My Loose Thread

It’s not for the faint hearted. Yes it’s about incest. Yes these kids are f**ked up. Yes there’s actual murders. But you begin to feel bad for the kids or even sympathize with them. It’s a beautiful book and I couldn’t stop reading it once I started. It’s raw and shocking and I’m glad I added it to my library.

every time i read a dennis cooper book, i think, "good god. he can't do anything better than this," and then the next book always makes me revise it. this one did that again, but in a farm more sophisticated way.in the first part of the book, i wondered if this was going to be a different version of _frisk_, in which the reader is made to secretly enjoy the atrocities performed by the protagonist. while i like that idea a lot, it doesn't really make a book that i'd cherish, like i did _closer_ and _try_.but dennis did something that is both fantastic and harrowing. he made the protagonist into a beatiful person who i could love. i saw pieces of myself and others in him and found myself excusing his actions toward other people.the parts that stand out the most are the recurrent paragraphs in which cooper reveals a little more about what happened with Rand, the failed interactions between the protagonist and his brother (the snap on the jeans... wow), and the description of the boy (curling up on the couch in particular). cutting, crying during sex, someone not realizing they yelled until after they did it, and so on... this book is incredible.maybe it's shock fiction, but it isn't *just* shock fiction. it's something more. there's a very humyn core that's beautiful and painful. the real visceral effect of this book comes from the emotions that it inspires with subtle waves of the hand and smirks... flashes of the horrific real winking at you. that makes it a million times as subversive as other shock books. this is real transgressive fiction.

One thing you can say about Dennis Cooper's writing is he intends to shock and alarm us with his subject matter, and he certainly is successful in that respect. You might even call it "high risk literature". He is a born writer who writes with short, tight, tense sentences that keeps the reader glued to the story from the beginning to the end. You can feel the emotions and feelings of each of his characters. That's why I have read all of his novels. The subject matter may not be appealing but Cooper is a daring, literary master with words. Cooper's writing has often been compared to another literary artist, William Burroughs. Cooper's latest novel is about a high school student named Larry who is offered $500, by an older student, to kill a fellow student at his school and retrieve the guy's notebook. It seems like a easy enough task for Larry to do, but many unexpected complications arise. After the student is killed, Larry decides to read the notebook out of curiosity. What it reveals is totally unexpected and shocking for Larry. Larry's life is changed from this point on in the story. Larry at the same time, is also wrestling with his own sexuality and a sexual relationship with his younger brother. These young characters seem to be in a permanent state of emotional upheaval. There seems to be so much violence, stress and sexual abuse in their lives. Everyday is a matter of life and death for these kids. This story is not one that will uplift your spirits, and it's not for the easily shocked. Shocking? Yes. Sexually tense and violent? Yes. It almost seems like a "teenage hell". As I said, "The subject matter may not be appealing but Cooper is a daring, literary master with words. Be prepared!!!! Cooper's done it again. Recommended.Joe Hanssen

Reading "My Loose Thread" can be infuriating. It is very simple on the surface. But if you slow down and take it in bit by bit, savoring the language, there are great rewards. Cooper has taken his usual minimalism and put it in deep-freeze, contrasting the approach by using it to describe passages of great emotion and psychological confusion and pain. The main theme of the novel seems to be how we lie to ourselves to construct our mental reality; and how we try to impose this mental reality on our lives, to hide other things.Emotions teeter on the edge of the narrative. Dialogue constructs the action, and revelations about the characters. Labeling Larry, the central character, as either hero or anti-hero does not quite get it. Larry is an everyboy, even if his actions are extreme in their violence, physical and emotional, to others and to himself.Cooper opens up the world of highschoolers in this age where school gunmen are prevalent. He does this with equal sympathy, disgust, and panache. Cooper's usual explicitness is not in play here. The thoughts and actions of his characters are extreme enough.The novel touches on incest, struggles growing up homosexual, the pathetic attempts of adults to communicate to - let alone raise - their children, the possibility of amorality in the young, and the violence that arises out of the segment of society rearing the next generation.The book is bleak, no question. However, although Cooper does not employ much of his adept dark humor in these pages, the writing evolves and opens over the short course of the book. What begins as clipped, barely-penetrable phrases turns into intermittent flashes of incredible poetry and sympathetic passages...even managing a credible sort of cliff-hanger quality as secrets are revealed, twisted, and brought to light as the end approaches.Cooper has changed his writing to some degree from his famous George Miles cycle. "My Loose Thread" may not be totally new, but is a fine, fine example of what sort of literature will become classic in the near future. Cooper is a writer of very high caliber. This one is certainly worth the trip for fans. Newcomers will find much to enjoy, if they have open minds and reserve judgement until Cooper's themes do their work on the subconscious. This one begs to be thought about, discussed, and reread.

This is the first Dennis Cooper novel I've read so I cannot compare it to what he has written before. But I think it's the most honest and emotionally intense fiction I've ever read. I've read it four times and it made cry every time. It makes me feel speechless. It's brilliant.

My Loose Thread is not only the best book Dennis Cooper has ever written, but i think that it is probably one of the best novels ever written,period. i kid you not folks! It's not funny like his other books, it's serious and intense the whole way through. It grabs you from the first paragraph and emotionally builds until it explodes at the end. Get it!