Frisk Book

Frisk is the gay American Psycho, and like that horrendous novel it revels in grossly repellant violence, and just like American Psycho, you have to ask yourself what the point is. And it's hard to say. Ellis's novel was supposed to satirise the yuppie greed-is-good 1980s. Okay, it does. But the violence towards women in that book goes on for page after page after page. And after say 15 pages, the reader is justified in saying Okay Brett, I Get The Point Already!! But on and on the violence goes. And so I get to figure that what's happening is that Ellis actually LIKES writing this stuff. Otherwise why go on at such length? And why does he like it, all that describing women being chopped up and tortured in so many disgusting, amusing ways? Well, I have to leave that to each reader to answer, and likewise answer why the reader likes reading it as well, and why so many many readers (vastly male it seems from the Amazon reviews) think American Psycho ROCKS! So, Dennis Cooper writes about gay sadomasochistic sex and murder. And in this book, plenty of coprophagy. The style he uses to do this is uniformly dull, lifeless, enervated, flat, affectless. It's... oh, I dunno, whatever. One critic describes it as "cool, immaculate prose [which] manages to convey intense romanticism alongside the macabre temptations of taboo." Yeah, right. Does that make it good, this breaking of taboos? Dennis Cooper does step out of his cool, immaculate style and gets quite excitable when he gets to the part about carving up teenaged boys. But then he lapses into a kind of boredom again. And the Los Angeles Times Book Review critic says in the blurb on the front "destined to classic status". And I say, these critics are degenerates. This book serves no purpose, except maybe, you know, if people like to read about torturing boys to death. I mean, some people might. So to them, it's good. Might even be a classic, I guess. Do I have the right to say that people shouldn't get their fun reading about pain and death and sadistic torture for page after page?