Guide

A brilliant novel of LA's underground from the author of Closer, "e;the last literary outlaw in mainstream American fiction"e; (Bret Easton Ellis). Chris is a young porn star who wants to experience death at someone else's hand; Mason has lurid fantasies about members of British pop bands; Sniffles is a teenage runaway whose need for love outweighs his attachment to life. Courtesy of a frankly manipulative author/narrator named Dennis, these characters move through a subterranean Los Angeles where hallucination and reality, sex and suicide, love and indifference run together in terrifying ways. Guide, the fourth novel in a projected five-book cycle, continues to explore the boundaries of experience in the manner that has earned Dennis Cooper comparisons to Poe, Genet, and Baudelaire. "e;The most seductively frightening, best written novel of contemporary urban life that anyone has attempted in a long time; it's the funniest, too."e; Los Angeles Times Book Review "e;With Guide, America's most daring novelist has given us his masterpiece."e; The Face "e;Make[s] American Psycho and Lolita seem tame . . . A brilliantly base tale of human self-destruction for the brave."e; The Times (London) "e;Dante's Inferno with George Bataille as your escort, damaged yet exhilarating."e; Arena "e;Though the story is as compelling as it is perverse, Cooper purposefully overrides it with an innovative style and raw, truthful character studies . . . With Guide, Cooper claims his place, alongside Genet and Burroughs, as a master of his own disenfranchised generation."e; Library Journal