Hogg: A Novel

A fearless descent into the darkest corners of human desire and violence.

First written thirty-five years ago and completed days before the Stonewall riots in New York, award-winning author Samuel R. Delany’s Hogg is one of America’s most famous “unpublishable” novels. It recounts three days in 1969 in the life of truck driver and rapist-for-hire, Franklin Hargus. Narrated by his young accomplice, Delaney’s novel portrays an exploration of erotic depravity, a capacious landscape of sexuality that transgresses social and erotic boundaries.

While testing readers’ tolerance, what transfigures the novel into a work of literature is Delany’s refusal, faced with moral anxieties and revulsion, to mutilate or disown his creation. Hogg’s characters wear recognizable human faces, possessing intense loyalty, perverse admiration, and a kind of integrity. Hargus fascinates. He is the embodiment of what society can turn people into, the decaying condition of the human soul.
 

Samuel R. Delany was born and grew up in New York City’s Harlem. Associated with New Wave science fiction and Afrofuturism, Delany was chosen by the Lambda Book Report as one of the hundred men and women who have most changed our concept of gayness in the last century. A novelist and critic, he is a recipient of the William Whitehead Memorial Award for a lifetime’s contribution to lesbian and gay literature.