Authors: Dennis Cooper
ISBN-13: 9780802135803, ISBN-10: 0802135803
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Date Published: August 1998
Edition: 1 PBK ED
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.
There's a stainles steel sheen to Cooper's sentences that is as admirable as anything this side of Joan Didion.