Physically beautiful and strangely passive, George Miles attracts his fellow students with a mysterious promise, like a wallet lying on the street. One after another, his teenage friends rifle through George, ransacking him for love or anything else they could trust in the mindlessness of middle America. What they find is a vision of nightmare intensity, in a novel that assaults the senses as it engages the mind.

Closer follows the links of desire and value that drag George into the arms of men like John, an artist who drains his portraits of humanity in order to find what lies beneath; Alex, fascinated by splatter films and pornography; and Steve, an underground entrepreneur who turns his parents’ garage into a nightclub. These and others pass George from hand to hand, hoping to feel even one emotion clear and uncorrupted by society, but George remains a blurry ghost until he is picked up by two men in their forties. Tom and Philippe think they can find reality in the sharp outlines of bones and the bright red of blood; obsessed with the beauty of death, they find in George the perfect object for their passion.

In brutally frank prose that exposes euphemism, cliché, and evasion, Dennis Cooper stares unflinchingly at the horror of a society without values, and his vision makes its enormity all too real. It is a world in which pain is an undeniable reality, the inevitable companion of truth, and a test of our commitment to life. Dennis Cooper explores the limits of experience, and while he sharpens our understanding of the life around us, he leaves no escape from what he finds.

Publishers Weekly Reviews

In chapters titled with the names of the characters on whom they focus, this brief novel links together a small, bleakly debauched cast of gay men. Dedicated to sex and violence for the catharsis these acts would seem to promise, the men settle into a dull grind of physical encounters that, no matter how searing, fail to provide transcendence. The fault of their miserable existence seems to lie not in them, but in existence itself; life by its very nature can offer little but a thrillingly painful prelude to death. The novel's problem is not Cooper's point of view but the monotony of his spare, honest treatment: his deadpan look at chronic sexual anomie is so faithful to the phenomenon it describes that the work succumbs, laconically, to weariness. Scope is further limited by Cooper's decision to address the condition of despair more than its cause. Though convincing, sometimes darkly funny evidence of dissolution and decay abounds (`` . . . men had worn him away. They'd fastened him to a treadmill that spun until there was nothing around but a vague outline, smeared in blood''), memorable details tend to languish in dolorous prose. (Apr.) Copyright 1989 Cahners Business Information.