Ugly Man

February 2, 2009
The cult novelist's collection of short stories plumbs veins of dark humor amid the sex and gore his fans have come to expect. The contents range from short shorts—a rumination on “The Fifteen Worst Russian Gay Porn Web Sites” and an abortive episode entitled “One Night in 1979 I Did Too Much Coke and Couldn't Sleep and Had What I Thought Was a Million-Dollar Idea to Write the Definitive Tell-all Book About Glam Rock Based on My Own Personal Experience but This Is as Far as I Got”—to longer pieces in which sadistic male characters explore their preoccupations with the murder, mutilation and rape of nihilistic teenaged boys. Stories of the latter group often feature text pared down to dialogue alone or resembling scripts complete with stage directions. The lighter fare, such as it is, provides much needed comic relief, as in the case of “The Anal-Retentive Line Editor,” which proceeds through interstitial edits upon a series of drafts of a piece of gay erotica, forming a running conversation and problematic seduction between author and editor. This is classic Cooper: explicit, unconventional and, to the uninitiated, alarming.

April 15, 2009
More sexually based offenses from the master, so to speak, of gay sadomasochistic overkill (The Weaklings, 2008, etc.).

In this cojone-squeezing collection of 18 mostly fragmentary stories, Cooper considers beautiful young male flesh, as exploited by admirers bent on discovering how it responds to torture, murder and mutilation (though not necessarily in that order). In"Jerk," a creepy performance artist dissects his own"experiences as a drug-addicted, psychotic teen murderer"; elsewhere, a boy who has dispatched his parents and younger brother analyzes his actions and thoughts in conversation with the sympathetic sadist who's about to kill him ("The Hostage Drama"); a male groupie praises the democratic carnal energies of rock and punk celebrities ("One Night in 1979…"); and in"The Ash Gray Proclam-ation," Cooper's feral adolescent death-desirers connect gay rape and murder with al-Qaeda and bin Laden, citing"the jihad that homoeroticism has unleashed on the cute." One of the more intriguing pieces is"Oliver Twink," which comes in the form of an impassioned dialogue between a teen junkie (Chris) and his compassionate"uncle" (iTodd). There's genuine scary power in the story's skillfully paced revelation of a dangerous unequal relationship. But, as usual, Cooper takes it way, way over the top. When his stories invite your empathy, he works like a Trojan (a painfully ribbed one, surely) to celebrate his soulless boy-toys' apocalyptic gamesmanship.

Some people call Cooper a maverick moralist and an innovative stylist. Well, some people will swallow almost anything.

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