[In the following review, Ford comments on Cooper's blurring of the lines between fiction and reality as expressed in his novel Period.]

Sometimes it's difficult to tell if an artist's success is really deserved or if he's simply developed a dedicated following because his work is so peculiar that people can't decide if it's brilliance or pretension. Dennis Cooper's success has certainly been accused of being both things. To some he is a master stylist, exploring the worlds of violence, sex, and desire in shocking ways that challenge readers to re-evaluate their views of morality and to confront their own, perhaps frightening, obsessions. To others his work seems nothing more than the psychotic visions of a mind fixated on young men, murder, gratuitous sex, and violence just for the sake of getting himself and readers off and/or shocking them.

Cooper's latest will undoubtedly add fuel to the debate. Period is the fifth, and last, book in the cycle he started with his novel Closer and continued in Frisk, Try, and Guide. Like the book's predecessors, Period centers on a tale of sex, murder, and obsession. This time, though, Cooper has also thrown Satanism, the Internet, and goth subculture into the mix. The end result is a story that takes readers into a world in which reality and imagination are blurred and where truth is a slippery figure darting through the shadows—there one moment and gone the next.

Initially, the story seems straightforward. Nate and Leon, two teenage boys obsessed with Satanism and a goth rock band called The Omen, decide to make a deal with the devil so that one of them can have sex with a deaf-mute boy who spends his days observing life and writing about it in a notebook. It works, but the object of desire ends up dead when the boys decide that sacrificing him to their dark master will make them immortal. A fight ensues between Leon and Nate, and Nate ends up bloodied and confused at the shack of Bob, an eccentric Outsider artist (an artistic movement in which art is created by people who have no formal artistic training and who are, generally, outsiders because they live in non-urban areas or are mentally ill, prisoners, or otherwise removed from mainstream society) with whom he sometimes has sex. Shortly after, he improbably finds himself traveling on a bizarre road trip with the members of The Omen, who spend as much time murdering young male fans as they do seducing them with their music.

On the surface, things are not so different here than they are in many Cooper books. People are killed to get other people off. Boys are used for sex and use one another in turn. Everyone is obsessed with everyone else. But there's more to this book. Much more. The house in which Leon and Nate kill the deaf-mute boy is one of Bob's art projects—a series of black-painted rooms behind a perfectly-realized facade of a typical American home. After his supposed death, the deaf-mute continues to “speak” to readers in a series of minute-by-minute diaries detailing his thoughts as he wanders through the black rooms of the house. He is, in effect, a disembodied consciousness roaming through Bob's Outsider art project and reporting what he finds.

So, too, is Cooper's novel a wandering through the rooms of the mind, through the imagination of Outsiders/outsiders everywhere. His story, which at first seems deceptively like the most overdone and infantile of Goth rock fantasies, is really an intricate musing on the nature of reality, dreams, and obsession. As the story, such as it is, unfolds, we find that Nate and Leon are (maybe) characters in a book (called Period) written by one Walker Crane. A cult following has sprung up around the book; and various young men are desperately trying to figure out what it means and who the real people are who inspired it.

Among the players are George (Crane's ex-lover who may or may not have killed himself), Nate (a young man who has become Walker's new lover), Leon (who has named himself after a character in Walker's book and who was also George's lover), Bob (who has created a web site devoted to Crane's work), and various online personalities (including two boys who form a band called The Omen after reading Period) who interact with one another via e-mail and chat rooms as they try to unravel the mystery of Period, its creator, and its subjects.

No one in the book ever really does find out what's true and what isn't, which is exactly Cooper's point. Period is a novel about the realities we create when we become totally obsessed with someone or something. The characters take on various identities depending upon who they're interacting with and which story they're a part of at any given moment. They tell different versions of the truth, all or none of which may be accurate. Maybe the book is the fevered dream of one or more teenage boys high on drugs and bad rock music. Maybe it's the work of a writer obsessed with these same boys and the things they love. Or maybe it's equal parts all of these things. The work is a comment on the nature of art and its effects on both the creator and the audience, and in creating this ever-shifting world, Cooper questions whether life creates art or vice versa, and whether it matters in the end anyway.

Period is not an easy read, nor is it meant to be. The publisher classifies the book as poetry but refers to it as a novel in the jacket copy. Both are correct. Cooper's prose in this book is his most lyrical. Like the deaf-mute boy scribbling his vision of the world in his notebook, Cooper weaves a tangle of truth and lies. There's no lifeline to keep you tethered to reality as you stumble through his funhouse maze of words and ideas. In the end, he leaves you back where you began, with two boys observing a third and thinking up a way to have him sexually. Only instead of being Nate and Leon, they're Etan and Noel. Like Alice stepping into the looking glass, they've passed through the mirror in which Cooper's world is reflected and come out the other side. Or maybe that other side was the real one all along. Cooper leaves it up to the reader to decide.