Frisk: A Novel (Cooper, Dennis) - Softcover

Cooper, Dennis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802132898 ISBN 13: 9780802132895

Publisher: Grove Press, 1993

Synopsis

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.

Surrounded by images of violence, the celebrity of horror, news of disease, a wasteland of sex, Dennis flies to Europe, having discovered some clues about the photographs: I see these criminals on the news who’ve killed someone methodically, and they’re free. They know something amazing. You can just tell.” What they know may lie in bodies themselves. Bodies are unavoidably real; what’s in them must have something to say, even in a society that lives on images and fantasies. An isolated windmill in Holland provides the perfect setting for Dennis to find out more about bodies of which there are many and what is inside them.

In Frisk, as in the award-winning Closer, Dennis Cooper explores the limits of our knowledge and the dividing line between the body and the spirit. Frisk is a novel about the power of fantasy and faith, about the ecstasy and horror of being human. The body’s power extends to us all, but what power do we have over it, over its appetites and satisfactions? The answer to these questions is a work of imaginative courage and clarity: a murder mystery that implicates us all and a horror story in which the monster is love.

About this title

Review:

Cooper says, "I present the actual act of evil so it's visible and give it a bunch of facets so that you can actually look at it and experience it. You're seduced into dealing with it. ... So with Frisk, whatever pleasure you got out of making a picture in your mind based on ... those people being murdered, you take responsibility for it." In unsparingly confessional mode, Cooper leads the reader into a confrontation with what they get out of fantasized scenes of violence. A brilliant novel -- not a genre horror work but, rather, a critique of the power of genre.

About the Author:

Dennis Cooper is the winner of the Ferro-Grumley Award for Closer, and Guide was a Los Angeles Times bestseller and one of its Ten Best Books of the Year. He lives in Los Angeles.

About this edition

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0802132898
• ISBN 13: 9780802132895
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 144