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Ziggy, the adopted teenaged son of two sexually abusive fathers, turns to his uncle, who sells pornographic videos, and his best friend, a junkie, in a complex tale of sexuality, abuse, and attraction. 15,000 first printing. Tour.

Cooper's disturbing new novel, like Frisk and Closer , explores the gritty, homoerotic subculture of a nondescript California suburb while chronicling two days in the life of Ziggy, the adolescent, adopted son of two sexually abusive gay fathers. Angelically beautiful and extremely insecure, Ziggy scarcely sleeps or attends high school, but struggles to articulate his own emotional life by compiling the latest issue of his fanzine, a crude journal about sexual abuse called "I Apologize." Ziggy's unlikely mentors include his uncle Ken, who produces child pornography, his friend Calhoun, an aspiring writer who has withdrawn into a heroin-induced haze, and Roger, the less violent of his two fathers, who, with Humbert Humbert-like detachment, extolls the virtues of Ziggy's anatomy. Cooper's narrative, clinical and often pornographic, rigorously refrains from moralizing. Cutting cinematically back and forth between characters, his prose is jumpy and convoluted when describing Ziggy, dazed and analytical when depicting Calhoun, drained of affect when chronicling the appalling antics of Ziggy's uncle, who spends much of the novel drugging and raping a 13-year-old heavy metal fan he has picked up somewhere. Cooper's novel is less a case study in sexual abuse, however, than a window on a nightmarish suburban world, where domestic norms are subverted to such a degree that adults are either pointedly absent or predatory pedophiles, and where stunted but angelic teenagers take solace in drugs, sexual promiscuity and punk rock.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Caveats often accompany reviews of Cooper's work (Frisk, Wrong, etc.), and it's not hard to see why. His novels (including this one) depict a nasty, brutish kind of gay sex, shadowed by violence and exploitation, yet they also have an inescapable power. We're in California, though you'd never know it; nearly all the scenes are interiors. Ziggy McCauley is a dysfunctional 18- year-old who checks into his high school just long enough to see his therapist. When Ziggy was two he was adopted by two gay fathers. After a while Roger, the ``less evil'' one, split; the other, Brice, has been raping and beating up his son for years. Ziggy, bisexual and ``needy,'' has one friend, Calhoun, ``the only human being...who definitely gives a half-shit about him.'' The problem is that Calhoun is both straight and a heroin addict who likes to keep the world at a distance, so Ziggy must keep his expressions of love to a minimum while simultaneously dealing with Roger, who has flown in from New York for some hot sex. Another sinister influence is Ziggy's Uncle Ken, who makes porn videos starring young teens; when 13-year-old Robin OD's, Ken summons a necrophile and collects a finder's fee before burying the corpse. Here, Cooper goes over the top; more chilling is the moment when Roger and Brice snare Ziggy, befouled by vomit, spaced-out on heroin, and do ``every lascivious thing you can do to a putrid and comatose male.'' Though Cooper's adults are beyond redemption, his kids achieve a genuine pathos, for despite their best efforts they never stop feeling; at the end Ziggy and Calhoun snuggle up together like babes in the woods. There is no narrative momentum in what is essentially a tableau of victims and predators; even so, the power is there. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

In a nightmarish novel reminiscent of the work of William Burroughs and Bret Easton Ellis, Cooper ( Wrong , LJ 5/15/92) explores the horribly dysfunctional world of Ziggy, the adopted teenage son of two gay men. Physically and sexually abused since he was eight, Ziggy drifts through his sordid life surrounded and used by heroin addicts and pushers, his pornographic filmmaker uncle, and a distant stepfather with unfamilial desires. Yet throughout, Ziggy holds onto his humanity, partly through his unrequited love for an addicted friend. At times shocking and repulsive, made more so by Cooper's precise but detached style and no-holds-barred realism, the novel is nonetheless compelling and successful. Certainly not for all tastes but recommended for large contemporary fiction collections.
- Eric W. Johnson, Teikyo Post Univ. Lib., Waterbury, Ct.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.