Infernal Bridegroom(s), Reanimated

Infernal Bridegroom(s), Reanimated Leora Lev The Sluts Dennis Cooper Illustrations by Todd James Void Books http://www.void-books.com 296 pages; cloth, $50.00 The Sluts was published by Alex Kasavin's Void Books, a press that, like Cooper's own Little House on the Bowery series with Akashic Books, is an urgent antidote to the increasing homogenization of the mainstream publishing industry in this reactionary backlash of an American cultural moment. Fortunately, these presses provide fare other than middlebrow conservative thrillers for which global warming is a leftist conspiracy, rants spewed by fascist, leggy, female misogynist cum homophobe "pundits," and low-rent Umberto Eco-wannabe art world murder mysteries hobbled by clichéd characters and shockingly pedestrian prose. The Sluts, illustrated with macabre, elegant, cartoony artwork by Todd James, was created over eight years, with segments published in such venues as Nerve.com, The Prague Literary Journal, and Sebastian . This is a fruitfully Frankensteinian inception for a book that queries subterranean psychosexual anxieties, traumas, and desires that cluster around the tension between cohesion and fragmentation of bodies and identities through an exploration of the web as a contemporary gothic space. For the phantasmatic Internet of this novel both dissects and performs these very dialectics, a virtual space where the contours of desiring selves and others waver, melt, and reconfigure themselves, like the three vampires who emerge and dissolve in Castle Dracula's dust motes. Here, as elsewhere, Cooper eschews any premise ofa self-conscious gay identity politics. This will pose problems for readers who like their fiction neatly niched, since the barbed skeins that constitute this narrative about desire projected, fantasized, and fetishized within the gay outlaw underworld of escort sex are not blunted within any consolatory, moralizing omniscience. Abysses both inner and outer, including crystal meth addiction and AIDS, and the self-destructive subcultures that have sprung up around the existential and physiological condition of being "???," are not mainstreamed but rather sounded to their disturbing depths. It all begins with Site 1, a message board in whichJohns post reviews of their tricks. Abeautiful, young, disturbed escort called Brad, who's a blood brother to the boys in Cooper's George Miles cycle, stars in these reviews, which detail such categories as body hair, eye color, kisser or not, in or out calls, and genital size, and then permit the reviewer to comment upon his experience. The bold typeset and typography, which evoke a pared-down verisimilitude in their visual listing of objective qualities, exist, from the very beginning, in tension with the unstable, contradictory, and self-deconstructing accounts of Brad. This novelistic gesture explores the ghostly paradoxes of Internet onto-epistemologies, which purport to offer immediacy and objectivity, and to be monitored by Webmasters who affirm the veracity of posts and threads, but that instead harbor infinite possibilities for dissimulation, the creation and dissemination of simulacra, and the monstrous profusion of the psyche's subterranean obsessions, dreads, anxieties, panics, and Usher-esque faultlines. This is a virtual gothic for our time, a haunted castle in which free-floating nightmare fantasies and desires both prey upon, and are nourished by, the imaginations of any who enter their portals. Protagonists and narratives do emerge in this site, but are subjected to a mise-en-abîme of permutations that refuse any onto-epistemological, characterological, or narrative stability or closure. Brad is beautiful but druggy, mentally unstable, and ill, alternately craving his olderJohns' attention and abusing it, while the Johns' self-presentations constantly unravel and/or are challenged by competing accounts. One John purports to be a trim 30-something, but his account is dismantled as that of "an ugly, fat pedophile and scat queen who got his heart broken." The unveiler is Brian, an older lover who alternately cares for, fetishizes, and abuses Brad. The Brad-Brian myth grows, feeding off the uncensored id of thejohn interlocutors, a baroque, serpentine spectacle for the fin de millennium that breaks through psychic filters to access the abject as well as the sublime. Myriad secondary characters and narratives perpetuate this spectacle, whose twists become ever more vertiginous and impenetrable, while also, and paradoxically, speaking to emotional and psychosexual truths that lie...