Frisk

Dennis Cooper hanging with Lawrence Braithwaite at a prose conference in 2001

If you are 1) an ass-eater, 2) an aficionado of Saw I-XCIV, or 3) a consummate collector of underground ‘zines, then please allow me to use this Kleenex to dab the spot of fecal matter crusting off your nostrils and announce that your hero, Dennis Cooper, didn’t do shit for me.

I expected lethal doses of satanic thrills and sticky semantics from Frisk, Cooper’s novel about the sado-masochistic fantasies of a serial killer conveniently named Dennis. Critics have touted Cooper as being akin to “Bataille trapped in Disneyland,” or “Aeschylus with a mouthful of bubble-gum”—a deviant intellectual who casts his lurid gaze at pop culture in the digitized age. Hell, even the acclaimed pederast William Burroughs took time in between chasing tail at Columbia’s gay soirees to tout Cooper as “the last literary outlaw in mainstream American fiction.”

Frisk came recommended by my pal Luke, one of the toughest queers in my coterie. The last time I went gay clubbing with him I ended up fleeing pissed off hood rats in Washington Heights after Luke said that he would kill a packing dealer for not providing adequate “trees with my yayo.” Since I take my friends really seriously, I decided to give this book a go, even though the cover’s blotchy imagery reminded me of the rancid mayonnaise of some milquetoast.

Fittingly, the novel’s epigram by Jean Genet vaguely references language and images—themes Cooper explores, or at least pretends to. We then sink into the life of “Dennis,” a gloomy gay who digs macabre fucking but can’t bring himself to fulfill his ultimate fantasy—killing one of his partners. Instead, he daydreams about the act in endearingly pervy detail, like when he ruminates, “I shoved one hand down his throat, one hand up his ass, and shook hands with myself in the middle of his body, which sounds funny, but it wasn’t.” (It is.)

Dennis becomes obsessed with the idea of tearing pretty boys apart to drape their guts all over him. A Keanu Reeves-doppelganger named Joe, whose “buttocks were as springy as balloons,” catches his eye, but before he can make a move, Joe mysteriously perishes. So instead, there’s an entire chapter devoted to Dennis fantasizing about the circumstances of Joe’s death, which I suppose is meant to be super dark and transgressive, but turns out to be pretty silly. It’s hard to take a murderer seriously when his perky bum is moseying through his leather assless chaps. Watch this scene of Joe’s murder from a movie adaptation by Todd Verow and tell me you aren’t distracted by that hot strappy number:

[daily_motion src='http://www.dailymotion.com/embed/video/x7hq4j' width='480' height='336']

Truly stomach-squeezing imagery doesn’t make its debut until about two-thirds through the novel, when Dennis moves to Amsterdam and winds up squatting with two random droogs. The three of them pick off their victims with the same cold-hearted relish as Patrick Bateman, except with lots of poop-play and anus-licking thrown in.

My lunchtime quesadilla only squirmed up my esophagus once: when Dennis relates an episode where he tortures and kills a ten-year-old Dutch boy. After injecting him with heroin so that “the kid’s squeals sort of faded [and] sounded more like a cat mewing,” Dennis then screws the runt’s mouth “until his nostrils were full of [his] pubic hair” and slices the munchkin’s skin open to lick his bloody organs from throat to chest.

The coup de grace is administered as Dennis fucks the boy’s asshole while his partners hack off his limbs piece by piece, stomp on his decapitated head, and finally shit all over the hair that “got all goopy with blood and brain tissue or something.”

**********************SPOILER ALERT**********************

Frisk’s final chapter has a huge motherfucking twist. And by “twist,” I mean a letdown so deflating it can only be compared to, like, if you had a toe-tingling pussy-eating session and then realized it was just a dream, in a movie, and also you were dead the whole time. Ready?

DENNIS’ AMSTERDAM KILLING SPREE WAS 100 PERCENT FAKE AND JUST A CONTINUATION OF HIS BLUE-BALLED DAYDREAMING.

What the fuck?

Rating: Two dildos. I can picture Cooper’s smug smile as he saunters back to his decrepit love dungeon-hole. “Subversive commentary on porn’s shock value” and “exploration of the limits of experience” are just fancy names for a cheap trick. I feel like I’ve been hustled.  

Previously - Georges Bataille