A Cask of Troutwine reviewed The Sluts by Dennis Cooper
None
4 stars
A book that was a little awkward to read in a public coffee shop, but also one I finished in a single afternoon. I'd actually been planning on getting my hands on Frisk first after hearing Bret Easton Ellis talk about it briefly in an old episode of the radio show Bookworm, but I came across this a short while afterwards while on a bookstore crawl and decided to snag it.
Cooper perfectly captures the tone and cadence of public porn and sex works forums, where users are either playing in a collective fantasy and building off of each other or reacting to said fantasies and interactions. He uses that a spring board for narrative where we are given no outside information and follow the users of a gay sex work review thread as they discuss a young, unstable possibly teenaged boy who has turned to sex work, and …
A book that was a little awkward to read in a public coffee shop, but also one I finished in a single afternoon. I'd actually been planning on getting my hands on Frisk first after hearing Bret Easton Ellis talk about it briefly in an old episode of the radio show Bookworm, but I came across this a short while afterwards while on a bookstore crawl and decided to snag it.
Cooper perfectly captures the tone and cadence of public porn and sex works forums, where users are either playing in a collective fantasy and building off of each other or reacting to said fantasies and interactions. He uses that a spring board for narrative where we are given no outside information and follow the users of a gay sex work review thread as they discuss a young, unstable possibly teenaged boy who has turned to sex work, and the bizarre and the growing desire of many of the users to abuse or injure him for sexual gratification. Or not. What is really happening and what isn't is often up in the air with very few revelations about what is really happening to him or the people he has interacted with, with it becoming questionable if they are even talking about the same boy at various points.
The collective fantasy that the users are engaging with works hand in hand with the readers built in biases about where books like this often go. At several points the book seems to be building towards common narrative beats as the situation gets worse and worse (even ignoring obvious fetish material users attempt to inject to the proceedings) only for the rug to be pulled out from under the reader, forcing them to consider how they, in many ways, are also fantasizing about the injury of this child. Not to morally chastise the reader, I don't think Cooper is interested in that, but more to show similarities between the reader and the forum users and what we get from narratives like this.
I wasn't sure how I felt about the book when I first finished it, I knew that I had liked it but it was difficult to fully judge off the bat. As I've sat with it, however, my esteem for it has grown. I've already ordered Closer and Frisk, the first two books of Coopers George Miles Cycle of books, and my hope is that they're as interesting and engaging as this book was.
