain area of life like I do is you start to understand all of it. Or else you know exactly what you want out of it, and the rest doesn't matter.Kevin shielded his eyes, pressed his face to the window. Amsterdam's skyline reminded him of a dessert tray. It was lighted so carefully, period detail after period detail, in such myriad of colors, Kevin wondered if it was being photographed for a children's storybook that evening. Or, if not, gee, what sort of people would live in there? He pictured friendly, bewhiskered, blond, diminutive types wearing quaint uniforms with a very slight fakeness around the collars and cuffs, like Disneyland employees. Just then the dirty glass wall of the station slid between him and that interpretation.
—Evan
