[In the following review, Byrne discusses the perverse themes and obsessions in Frisk.]

“When Dennis is thirteen, he sees a series of photographs of a boy apparently unimaginably mutilated. Dennis is not shocked, but stunned by their mystery and their power; their glimpse at the reality of death. Some years later, Dennis meets the boy who posed for the photographs. He did it for love” (jacket). Frisk is about what happens between Dennis's first look at such “snuff” shots and his last look at the reality behind the “snuff” and things created for the boys in the back room: “The wound is actually a glop of paint, ink, makeup, tape, cotton, tissue, and papier-mâché sculpted to suggest the inside of a human body.” Is murder the ultimate experience? Dennis Cooper goes beyond the question; he asks “What is it to touch skin, smell it, taste the body's secretions? This is not possession. The lungs, the intestines, the brain: to hold them in bloodied hands—that is it. What is it to murder a trick, a punk, a yuppie, a boy?” Cooper's narrator, also called Dennis, wrestles with this problem throughout the novel, hoping to exorcise the overwhelming desire to experience firsthand the murder of a certain type of victim: “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.” Clearly, for Dennis, this is the prelude to incipient necrophilia accompanied by latent homosexuality, and a growing interest in the usual laundry list of the pervert's dream of Turkish delights—“three ways, rimming, and drugs,” s & m, booze, mescaline, massage parlors, hard-core and soft-core sex magazines, porn videos, splatter films, marijuana, hash, crack, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down, buckle me with belts, belt me with buckles, all leading to the fantasy of fantasies, murder, dramatized in recent years as snuff movies, those little-seen attempts to market the ultimate horror—the “murder” of helpless victims to satisfy some of those who live for the love that dare not speak its name, in Wilde's phrase, many of whom “see homosexuality as a journey with stages—beginning with humiliation and ostracism, proceeding to glamour and sprezzatura and (after the boyfriends), either seeking a sort of domesticity or rotting in lechery.” Frisk is about the lechery of the mind, the obsession with murder and death acted out in fantasy and bordering on the possibility of actually murdering the victim, ending with the ultimate snuffing out of life. Poor Dennis's apologia of sorts comes when he pouts, “Maybe … if I hadn't seen this … snuff. Photographs. Back when I was a kid. I thought the boy in them was actually dead for years, and by the time I found out they were posed photographs, it was too late. I already wanted to live in a world where some boy I didn't personally know could be killed and his corpse made available to the public, or to me anyway. I felt so … enlightened?” We should remember that in this fantasy world a real snuff film is like the abominable snowman—we have yet to see a real yeti!