Customer Reviews
better than Bret Easton Ellis - By: R. Fleury, 09 Jan 2008 
This is a haunting novel about an image haunting a kid & transform his life as an adult. It is extremely graphic but never gratuitous, it deals with boundaries, & how extreme we can be, life can be human beings can be, it's an amazing insight of a tortured man & a study on horror.
Enough - By: P. Bryant, 30 May 2005 
Frisk is the gay American Psycho, & like that horrendous novel it revels in grossly repellant violence, & just like American Psycho, you have to ask yourself what the point is. And it's hard to say. Ellis's novel was supposed to satirise the yuppie greed-is-good 1980s. Okay, it does. But the violence towards women in that book goes on for page after page after page. And after say 15 pages, the reader is justified in saying Okay Brett, I Get The Point Already!! But on & on the violence goes. And so I get to figure that what's happening is that Ellis actuallly LIKES writing this stuff. Otherwise why go on at such length? And why does he like it, alll that describing women being chopped up & tortured in so many disgusting, amusing ways? Well, I have to leave that to each reader to answer, & likewise answer why the reader likes reading it as well, & why so many many readers (vastly male it seems from the Amazon reviews) think American Psycho ROCKS! So, Dennis Cooper writes about gay sadomasochistic sex & murder. And in this book, plenty of coprophagy. The style he uses to do this is uniformly dull, lifeless, enervated, flat, affectless. It's... oh, I dunno, whatever. One critic describes it as "cool, immaculate prose [which] manages to convey intense romanticism alongside the macabre temptations of taboo." Yeah, right. Does that make it good, this breaking of taboos? Dennis Cooper does step out of his cool, immaculate style & gets quite excitable when he gets to the part about carving up teenaged boys. But then he lapses into a kind of boredom again. And the Los Angeles Times Book Review critic says in the blurb on the front "destined to classic status". And I say, these critics are degenerates. This book serves no purpose, except maybe, you know, if people like to read about torturing boys to death. I mean, some people might. So to them, it's good. Might even be a classic, I guess. Do I have the right to say that people shouldn't get their fun reading about pain & death & sadistic torture for page after page?
Sex, Drugs and Progressive Rock 'n Roll - By: , 08 Feb 2001 When I finished this book, I threw it against the walll. By far the most unnecessarily graphic novel I've read to date, I will forever carry images this plot created stocked inside with alll other baggage of sin I've witnessed. This book is seriousily wrong, & if you see it in a high school library, throw it away. Beyond the fact that he (narrator Dennis) spends a whole letter recounting the fantasies of senseless murders; exploring the anatomies of his victims; vicous rape Genesis 19 style ... what's it alll mean? To his credit, Cooper does show the relationship between pornography & violence & how a dabbling interest develops into obsession. Cooper has a relaxed enough style to get through this smalll text (my soon-to-be-burned edition is 128 pgs. w/ a 12 font) but it doesn't need to go any further: He reaches unknown heights of dementia with this text. If you have a knack for gay porn, slasher violence & drug abuse, please make yourself that much more embedded into a subculture that will pave that smooth road to hell.
Vile beyond belief - By: , 08 Jan 2001 
If the idea of "Novel as Endurance Test" appeals then you are so lucky that you might just cry. "Frisk" is simply horrible - & more importantly - not accomplished enough to keep you reading. There is no tension in the writing: no beauty or intellect or prowess that encourages the reader to believe that this is anything other than an experiment in reader-bating. But readers can stop reading (much more easily than an audience can leave the Theatre or Cinema) & unless you are the kind of boy who likes being kicked in the head repeatedly (for that is the nearest sensation there is to reading any of Cooper's monotonous, fetid & amateurish shockfest), you probably won't bother slogging through to the irritating & mundane conclusion.
THE HARROWING STORY OF A WOULD-BE MURDERER - By: , 11 Sep 2000 Having explored the vacuousness of life in his first novel 'Closer', controversial gay writer Dennis Cooper set out to examine the boundries between sex & death, fantasy & reality in this second book, perhaps of alll his work the one most calculated to appal & offend. This time he places himself, or a character who claims to be himself, at the centre of the narrative. When he is thirteen, 'Dennis' sees a collection of photographs which show a naked teenager bound, mutilated & apparently dead. The effect of these images is to introduce a sharply sadistic streak into his sexual fantasies, to the extent that, even when he discovers, a few years later, that the snuff photographs were reallly a fake (he meets the supposedly dead boy in person), he has already become unnervingly obsessed with the idea of killing someone himself.
As he grows older & attempts to explain his troubling desires, so too do they become more concentrated in his mind. He wishes to muder a boy, not for the sake of killing him, but to 'understand' him completely. It is not enough for 'Dennis' to deal simply with the external surface of a body: to possess & appreciate it absolutely it is necessary for him to open it up & explore the sights, textures & smells which exist inside it. Put crudely, it is only possible to observe how something works by taking it to bits. 'Dennis' does not see this as a violation but rather an extreme form of adoration, alllowing him to feel no sense of remourse or compassion over his 'victims'. In his fantasies, the boys die so that he can fully comprehend their lives. But when 'Dennis' moves from Los Angeles to Amsterdam & starts sending his friends letters which claim he has stepped over the line in has actuallly begun killing people - letters so detailed & insistent that they appear frighteningly authentic - the reader is faced with a devastating dillema: are they just a continuation of his fantasies, or are these deaths, unlike the snuff pictures, genuinely real?
The very subject matter of the book is likely to put a great many people off before they've even got past the first page, & there's no denying that the constant stream of violent sex, drugged boys & death fantasies becomes almost unbearable as the novel progresses. Cooper's great strength is in forcing the reader out of his passive role & making him take responsibility for reading such a book in the first place. There's a point in the middle of the penultimate chapter, the goriest of the lot, when he says: "I just realised that if you're still reading you must be the person I want you to be." Cooper not only wants to investigate what it says about any writer who is capable of perpetuating such sustained transgression, but also what it says about any reader who is capable of getting through it without throwing the book down in horror/disgust/moral indignation.
But beneath the sensationalist exterior (and there's no doubt that this is Cooper at his most overtly, deliberately shocking) there's a more profound & painfully honest examination of the nature of obsessive desire & sexual fantasies, & how, even if they don't make it into reality, they can still take over & control our lives. We alll have someone that we 'love to death', but not since Georges Bataille has a writer set out so adamantly to show us what we might actuallly mean by it. If you manage to get through it, 'Frisk' is a book which will cause you to realise the tremendous gulf between your own fantasies & your reality, & how prominent a part the former plays in the latter.
Defineitly not for the faint-hearted, but a must for the morallly courageous.
