Synopses & Reviews
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 flies to Europe, having discovered some clues about the photographs: I see these criminals on the news whove killed someone methodically, and theyre free. They know something amazing. You can just tell.” What they know may lie in bodies themselves. Bodies are unavoidably real; whats in them must have something to say, even in a society that lives on images and fantasies. An isolated windmill in Holland provides the perfect setting for Dennis to find out more about bodiesof which there are manyand what is inside them.
In Frisk, as in the award-winning Closer, Dennis Cooper explores the limits of our knowledge and the dividing line between the body and the spirit. Frisk is a novel about the power of fantasy and faith, about the ecstasy and horror of being human. The bodys power extends to us all, but what power do we have over it, over its appetites and satisfactions? The answer to these questions is a work of imaginative courage and clarity: a murder mystery that implicates us all and a horror story in which the monster is love.
Review
"Dennis Cooper, a disturbing and transcendent artist, enters the mind of a killer and comes out with a genuine revelation." Los Angeles Times
Review
"Frisk is a significant work of fiction. Cooper...wants to lead us into the wormy heart of the murderous impulse." Michael Cunningham
Synopsis
An exploration of the fine dividing line between desire, pornography and violence, this is a novel both about the macabre temptations of taboo and the power of fantasy and faith. Dennis Cooper has also written Closer and several volumes of poetry, including The Tenderness of the Wolves.
Synopsis
In Frisk, Dennis Cooper explores the ultimate meaning of the body, sex, and death. The novels narrator, a thirteen-year-old boy, is stunned when he encounters photos of a mutilated boy; his imagination leads him on a journey in which sexual urges start to fuse with grisly fantasies and desires he doesnt understand.
About the Author
Dennis Cooper was born on January 10, 1953. He grew up in the Southern California cities of Covina and Arcadia. He wrote stories and poems from early age but got serious about writing at 15 after reading Arthur Rimbaud and The Marquis de Sade. He attended Pasadena City College for two years, attending poetry writing workshops taught by the poets Ronald Koertge and Jerene Hewitt. He then attended one year of university at Pitzer College in Claremont, California, where he studied with the poet Bert Meyers. In 1976, he founded Little Caesar Magazine and Press, which he ran until 1982. From 1980 to 1983 he was Director of Programming for the Beyond Baroque Literary/Art Center in Venice, California. From 1983 to 1985, he lived in New York City. In 1985, he moved to Amsterdam, Holland where he lived for two and a half years before returning to New York. While in Amsterdam, he began his ten year long project, The George Miles Cycle, an interconnected sequence of five novels that includes Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, and Period. In 1990, he moved back to Los Angeles where he has lived ever since.