Nobody Did Anything: On Dennis Cooper’s The SlutsNobody Did Anything

We like to believe there is some common denominator to what is vile, corrupting, and unbearable in literature, that readers might, in principle, agree on where it really starts to hurt and draw a reasonably clear line beyond which something becomes unacceptable. There is no such line. Everyone has their own threshold: one person can get stuck on a single sentence for days, while another will make it through any amount of humiliation and brutality without so much as flinching. 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 catalogue keeps turning up in fiction that has long enjoyed a reputation for being forbidden. And plenty of people, understandably and quite rightly, would rather have nothing to do with any of 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 bodies, the harder the reading.

Dennis Cooper’s The Sluts operates on this terrain, but it soon becomes clear that Cooper is less interested in the limits of the permissible than in the behaviour of the person who has reached that limit and still hasn’t closed the book. He is interested not only in what happens to his characters, but in what happens in us as we watch it. At a certain point it becomes hard to tell what is more disturbing: the scene on the page, or the fact that we keep following it. Cooper does not so much test the reader with cruelty as deny him the comfort of deciding that all of this is happening somewhere else, to other people, at the hands of absolute perverts with whom he has nothing in common. Violence needs more than a perpetrator. It needs a witness, a spectator, a narrator, and somebody asking for more.

The first time I read the novel, I wanted to say that The Sluts brings these perspectives together: there is the figure of the willing victim, and then there is the whole crowd watching him—reading, writing, commenting, doubting, chewing over every new detail, and in doing so becoming part of what is happening. On a second reading, “willing victim” already feels much too simple. Especially if willingness is taken to mean that once a certain Brad—and Brad is precisely who this is about—has agreed to something, his consent no longer matters from that point on. Brad offers himself up and then backs away; says it doesn’t matter whether he opens his eyes the next morning, 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 fix, a ticket to Los Angeles, a 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 deaf during the second.

Cooper is not showing us someone who knowingly and lucidly agrees to everything, only to discover that his consent means nothing. He exposes the way consent can be produced by dependency. Formally, Brad agrees. In practice, his choices have already narrowed: he has no home, no money, no stable sobriety, no confidence that he is worth much of anything and, at times, not even anyone he can call. His body is the only currency he has. He uses it to pay for love and for staying alive. So the novel’s question is not why Brad wants to become a victim. The question 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, is built out of the early internet: dubious-looking websites, Hotmail, AOL (America Online), message boards, forums, emails, faxes. The novel is divided into sections called 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 remains of communication and try to work out what happened between them.

The novel begins not with a psychological portrait but with a form. Escort’s name. Age. Height. Weight. Hair colour. Price. Accuracy of description. Rating. Would hire again. A person enters the book already broken down 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 we were dealing with an incorrectly listed product size. It is precisely this neutral format that makes the book so hard to take. Cooper does not build horror through authorial commentary. He puts it inside the language of customer service. After the description of violence, there is still a box marked rating. After humiliation, you can still click recommended. After a presumed death, the question remains: hire again? The administrative tone does not soften what is happening. It strips it of its exceptional status. Everything can be entered into a form, compared with a 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 a body is accepted as a set of parameters and the other person’s response becomes an optional part of the service. One client in the second half of the novel 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 this is “the legendary Brad.” The biography is already included in the price.

At first, the book’s central mystery seems to be the identity of the real Brad. How old is he? Does he have a brain tumour? 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 book goes on, another question becomes more interesting: why does everyone need the real Brad to exist so badly?

As long as his identity remains uncertain, everyone gets to write a Brad of their own. To one person he is an innocent child who needs to be saved. To another, he is someone who can spot another person’s vulnerability and knows how to use it. To a third, the perfect kinky boy. To a fourth, a doomed sick kid whose murder can be passed off as the fulfilment of his dying wish. At one point, a forum user admits it outright: the real Brad may exist, but the Brad they are obsessed with is a fantasy. The person himself is secondary. What matters is how readily his name can be made to serve other people’s projections.

That is why fact-checking works strangely in The Sluts too. In theory, checking facts should eliminate one version after another until the picture becomes clearer. Here, every confirmed fact drags another couple of possibilities in behind it. The administrator contacts posters, asks for evidence, checks addresses, searches newspaper reports, calls supposed participants. No merciful ending or catharsis is coming, obviously; looking for some glimmer of hope here would be a sappy optical illusion. Truth is not needed to bring the story to an end. Quite the opposite: it is needed to keep it going. It gets dragged 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 again, only this time at three times the price.

