Reviews for Hard time

The average rating for Hard time based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-11-07 00:00:00 Rita Blair There's a philosopher's stone at the heart of this novel and it's a petrified lump of shit high up in the ass of a teenage junky. At first this lump is merely an erotic curiosity discovered during deep and relatively innocent digital anal probing, but later it becomes a potential mystical object in the hands of a sadistic dwarf. The "harvesting" of this stone provides the most potent image in the book - The dwarf slowly stabbing a willing boy to death during sex, then slicing around the boy's ass and lifting it off like a wilted manhole cover exposing the mystical shit lump deep in the gore. Intrigued, the dwarf washes the bloody spoils in a sink as the water turns thick and purple and drains away. He thinks he's happened upon something real special, but alas it is just a petrified lump of shit from the depths of a junky's ass. Then it's all downhill: no potential mystical breakthrough, no magic, only failed fairy tales and poop deck swabbing after messy deaths, and, yes, the search for love as one sifts through one's own violent fantasies and warped realities while navigating the world of blank narcissistic druggies and lost boys. As should be evident this is a dirty book, but as with all the Cooper I've read thus far there's a purity and beauty also because of his spare and vivid style and his visionary power and polish.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-05-22 00:00:00 Nir Dayan In the full context of the George Miles cycle, this is the fourth, sitting symmetrically across the relative calm of Try from Frisk. Which is the other of these narrated from within by a writer named "Dennis" who is prone to murderous fantasies. But as opposed to the cold amorality of the Dennis in Frisk, this is an apologetic, sometimes antithetically sentimental Dennis. Who actually has a hand in more direct harm than Frisk's Dennis despite this. (Doubtless, though, neither Dennis seems likely to be more "real".) Also like Frisk, this is a book about sublimation. A layer of artists interpreting the story for others, or working through their shit on various kinds of page. Eddie W spotted a philosopher's stone of sorts in here, even, that ultimate sublimator, and Cooper here aspires to alchemy in several senses. Does it work? The question itself is an oversimplification of the terms. This is also about death and the sublime, which in this context definitely belong separated by only two short words. Drugs are a proxy oblivion, of course, so they're also close, but there are... problems to that approach, always. But through these and other mediums, Guide is suffused in a non-verbal hum, or exhalation, or static: a brush with the inexpressible, a single continuous murmur of collective unconscious. There's a collective conscious of sorts too, a constant mirroring buzz of pop lyrics, sometimes by literal and actual bands of the mid-90s, sometimes transmogrified into proxy selves to better be sexualized and dissected. Because here to sexualize is to dissect. Or to want to. And love? Cooper -- and "Dennis" -- keep a close eye on the abyssal spaces between love, sex, and desire at all times. But love is granted an unaccustomed level of... possibility this time. Despite all the other events that surround it in a dense and inextricable web of fabrication, obfuscation, and occasionally even truth.