Try

February 28, 1994
Cooper's disturbing new novel, like Frisk and Closer , explores the gritty, homoerotic subculture of a nondescript California suburb while chronicling two days in the life of Ziggy, the adolescent, adopted son of two sexually abusive gay fathers. Angelically beautiful and extremely insecure, Ziggy scarcely sleeps or attends high school, but struggles to articulate his own emotional life by compiling the latest issue of his fanzine, a crude journal about sexual abuse called ``I Apologize.'' Ziggy's unlikely mentors include his uncle Ken, who produces child pornography, his friend Calhoun, an aspiring writer who has withdrawn into a heroin-induced haze, and Roger, the less violent of his two fathers, who, with Humbert Humbert-like detachment, extolls the virtues of Ziggy's anatomy. Cooper's narrative, clinical and often pornographic, rigorously refrains from moralizing. Cutting cinematically back and forth between characters, his prose is jumpy and convoluted when describing Ziggy, dazed and analytical when depicting Calhoun, drained of affect when chronicling the appalling antics of Ziggy's uncle, who spends much of the novel drugging and raping a 13-year-old heavy metal fan he has picked up somewhere. Cooper's novel is less a case study in sexual abuse, however, than a window on a nightmarish suburban world, where domestic norms are subverted to such a degree that adults are either pointedly absent or predatory pedophiles, and where stunted but angelic teenagers take solace in drugs, sexual promiscuity and punk rock.

January 1, 1994
In a nightmarish novel reminiscent of the work of William Burroughs and Bret Easton Ellis, Cooper ( Wrong, LJ 5/15/92) explores the horribly dysfunctional world of Ziggy, the adopted teenage son of two gay men. Physically and sexually abused since he was eight, Ziggy drifts through his sordid life surrounded and used by heroin addicts and pushers, his pornographic filmmaker uncle, and a distant stepfather with unfamilial desires. Yet throughout, Ziggy holds onto his humanity, partly through his unrequited love for an addicted friend. At times shocking and repulsive, made more so by Cooper's precise but detached style and no-holds-barred realism, the novel is nonetheless compelling and successful. Certainly not for all tastes but recommended for large contemporary fiction collections.-- Eric W. Johnson, Teikyo Post Univ. Lib., Waterbury, Ct.