[In the following review, Young discusses Cooper's series of five novels, offering a positive evaluation of Period. Young acknowledges the base and sordid elements, but lauds the “grace and elegance” and “ethical torment” within the works.]

When Dennis Cooper began his quintuplet of novels in 1989, of which Period is the last, he was no more than a minor poet on the Los Angeles avant-garde gay scene. But as the novels appeared with relentless regularity, and Cooper became more widely known, critics competed to garnish his work with ever more elaborate encomia: the novelist Edmund White wrote that Cooper was “reciting Aeschylus with a mouthful of bubblegum”; Bret Easton Ellis called him the “last literary outlaw in mainstream American fiction”; the New York Times opined that “this is high-risk literature. It takes enormous courage for a writer to explore the extreme boundaries of human behaviour and amorality.” Even I contributed my two cents worth, writing in the Guardian: “If Georges Bataille had been stranded in Disneyland, he might have written like Dennis Cooper.” At the same time, the extreme sexual nature of Cooper's fiction resulted in his receiving death threats and being attacked by literal gay activists.

So what is the big deal about Dennis Cooper? In person, he seems to be anything but the heir to a great Continental tradition of licence and abandon. He may be aware of the transgressive tradition in which his work is located—de Sade, Poe—but he speaks (and often writes) in a deliberately dumbed-down Californian teen demotic. This is informed not only by the time he spends among deviant teens, but also by the compassion he feels for abused kids and, through association, by memories of his own unhappy childhood. Reading him is a bit like eating an apple full of razor blades.

The five novels in this series—Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, and now Period (all published by Serpent's Tail)—concentrate on Cooper's own sexual fantasies. Each novel is a nightmarishly complex knot of predatory homosexual desire, murderous longing and rampant pedophilia. These are shot through with shards of romanticism, nurturance and moments of tenderness. Cooper is obsessed with a certain type of passive, abused, drugged teenage boy. The novels depict grotesque scenes of murder and mayhem.

Central to Cooper's fantasies is a compulsive buttock worship: “Goof's ass is this splayed, perfect, shimmering, televised orb”; “Junkies' asses are perfect, so constipated, such weird treasure chests”; “One of my fingers was up Chris's ass. There was this hard rock of shit stuck in there like a horrid antique.”

Should people doubt that this is serious art, let me direct them to three books published recently by imprisoned US serial killers, one of whom was trained in creative writing and was quite talented. These books, with their endless, thudding scenes of sadistic torture, are utterly devoid of the grace and elegance of Cooper's work, his empathy and longing, his ethical torment.

Cooper is tormented, pre-eminently, by the inadequacy of language as a medium through which to express extreme emotions. “Words have this awful, downsizing effect on your thoughts”; “Luke's eyes are greenish … no, hazel—no, aquamarine with a spray of brown speckles and kind of, uh, yellowy smears.”

In terms of animating one's deepest sexual fantasies, Cooper has something in common with William Burroughs. Burroughs wrote of the “courage” required of an author—“the courage of the inner exploration, the cosmonaut of inner space. The writer cannot pull back from what he finds because it shocks or upsets him, or because he fears the disapproval of the reader.” Cooper has certainly felt very frustrated by those who (unfamiliar with the sentiments expressed here by Burroughs and similarly elsewhere) persist in misreading him. “I'm seen as this person who wants to kill boys and I'm NOT. They think I'm a monster.” In Period, the narrator explicitly rejects any idea that he wishes to embrace his fantasies in real time: “I'm a wuss”; “I'm not an evil man”; “I'm sick. But I'm doing my very best, really.”

Cooper has said that he detests the sexual exploitation of children; and yet he can “understand the impulse—the horror of it is very sexy or something”. This presumably accounts for his wilful flouting of strong taboos: all the novels feature pornography, kiddie porn, child sexual abuse and snuff films.

The first book in the series, Closer (1989), supports a Lacanian pre-Oedipal reading with its creation of George Miles, beautiful and benumbed. Scared, self-destructive, he is Cooper's archetypal teenage muse. In Frisk (1991), a doomed flirtation with the reader, the narrator claims actually to have enacted his most extreme murderous impulses. Try (1994) is less solipsistic and, mercifully, more plot-driven. In it, Cooper describes the damage sustained by Ziggy, the adopted son of an abusive gay male couple. After the publication of this book, Cooper went into therapy.

By the time Guide was published in 1997, I found that, with the best will in the world, I could read no more novels about boys' bottoms. In any event, they weren't a particular interest of mine. Yet I have since returned to Guide, and have found, as in Period, a deeper, more mature work. Both novels, unlike their predecessors, focus on other forms of love and tenderness; they are not simply cruel, exploitative depictions of extreme sexuality.

Elliptical and strange, Period is a worthy finale. George Miles reappears, providing a unity of thematic purpose. All the current appurtenances of Californian teendom are here: drugs, Goths, death metal, Satanism, the net, disturbed psychic states. And Cooper has at last achieved a certain distance from his implacable, airless fantasies. The prose is gentler, sadder and more resigned than in the earlier, sexually frenetic books. It is far more stylistically complex, too. Identities dissolve—and meld.

For Cooper, the body is itself a “text”, something to be “read”. He speaks of reading the body “like braille”. Roland Barthes has written of how the “text can reveal itself in the form of a body, split into fetish objects”; that texts arise out of our history, “leaving the trace of a cut”. Barthes calls them “texts of bliss”—or jouissance.

Cooper's texts are unequivocally part of this tradition. In this sense, his concentration on the buttocks is crucially important, signifying as it does all the divisions in his own nature. His achievement, in the end, is to illuminate ways in which we are all at psychic odds with ourselves, but remain trapped within the inescapable contours of our own hard corporeality.