We like to believe that the vile, the corrupting, and the unbearable in literature have some common denominator—that readers can, in principle, agree on where it really hurts and draw a reasonably clear line beyond which the permissible ends. There is no such line. Everyone has a different threshold: one reader can get stuck on a single sentence for days; another will pass through any amount of humiliation and brutality without so much as changing expression. And yet there are subjects that seem almost certain to fall beyond the pale for just about anyone.
Incest, cannibalism, child abuse, rape as such—the same inventory keeps resurfacing in fiction that has long enjoyed, or endured, a reputation for being forbidden. And plenty of people, understandably and entirely justifiably, would rather have nothing to do with it: not read it, not imagine it, not put it into words. Arguments about books like these usually collapse pretty quickly into the question of how far an author has the right to go. As though a book’s brutality could be measured by the number of dismembered bodies per page: the more there are, the harder the book must be to read.
Dennis Cooper’s The Sluts operates in this territory, but it soon becomes clear that Cooper is less interested in the outer limit of what can be shown than in the behavior of the person who reaches that limit and still doesn’t close the book. What concerns him is not only what happens to his characters, but what happens in us as we respond to it. At a certain point, it becomes hard to tell which is more disturbing: the scene on the page or the fact that we are still watching it unfold. Cooper is not so much testing the reader’s tolerance for cruelty as denying him the comfort of deciding that all of this is happening somewhere else, to other people, at the hands of terminal perverts with whom he himself has nothing in common. Violence is not satisfied with a perpetrator. It needs a witness, a spectator, a narrator, and somebody asking for more.
The first time I read The Sluts, I wanted to say that the novel brought these perspectives together: there was the figure of the willing victim and, surrounding him, a whole crowd of onlookers who read, write, comment, doubt, pick over every new detail, and in doing so become part of what is happening. On a second reading, “willing victim” already seems much too simple. Especially if we take it to mean that once some Brad—and Brad is exactly who this is going to be about—has agreed to something, whatever he says afterward no longer matters. Brad offers himself up and then backs away; says it doesn’t matter whether he opens his eyes in the morning and then says outright that dying was never part of the plan; ties his submission first to love, then to money, a place to stay, a dose, a ticket to Los Angeles, the wife he might still go back to. In the same letter he can say “do whatever you want” and “you scare me.” Everyone around him hears the first sentence perfectly well and somehow goes a little hard of hearing during the second.
Cooper does not give us a person who knowingly and lucidly consents to everything and then discovers that his consent means nothing. He lays bare the way consent is produced by dependency. Formally, Brad consents. In practice, the range of choices has already been narrowed: he has no home, no money, no stable sobriety, no confidence that he is worth anything, and at times not even a person he can call. His body is the only currency he has. He spends it on love and on staying alive. So the novel’s question is not why Brad wants to become a victim. It is who gets the right to turn his contradictory words into permanent permission.
The book came out in the early 2000s, and on the surface it is built out of the spaces of the early internet: badly designed websites, Hotmail, AOL (America Online), message boards, forums, emails, faxes. The novel is divided into sections titled Site 1, Ad, Board, Email, Fax, and Site 2. There is no conventional narrator. There is not even any certainty that the book has a single present tense. We read the debris of communication and try to work out what happened in the gaps.
The novel begins not with a psychological portrait but with a profile. Escort’s name. Age. Height. Weight. Hair color. Price. Accuracy of description. Rating. Would hire again. The person arrives already disassembled into consumer specifications. His body exists in the same register as a phone number, a price, and a customer review. Even Brad’s age comes with a question mark, a joke, or somebody else’s assurance, as though what had been entered incorrectly were the dimensions of a product. It is this neutral format that makes the book so hard to take. Cooper does not heighten the horror with authorial commentary. He embeds it in the language of customer service. A description of violence is still followed by a box marked rating. Humiliation can still receive a recommended. After an alleged death, there is still the question of hire again. The administrative tone does not soften what happens; it strips it of exceptionality. Anything can be entered into a form, compared with previous experience, and recommended to the next user.
