[In the following review, Hitchings alleges that Period fails to take a clear stand, and that Cooper's intentions are obscure and “illegible.”]

For twenty years, Dennis Cooper cultivated a reputation as a subversive, stylish, gay poet. Then, in 1994, he published Closer, the first in a series of loosely connected novels. His new book, Period, concludes this quintet of edgy, risk-taking volumes. As the title suggests, it is intended to bring the sequence to a definitive close; but Cooper, who is seldom content with the standard formulae of narrative fiction—its tired resolutions and coy denouements—chooses to complicate this composed but malignant last installment with self-reflexive ironies and technical sleight of hand. The implicit aim is to show the reader that the idea of closure is merely a construct; there can be no such thing as a final, decisive, determined ending.

The novel's dramas are psychological. Its opening paragraph suggests a precise geographical setting—“A little town made up of rickety shacks largely hidden away in some humongous oak trees that this thick fog enclosed”—but it is the fog, not the little town, that persists during what follows. The deliberately murky story concerns the efforts of a cultish goth band to secure human victims for its wayward creative project, an essay in the poetry of death. Rather than being shown events, we pick up tremors of forewarning and inklings of appetite; events consist of a series of conversations and musings, played out on the Internet, and in the form of disembodied dialogues, befuddled diary entries and cinematic vignettes.

Cooper's is a world instantly recognizable to any aficionado of online dalliance. Perverts and their prey hide behind assumed identities, explore their cravings with inarticulate candour, and feast on prospects and memories of transgression. The young male characters are interchangeable; they have no personality, existing merely in order to be the props of violence and fantasy. Cooper unflinchingly depicts a blandly hedonistic underworld, and evokes with skill the intellectual and emotional emptiness of chat-room dialogue, the dissolute vagueness of pornographic fanzines, and the tawdry sexuality around which so much cyber-fantasy revolves.

Contrary to what his fans might have one believe, Cooper's feel for the subtleties on English prose is only modest. Occasionally he musters an ingenious image—one character has “a malignant brain tumour the size of an alarm clock”—but for the most part the semi-literate vacuity of his characters serves as a convenient excuse to employ a muckily colloquial style. His writing thrives on stagy inverted commas, phrases such as. “Long story short” (as in “to cut a long story short”), and words like “scaredy-cat”, “creepy”, “nondesigned” and the necessary but overused “weird” and “strange”.

With its numbly violent prose and moral opacity, Period is the quintessential “blank” novel. It avoids committing itself to any explicit standpoint; the narrator covers his tracks at every turn, and Cooper's own intentions are illegible to the last. Sickness and depravity are portrayed in a casual fashion, and though the characters who perpetrate the novel's evils are by any conventional standard unsympathetic, it remains unclear whether the reader is supposed to recoil in shock from the dystopian spectacle or enjoy its brutality.

There is a craven tendency to describe writing of this kind as “courageous”, on the grounds that it knows no boundaries. We are supposed, it seems, to nod and reflect that “this is how things are”. But Cooper's corner of the world, though larger than one might wish, remains obscure. Fans of his work scarcely need critics to switch them on to its macabre delights; such is its samizdat appeal, they no doubt commune with his ideas at source, online, rather than after they have been mediated by formal publication. And, for the rest of us, Dennis Cooper's writing constitutes the sort of wake-up call that our beleaguered modern conscience barely needs.