Hence the novel’s strange form of authorship. Brad is not written by Dennis Cooper in the usual sense. He is written by an entire workshop of co-authors. Clients describe his body. Brian and Zack hang their own desires on it. The forum invents his biography. The administrator decides what gets published and in what order. Users pitch possible scenarios for what should happen next. The reader decides whose version sounds most convincing. Brad himself comes last; by the time we reach him, he has already been described, dismantled, and appropriated. Brad has a voice, but no right to the last word. The moment he answers, his words are drowned out by other people explaining what he “really” meant. Says he doesn’t need saving—symptom. Asks for help—manipulation. Agrees—he is asking for it. Refuses—part of the game. His silence is interpreted just as eagerly as his words.

Brad has a voice, but no right to the last word.Brad has a voice,but no rightto the last word.

The Ad section is particularly important: at first it feels as though Brad’s story has simply been interrupted. For me, it was the hardest part of the book to read. I used to see it as a digression: Cooper temporarily peels himself away from Brad and throws in a new batch of eighteen-to-twenty-year-olds selling themselves for money and drugs, some of them willing to go as far as being killed, while the same old fag with a taste for young boys takes the bait. Now I see it differently: it is the exact same logic as the rest of the book, only without the wrapper of Brad’s story.

“No limits” is a routine line in these ads, but this is not about free will. It is about how much it takes for someone to agree to anything. One will do “anything” for five thousand dollars. Another needs a fix. A third barely speaks English and accepts whatever terms he is offered because he needs money for his family. The buyer methodically feels around for the string he can pull—addiction, poverty, trauma—to push the boy a little further. The body alone is not enough for him; in one conversation he says it plainly: I’m not letting you leave. You’re coming here to die. And that is why the scenes in which the past surfaces are difficult to read for reasons beyond what is actually happening in them. An adult makes a boy describe his own trauma the way you would describe a product—listing its features as though he were talking about something other than himself. The past matters to him neither for understanding nor for sympathy. He uses it to calculate how far he can go this time. Cooper never says that surviving abuse somehow naturally leads to self-destruction. He shows something else: how another person’s trauma can be used to estimate where they will break.

There are also people in the book who want to save him. They want to cure Brad, take him away from Zack, find him a home, return him to a normal life. Saving someone and destroying them are not morally equivalent. But in the novel they operate according to the same structure. Both the saviour and the buyer who wants to break Brad and finish him off have already decided 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. With either of them, Brad remains raw material for someone 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 exceptional enough to justify the obsession, the money, the rescue, the murder. Nobody spends this kind of love on an ordinary person. Brad is not allowed to turn out to be a boring hole, a nobody, unremarkable, or simply someone who changed his mind.

And when the supposedly “real Brad” finally appears, he is far more ordinary than any of the versions invented for him. He didn’t want to die, none of that extreme shit turned him on, he did sex work for a short while, he lives with his wife, works construction, and dreams of opening a little shop. He does not think of himself as especially beautiful or important, and asks the people obsessed with his name to get on with their own lives. This is perhaps the most radical version of Brad in the entire novel: a person refusing to be a story. 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 participate in someone else’s tragedy, then the whole grand construction did not grow out of the mystery surrounding him. It grew out of everyone else’s refusal to accept how ordinary he might be.

Another central figure in this system is the forum administrator. At first he looks like someone trying to preserve what remains of reality: he verifies posts, contacts their authors, publishes warnings, removes dubious material. Gradually, though, it becomes clear that he is also the managing editor and the owner of the business. He openly admits that the Brad story drove traffic to the site. He decides to shut the forum down only when the discussion starts driving users away, generating complaints, and creating legal risk. The platform develops a conscience at precisely the moment risk begins to outweigh profit.

The administrator does not invent the posts, but he decides which ones get visibility. He does not know what is true, yet arranges the posts in a sequence that creates suspense. He warns the audience and, at the same time, invites them to “stay tuned.” His verification does not stop the story; it gives the story editorial form. He does by hand what the feed does now: turns scattered statements into an event, because an event holds attention.

So 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 turns into collective demand.

