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3.46 AVERAGE
3.46 AVERAGE
I really didn’t follow a lot of it and I’m not sure why at all - had to kept flicking back and forth to remember who the characters were and for a short book I’m not sure why. The graphic letters were really good and the flow and obsession of Dennis really showed through.
5/10
Fucked.
I was literally feeling like I had a moral obligation to give this book a lower rating; however, the way that Cooper totally flips the narrative on it’s head in the end was pretty clever.
This by no means makes the book perfect, but certainly makes it a helluva lot more mature.
Fucked.
I was literally feeling like I had a moral obligation to give this book a lower rating; however, the way that Cooper totally flips the narrative on it’s head in the end was pretty clever.
This by no means makes the book perfect, but certainly makes it a helluva lot more mature.
The first half was definitely nothing beyond what I was expecting out of this. The second half is completely repulsive but was compelling enough for me to keep reading.
Yeah, I didn't much enjoy this. I can see the idea behind it - an obsession with sadism that propels a young man into fantasies of murder - but the execution seems to be more concerned with shock value than anything else. I often find that the horror films I like least are the slashers, the ones least concerned with story and more with gross-out gore, and that's the case here. There's only so often you can read about violent sex before the author's desire to shock starts to seem laboured and tedious, and constantly ratcheting up the gore value - there's a horribly explicit scene of the rape and murder of a child - doesn't increase my interest. On top of that, the prose just doesn't do anything for me. Sample line: "His head must have swivelled too quickly or something, because it started trembling like what's-her-name's... Katharine Hepburn's." Ugly prose kills even good stories stone dead for me, and this is just not that good a story to begin with.
I picked up this book at a library book-sale, intrigued by the vague description on the back cover.
When I read the Jean Genet quote that came before the book started, I knew that this was going to be a heavily sexual story - and it was. Depending on how they are written, books like this normally don't offend me.
However, this one really made me feel uncomfortable. I know that that was the author's aim, as his writing was pointedly shocking.
The book opens with a series of photographs being studied in detail. These photos are child pornography - bondage, and the reader is led to believe that the child in the photographs has been severely hurt at the very least.
Fortunately, there was not an emphasis or focus on child porn in the rest of the story, or else I probably would have put it down (something I normally refuse to do, no matter what!).
However, the rest of the hard-hitting sexuality in this book is certainly present in every sentence you read.
I got the feeling that it was very overdone - a dirty, merciless world of sex, drugs, alcohol, more sex, more sex (and, yes, more sex) - just seemed like the author was trying to squeeze in as many filthy, offensive, shocking things as possible in record-breaking time.
The result is a very scattered, messy little book. All of the endless fragments annoyed me, and rendered the flow of this book into a jerky, disconcerting style. I could never get into it, and all of the characters seemed to be exactly the same - dirty, more or less world-weary, shamelessly sexual.
This book tried too hard and accomplished nothing, in my opinion. Maybe you would have to read the rest of the books in the series - but that is definitely not something that I ever plan on doing.
This book was certainly not my type of reading.
When I read the Jean Genet quote that came before the book started, I knew that this was going to be a heavily sexual story - and it was. Depending on how they are written, books like this normally don't offend me.
However, this one really made me feel uncomfortable. I know that that was the author's aim, as his writing was pointedly shocking.
The book opens with a series of photographs being studied in detail. These photos are child pornography - bondage, and the reader is led to believe that the child in the photographs has been severely hurt at the very least.
Fortunately, there was not an emphasis or focus on child porn in the rest of the story, or else I probably would have put it down (something I normally refuse to do, no matter what!).
However, the rest of the hard-hitting sexuality in this book is certainly present in every sentence you read.
I got the feeling that it was very overdone - a dirty, merciless world of sex, drugs, alcohol, more sex, more sex (and, yes, more sex) - just seemed like the author was trying to squeeze in as many filthy, offensive, shocking things as possible in record-breaking time.
The result is a very scattered, messy little book. All of the endless fragments annoyed me, and rendered the flow of this book into a jerky, disconcerting style. I could never get into it, and all of the characters seemed to be exactly the same - dirty, more or less world-weary, shamelessly sexual.
This book tried too hard and accomplished nothing, in my opinion. Maybe you would have to read the rest of the books in the series - but that is definitely not something that I ever plan on doing.
This book was certainly not my type of reading.
The sleazeball of gay fiction. Dennis Cooper has something of a reputation as a writer of violent, disturbing, pornographic, mostly-well-written fiction. Frisk is the only novel of his that I've read, and it does live to that reputation. I've read a fair amount of disturbing stuff before (I'm a big fan of William S. Burroughs, I spent some time once reading de Sade, and I still try to read Les Chants du Maldoror from time to time.) Stuff like Frisk doesn't really suprise me, so I was suprised at how unpleasant I found the process of reading it. Maybe it's because it's not that well written, or too well written, or so contemporary I can't distance myself from it.
The only disturbing thing about this book is the dull and dreadful writing.
dark
tense
medium-paced
Content Warnings
Graphic: Body horror, Child abuse, Child death, Death, Drug abuse, Drug use, Gore, Pedophilia, Physical abuse, Rape, Sexual content, Sexual violence, Torture, Violence, Blood, Excrement, Vomit, Murder
This one was much tighter, and a bit more focused, than Closer. It's also far more violent and depraved.
A negative review I read of this somewhere claimed that Frisk was an attempt at a gay(-er) version of American Psycho -- while a pretty bold claim, I don't think it holds up well when one compares the two.
A negative review I read of this somewhere claimed that Frisk was an attempt at a gay(-er) version of American Psycho -- while a pretty bold claim, I don't think it holds up well when one compares the two.
Another reviewer on Goodreads, Paul Bryant, described this novel as "the gay American Psycho" and i can definitely see the parallels. Consumerism bad = murder bad = murder & consumerism.
How Frisk differs is that the narrator, "Dennis", and the collection of other gay murder boys are actually interesting and i cared about them. Not to mention the novel doesn't bore you with needless paragraphs, and makes its point bluntly. I honestly enjoyed Frisk, though i know Dennis Cooper is a specific taste.