The Sluts
Ratings20
Average rating4.3
As I read more and more I've made myself start writing reviews. My thought is sometimes these can be useful to others, other times not so much. I have nothing to add that hasn't been said already in other reviews. So I'll keep this sort, and more to trigger my own memory in the future.
It slogged a bit in the middle, I got quickly bored of the twist every page in a half. Pushing me out of immersion or caring would normally knock a star off, but I was enthralled from the start....and it's after the mid point we return to continuously increasing insanity and depravity of the start of the book, and each paragraph after just adds more and more intensity to it.
In my opinion, the best thing Cooper has written. Forming a coherent, engaging, and thoughtful story this style is a true achievement.
I think what i liked about this most is the format. This entire time, we are reading the entries off of a gay escort service website. It played out like a reddit mystery with thousands of strangers all around the world trying to solve it , but very, very dark. Very realistic portrayal of internet culture.
I have read quite a bit of extreme horror before, but the reason why i found this especially disturbing is because this lacks basic empathy, and humanity. I think about this book a lot.
If you've read and liked exquisite corpse by poppy z brite, you'll enjoy this one. It has a similar dark, gay underworld of sex, drugs, and blood.
So incredibly good omg.
Reminds me a lot of BR Yeager's Amygdalatropolis I read a few weeks back. Both deal with truth in an internet world through a verisimilitudenous (is that a word?) epistolary framework.
Where Amygdalatropolis deals with a subculture I'm at least tangentially knowledgeable about, The Sluts exists in a realm I know nothing about (which might make sense of why I'm such a big fan of these gay focused transgressive horror novels?)
I fucking loved it. This is my second Dennis Cooper and definitely not my last.
Cooper writes about the intersection of sex and violence. This novel, mostly told through anonymous message boards provides a slew of unreliable narrators. While Cooper is often labeled as a transgressive writer, I really believe he transcends such labels, and it would be reductionist to say that his novels are transgressive. I find them wrapped in so many layers of honesty that isn't always present in the works of other transgressive writers. Highly recommended unless you have a low tolerance for sadism.