Physical violence is only the next stage of a process already under way. It begins the moment the body is treated as a set of parameters and the other person’s response as an optional feature of the service. One of the clients in the novel’s second half makes it perfectly clear that what he wants is not a person but compliant meat. Brad’s passivity suits him just fine. Better still is the knowledge that the person in front of him is “the legendary Brad.” The biography is already included in the price of admission.
At first, the central mystery of the book seems to be the identity of the real Brad. How old is he? Does he have a brain tumor? Did he live with Brian? Was he an escort, a prisoner, the husband of a pregnant woman, a dying boy, a manipulator, or somebody’s invention? As the novel goes on, another question becomes more interesting: why does everyone need a real Brad to exist so badly?
As long as his identity remains unsettled, everyone gets to write a Brad of his own. To one person, he is an innocent child who needs to be rescued. To another, he is someone who recognizes other people’s vulnerabilities and knows how to exploit them. To a third, the perfect kinky boy. To a fourth, a terminally ill young man whose murder can be passed off as the fulfillment of his dying wish. At one point, a forum user admits outright that the real Brad may well exist, but the Brad they are obsessed with is a fantasy. The actual person is secondary. What matters is how readily his name can be made to service other people’s projections.
This is why fact-checking behaves so strangely in The Sluts. In theory, checking the facts should eliminate possibilities one by one until the picture comes into focus. Here, every fact that gets confirmed drags two more possibilities in behind it. The administrator contacts posters, asks for evidence, verifies addresses, searches newspaper reports, calls the supposed participants. No merciful ending or catharsis is on the horizon, of course; searching for some glimmer of hope here would be a mawkish optical error. The truth is not wanted because it might put an end to the story. Quite the opposite: it is wanted so the story can keep going. It is hauled into the light for one sober purpose—to whet the appetite, throw the crowd another piece of meat, raise the stakes, and sell them the same story all over again, only now at three times the price.
Hence the novel’s strange distribution of authorship. Brad is not written by Dennis Cooper in the conventional sense; he is written by a whole workshop of collaborators. Clients describe the body. Brian and Zack load it with their own desires. The forum invents the biography. The administrator decides what gets published and in what order. Users pitch scenarios for what should happen next. The reader decides whose version sounds most convincing. Brad himself comes last; by the time anyone gets around to him, he has already been described, taken apart, and appropriated. Brad has a voice, but no right to the last word. The moment he speaks, his words are drowned out by other people explaining what he “really” meant. He says he doesn’t need rescuing: symptom. He asks for help: manipulation. He agrees: he’s asking for it. He refuses: part of the game. Silence is interpreted just as eagerly as speech.
The Ad section is especially important: at first, Brad’s story seems simply to stop. For me, this was the hardest part of the book to read. I used to take it as a digression: Cooper temporarily peels himself away from Brad and shoves other eighteen-to-twenty-year-olds in front of us—boys selling themselves for cash and drugs, up to and including agreeing to be killed—while the same old fag with an appetite for young flesh keeps taking the bait. I see it differently now: this is the novel’s same logic with the wrapping of Brad’s story stripped away.
“No limits” is a standard line in these ads, but it has nothing to do with free will. It means: how much will it cost to get you to lie down and take anything? One will do “anything” for five thousand dollars. Another needs a fix. A third barely speaks English and agrees to whatever is asked because his family needs the money. The buyer methodically feels around for the right thread to pull—addiction, poverty, trauma—so he can push the boy further. The body alone is not enough for him; in one conversation he says it outright: I’m not letting you leave. You’re coming here to die. And this is why the scenes in which the past surfaces are so difficult to read—not only because of what happens in them. An adult forces a boy to describe his own trauma the way you would describe merchandise, listing its properties as though he were not talking about himself. The past is useful to the buyer neither for understanding nor for sympathy. He uses it to calculate how far he can go now. Cooper never says that surviving abuse automatically leads to self-destruction. He shows something else: how someone else’s trauma can be read for clues about where that person will break.
