[In the following breif review, Howard offers the opinion that Period is a “deeper and darker” work than its predecessors, and that the book contains a complex structure and extensive vision.]

Period explores themes and motifs familiar to Cooper's readers. Here again is a world of boys bored with everyday life, stimulating themselves with drugs, sex, and violence; here again is sexual confusion, thwarted desire, and misdirected affection. This book, however, is a deeper and darker work than its predecessors, more complex in its structure and more expansive in its vision. Gone is any locational detail, replaced by stark and desolate landscapes—an unnamed, rural town, the highway, an unnamed city. Much of the “action” takes place in virtual spaces like the Internet, the telephone, and radio. Gone, too, is any sense of linear narrative; this book bends back on itself, fragments, and puts itself back together.

The novel begins with two teens, Nate and Leon, sacrificing a cat to Satan so that Leon, who is infatuated with Nate, can instead have Dagger, a mute who looks exactly like Nate. The boys then decide to sacrifice Dagger inside of a “hellmouth,” built by a local artist in memory of his boyfriend George, another Nate doppelgänger. Later, Nate is picked up by a Goth band driving around the country, picking up look-alike boys and killing them in an attempt to revisit their first kill. Cut to a city and a group of men whose lives revolve around Walker Crane's book Period, a tribute to his lover George, who was raped and beaten, a book which may be the book we have been reading. Unless the entire book is the fantasy of Etan, a Nate doppelgänger introduced at the end of the book, itself a revision of the beginning, in which Etan, infatuated with Noel, tries his luck with a Noel replica named George. In Period's circular, looking-glass structure replete with multiple doppelgängers, Dennis Cooper has finally found a form to suit his content. Period is a startling work of fiction.