_{Ugly Man
by Dennis Cooper
published May 26, 2009
Harper Perennial
272 pgs.}

As a rule, collected short stories are best consumed sparingly, letting the discrete flavor of each remain undiluted by the others.  Dennis Cooper however is a rule breaker by trade, so it comes as no surprise that Ugly Man, his recent collection of short fiction, is an exception to the discretionary rule. For those who can stomach it, this is a volume that should be wolfed down. Indulgence of appetite is central to Cooper’s work after all and when read in large portions, Ugly Man not only displays his trademark range of horror, humor, and hyper-textuality, but also delivers much of the queasy power of his longer work. Ingested one after the other, the pieces merge and collide, pulling the reader further into a world of beautiful, apathetic junkies; death-tripping teens; molesters; mutilators; and cannibals negotiating the void of their world with violence, pop culture banter, philosophical speculation, and rampant sexual fetishism.  The objectified body is the center of Cooper’s universe – the ass in particular, with the line between life and death, meaning and its lack, identity and image, often being the crack of that ass. Throughout the 19 pieces that make up Ugly Man, asses invite lust, idolatry, torture, and spiritual transgression – usually in combination – the ass as the sign of the liminal body – the ass crack as the bodily and existential abyss. All of this served up with a voice so dry one wonders how it can evoke such physical sensations and acute psycho/sexual hungers. 

Ugly man is Cooper’s first short story collection since Wrong (1984) and his first work published by Harper Perennial. The volume includes an appendix of poems, interviews, even lists of Coopers favorite writing and music. While this ephemera certainly seems like a mainstream publisher’s attempt to legitimize Cooper’s status, much of the material does shed light on his work.  In an interview with Robert Gluck, Cooper says that Rimbaud and Robert Bresson are two continuing influences on his writing. This influence can be clearly seen in the delirium of his content and the cool, transparent control of his prose.  Cooper seems to have a butcher’s detachment to the abattoir he creates, simultaneously invoking a compulsion for trauma and removing the reader from it. This isn’t the safe literary position that it might seem at first. As Angela Carter once said of Burroughs “…you cannot be carried along by the narrative. You yourself are being rendered as discontinuous as the text.”  In Cooper’s work rendering and rending are one and the same, presented in the form of graphic physical description. It may be hard to care for Cooper’s characters, but we do fear for them, and more so for ourselves in the places they invite us to enter. Caught in the mix of titillation, repulsion, and social incisiveness, we are consciously implicated in the atrocities the characters commit and have committed unto them.  Everyone within Cooper’s text is a victim, a victimizer or both––leaving no easy moral escape.