There are also people in the book who want to save Brad. They want to get him treatment, take him away from Zack, find him a home, return him to a normal life. Rescue and destruction are not morally equivalent. But in the novel they operate according to the same structure. Both the rescuer and the buyer who wants to break Brad and finish him off already know who Brad is and what is supposed to happen to him. One is desperate to prove his own absolute cruelty, the other his absolute goodness. Under either regime, Brad remains material for somebody else’s moral biography.
There is no altruistic samsara to be found here. Selfless rescue turns, quickly and without the slightest embarrassment, into ordinary control. Brian’s love works the same way: an ordinary Brad is not enough for it. He has to be special enough to justify the obsession, the money, the rescue, the murder. You do not spend love like this on an ordinary person. Brad has no right to turn out to be a boring hole, a nobody, mediocre, or simply to change his mind.
And when the supposedly “real Brad” finally appears, he turns out to be far more ordinary than any of the versions invented for him. He did not want to die. None of the extreme shit turned him on. He did sex work for a while, lives with his wife, works construction, dreams of opening a little shop. He does not think of himself as especially beautiful or significant and tells the people obsessed with his name to get lives of their own. This may be the most radical image of Brad in the entire novel: a person who refuses to be a plot. We still have no way of knowing whether this Brad is real. Cooper gives us no certainty even at the end. But the mere possibility of such a Brad is fatal to the forum. If he really is alive, more or less ordinary, and unwilling to take part in somebody else’s tragedy, then the whole grand construction has grown not around his mystery but around other people’s refusal to accept his ordinariness.
Another central figure in this system is the forum administrator. At first he looks like someone trying to preserve the last scraps of reality: he checks posts, contacts their authors, publishes warnings, deletes dubious material. But gradually it becomes clear that he is also the managing editor and the proprietor of a business. He openly admits that the Brad story has driven traffic to the site. He decides to shut the forum down only when the discussion starts driving users away, generating complaints, and creating legal exposure. The platform discovers morality at precisely the moment risk begins to exceed profit.
The administrator does not invent the posts, but he decides which ones will become visible. He does not know what is true, but he arranges the posts into a sequence that generates suspense. He warns the audience and, in the same breath, invites them to “check back for updates.” His verification does not stop the story; it gives the story an editorial form. By hand, he does what the feed does now: turns scattered statements into an event because an event holds attention.
This is why The Sluts is not simply a novel about people obsessed with violence. Cooper is interested in the moment when a private fantasy stops being private, finds other willing participants, and hardens into collective demand.
This becomes especially clear after the Email, Fax section. Behind all the reviews and other people’s versions, Brad himself seems, at last, to emerge. Instead of descriptions of somebody else’s body, we get a long, confused first-person account. Then the novel immediately launches Site 2, and everything starts over. Name. Age. Price. Rating. Hire again. The private voice has been returned to the service listing.
It is one of Cooper’s cruelest formal decisions. Even Brad’s confession about himself ends up as simply one more version of Brad: material to be discussed and used alongside everyone else’s. Everything that ought to puncture the myth—dependency, fear, poverty, the emotional mess—only drives up its value. The clients are no longer buying a body. They are buying access to the legend. They are paying for the right to enter the story. Violence against some unknown person does not carry the same value. The victim has to be Brad: the bearer of a collectively manufactured biography. Otherwise the client feels cheated. One of them is outraged not because he mutilated a helpless young man but because he mutilated the wrong young man. He believes the deception deprived him of the opportunity to make a moral choice. It may be the most exact formula for self-exoneration in the entire novel: the act was mine, but the person who gave it the wrong meaning is to blame.
