A brilliant novel of LA’s underground from the author of Closer, “the last literary outlaw in mainstream American fiction” (Bret Easton Ellis).
Chris is a young porn star who wants to experience death at someone else’s hand; Mason has lurid fantasies about members of British pop bands; Sniffles is a teenage runaway whose need for love outweighs his attachment to life. Courtesy of a frankly manipulative author/narrator named Dennis, these characters move through a subterranean Los Angeles where hallucination and reality, sex and suicide, love and indifference run together in terrifying ways.
Guide, the fourth novel in a projected five-book cycle, continues to explore the boundaries of experience in the manner that has earned Dennis Cooper comparisons to Poe, Genet, and Baudelaire.
“The most seductively frightening, best written novel of contemporary urban life that anyone has attempted in a long time; it’s the funniest, too.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review
“With Guide, America’s most daring novelist has given us his masterpiece.” —The Face
“Make[s] American Psycho and Lolita seem tame . . . A brilliantly base tale of human self-destruction for the brave.” —The Times (London)
“Dante’s Inferno with George Bataille as your escort, damaged yet exhilarating.” —Arena
“Though the story is as compelling as it is perverse, Cooper purposefully overrides it with an innovative style and raw, truthful character studies . . . With Guide, Cooper claims his place, alongside Genet and Burroughs, as a master of his own disenfranchised generation.” —Library Journal
