Frisk

“Dennis Cooper, a disturbing and transcendent artist, enters the mind of a killer and comes out with a genuine revelation.”—Los Angeles Times From the “disquieting genius” (Vanity Fair) Dennis Cooper, Frisk is the second novel in the controversial and award-winning George Miles Cycle—a murder mystery that implicates us all and a horror story in which the monster is love When Dennis is thirteen, he sees a series of photographs of a boy apparently unimaginably mutilated. Dennis is not shocked, but stunned by their mystery and their power; their glimpse at the reality of death. Some years later, Dennis meets the boy who posed for the photographs. He did it for love. Surrounded by images of violence, the celebrity of horror, news of disease, a wasteland of sex, Dennis flees to Europe, having discovered some clues about the photographs: “I see these criminals on the news who’ve killed someone methodically, and they’re free. They know something amazing. You can just tell.” What they know may lie in bodies themselves. Bodies are unavoidably real; what’s in them must have something to say. An isolated windmill in Holland provides the perfect setting for Dennis to find out more about bodies–of which there are many–and what is inside them. In Frisk, Dennis Cooper explores the limits of our knowledge and the dividing line between the body and the spirit. The body’s power extends to us all, but what power do we have over it, over its appetites and satisfactions?

Dennis Cooper is the author of the George Miles Cycle of five novels, of which Closer is the first. He is also the author of My Loose Thread, The Sluts, God Jr., and The Marbled Swarm. Cooper’s other works include story collections, poetry, and the essay collection Smothered in Hugs. He divides his time between Los Angeles and Paris.