· · ─ ·✶· ─ · · 2025-11-17 // review of Dennis Cooper's novel The Sluts (2004) weak-strong 4. an absolutely horrifying, riveting descent into a nightmare world of violence driven by the internet's singular ability to transmute the myriad valences of desire into the pornographic mode. it takes until the last quarter or so of the novel for its prescient-ness to begin to take shape, as one realizes with horror that they have entered the real. what at first seemed like cheap shock-value horror began to come together. throughout all this, Cooper never lets you become inured to the violence. the singing beauty, dark as it is, of this novel also comes when considered through the lens of the AIDS crisis, which peaked the year he began writing, and its psychological devastation on the generation of men whose foreclosed futures collided head-on with the Pandora's box of the nascent World Wide Web. unsure whether I will pick up any more of his novels, though I still find them interesting and curiously fascinating. this one took me a long time to finish due to its graphic subject matter. though maybe it will help now that I have some sort of idea as to its purpose in his writing. nevertheless I will need a break. · · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·