By the end, the question of authorship becomes literal. Zack admits that after Brad disappeared, he wrote the reviews himself, trying to come up with a better ending. What actually happened was not good enough for him. The story lacked the necessary effect. He wanted to satisfy the audience’s expectations and stage the perfect death, but the questions and contradictions multiplied until the plot slipped out of his control. The final planted post was supposed to give readers what they had been waiting for: to force everything, at last, into the promised resolution.
And here the whole relation reverses. We thought the reviews were recording events. It turns out the events are being tailored to the requirements of the reviews. At first the text follows the body; then the body is required to follow the text. Brad has to die because the story now requires his death. It has rules of its own, an audience, and accumulated expectations that have to be met. He is not allowed simply to disappear, change his mind, or turn out to be an ordinary person with an ordinary life. Incompletion is intolerable to people who have invested fantasies, money, and hours of reading in him.
The novel itself draws an important line. One forum user insists that a person should be free to fantasize about anything. Another answers: fantasize all you want, but don’t write to Brad; keep it to yourself. The obscenity begins not in the mind but at the point of contact, where someone else’s desire acquires an addressee and power over what that person does.
So it would not be entirely fair to say that the reader is no better than the forum user. The reader will not write to Brad, book an appointment, or send money. He is dealing with a novel, not with an actual crime unfolding in real time. Reading alone does not make him an accomplice. Otherwise, reading any text about violence would have to count as a form of complicity. But Cooper still leaves the reader in an uncomfortable position. We are impatient to find out how it ends, who is lying, who died, who is hiding behind Brad’s name. We sift through testimony, arrange causes and effects, choose the version that seems most plausible. Conventional fiction gives the reader an intermediary—a character to hide behind, an “I” onto whom it is convenient to dump responsibility for one’s own gaze. There is no personnage alibi here. The reader has to assemble the story himself out of mutually contradictory versions.
Complicity arises not from curiosity itself but from the desire for some real body, somewhere, to finally confirm our version. We do not merely want to understand the story. We want it to end correctly. Moral disgust is no guarantee of innocence either: it can easily supply the pleasure of feeling superior to the characters while the hand keeps turning the page.
The title The Sluts is plural, and Cooper can hardly mean only the people selling sex. By the end of the novel, the word has spread well beyond prostitution, until it comes to name the entire economy of exchange that has formed around Brad. Not because everyone is equally guilty. They are simply trading in different things: bodies, money, fantasies, care, outrage, attention, and their own curiosity.
By every outward measure, The Sluts belongs unmistakably to the early 2000s. Its internet is slow, ugly, and almost touchingly homemade. But the machinery underneath it has not aged at all: a story gains visibility, visibility creates demand, demand requires more, and the platform discovers responsibility only when responsibility begins to threaten the platform itself. A correction settles nothing; it becomes another post. An exposé does not kill the myth; it refreshes it. And all the while, a dubious story is busy producing perfectly real consequences, as everyone involved finds some reason not to stop anything. One user is certain the whole thing is made up; another allows that some of it might be true but wants to wait for proof; a third suggests a scenario; a fourth pays; the administrator publishes. Taken separately, each does too little to recognize himself as a cause—and exactly enough to keep the machinery running.
In this sense, The Sluts is an extraordinarily controlled and deliberately uncomfortable book. Possibly the hardest book I have ever read. What is frightening is not that Cooper dredges up something unimaginable; it is that there is almost nothing for him to dredge up. The machinery is already there, running perfectly well without him. And by the end of the novel, the question of who the real Brad is has ceased to matter very much. The more important question is what everyone needed him for. The client needs him so that fantasy can pass for experience. The administrator needs him so that exploitation can pass for service. The reader needs him so that jerking off to somebody else’s misery can pass for an interest in the truth. Brad himself is the least necessary person in the whole arrangement. He can disappear, survive, die, or turn out to have been someone else entirely. The name will keep working either way. The demand for Brad will outlive anyone unlucky enough to become him.
