Guide (Cooper, Dennis) - Softcover

Cooper, Dennis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802135803 ISBN 13: 9780802135803

Publisher: Grove Press, 1998

Synopsis

Chris is a young porn star who wants to experience death at someone else's hand; Mason has lurid fantasies about members of British pop bands; Sniffles is a teenage runaway whose need for love outweighs his attachment to life. Courtesy of a frankly manipulative author/narrator named Dennis, these characters and more move through a subterranean Los Angeles where hallucination and reality, sex and suicide, love and indifference run together in terrifying ways. Guide, the fourth novel in a projected five-book cycle, continues to explore the boundaries of experience in the manner that has earned Dennis Cooper comparisons to Poe, Genet, and Baudelaire.

About this title

Review:

Over the past 15 years Dennis Cooper has established himself as the preeminent spokesperson and chronicler for angst ridden teens in Los Angeles. In Closer, Frisk, and Try, Cooper delineated the existential crisis of gay teen boys with no place to go but down, nothing to look forward to but death. Cooper's plots usually revolve around the idea that there are people--usually older men--who are willing to help them with this last desire. Cooper tells a similar tale in Guide, but has placed himself in the middle of the action as a participant. Beautifully and chillingly written, Guide is Cooper's most disturbing, transgressive tale yet. A visionary masterpiece as sublime as it is frightening.

From the Back Cover:

Narrated in a voice that at times may be construed as the author's own, Guide is the story of the conflict between a novelist's fantasy life and his inability to represent it in language. Remembering the clarity and omnipotence he felt during an LSD trip in his teens, "Dennis" drops acid and attempts to write a novel that will make sense of his life, his desires, his friends, and his art, and distinguish what is real from the distortions created by his overactive imagination. Dennis's sexual relationship with Chris - an addict who fantasizes about being killed - pushes him to the very edge of emotions he has only imagined. His platonic love for Luke, an imaginative, but far more innocent, friend, offers possible salvation from his otherwise crazy life. In episodic chapters that criss-cross through time, Guide weaves together Dennis's story with these and other characters, including Goof, a young and amazingly innocent porn star, Sniffles, a teenage runaway whose need for love outweighs his attachment to life, and Mason, whose lurid desires are rivaled only by Dennis's own.

About this edition

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0802135803
• ISBN 13: 9780802135803
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192