This becomes especially clear after the Email, Fax section. At last, it seems, Brad himself appears behind the reviews and other people’s versions. Instead of descriptions of somebody else’s body, we get a long, confused first-person account. But immediately afterwards the novel launches Site 2 and everything starts over. Name. Age. Price. Rating. Hire again. A private voice is put back into a service listing.

This is one of Cooper’s cruellest formal decisions. Even Brad’s account of himself ends up as just another version of Brad: material to be discussed and used alongside everyone else’s. Everything that ought to puncture the myth—addiction, fear, poverty, the mess of his feelings—only drives up its price. The clients are no longer buying a body. They are buying access to the legend. They pay for the right to enter the story. Violence against an unknown person does not carry the same value for them. The victim has to be Brad, meaning the bearer of a collectively produced 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 fraud deprived him of the opportunity to make a moral decision. It may be the most precise formula for self-exoneration in the whole novel: the act is mine, but the blame belongs to whoever gave it the wrong meaning.

By the end, the question of authorship becomes literal. Zack admits that after Brad disappeared, he wrote the reviews himself, struggling to come up with a better ending. What had actually happened did not satisfy him. The story lacked the necessary effect. He wanted to give the audience what it expected and stage the perfect death, but so many questions and contradictions accumulated that the plot slipped out of his control. The final fabrication was supposed to give the readers what they had been waiting for: at last, the promised ending.

And here everything finally changes places. We thought the reviews were recording events. It turns out the events are being made to meet the demands 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 already demands his death. It has rules of its own, an audience, a backlog of expectations that need to be satisfied. He is not allowed simply to disappear, change his mind, or turn out to be an ordinary person with an ordinary life. An unfinished story is unbearable to people who have invested fantasies, money, and hours of reading in him.

The novel itself draws an important line. One forum user says that a person should be free to fantasise about whatever they want. Another replies: fantasise all you like, but don’t write to Brad; keep it to yourself. The ugliness does not begin inside the head. It begins at the point of contact, where somebody else’s desire acquires an address and power over another person’s actions.

So it would not be entirely fair to say that the reader is no better than the people on the forum. The reader will not write to Brad, book an appointment, or send money. He is dealing with a novel, not with a real crime unfolding in real time. Reading alone does not make him an accomplice. Otherwise any act of reading about violence would have to count as complicity. Cooper still leaves the reader in an uncomfortable position. We are desperate to know how it ends, who is lying, who died, who is hiding behind the name Brad. We sift through testimony, arrange causes and consequences, choose whichever version seems most plausible. Conventional fiction gives the reader a character to hide behind, an intermediary whose “I” can conveniently be made responsible for our own gaze. There is no personnage alibi here. The reader has to assemble the story himself out of mutually contradictory versions.

Complicity does not begin with curiosity itself. It begins with the desire for some real body to finally confirm our version. We do not only want to understand the story. We want it to end correctly. Moral disgust is no guarantee of innocence either: it can easily become the pleasure of feeling superior to the characters while your hand keeps turning the page.

The title The Sluts is plural. Cooper can hardly mean only the people selling sex. By the end of the novel, the word has spread far beyond prostitution and come to name the whole system 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 sign, The Sluts belongs unmistakably to the early 2000s. Its internet is slow, ugly, and almost touchingly homemade. But its inner mechanics have not aged at all: a story gains visibility, visibility creates demand, demand requires more, and the platform discovers responsibility only once responsibility itself becomes a threat. A correction ends nothing; it becomes another post. An exposé does not kill the myth; it refreshes it. And all the while a dubious story has enough time to acquire perfectly real consequences, while everyone involved finds a reason not to stop it. One is convinced the whole thing is made up; another allows that some of it might be true but waits for proof; a third suggests a scenario; a fourth pays; the administrator publishes. Taken separately, each person does too little to admit to being the cause—and exactly enough to keep the machinery running.

In that sense, The Sluts is an extraordinarily precise and deliberately uncomfortable book. Possibly the hardest book I have ever read. What is frightening is not that Cooper turns something unimaginable inside out. What is frightening is that there is almost nothing to turn inside out: it already works this way without him. And by the end, the question of who the real Brad is no longer matters all that much. Something else does: why did everyone need him in the first place? The client needs him so that fantasy can pass for experience. The administrator needs him so that exploitation can pass for a service. The reader needs him so that jerking off to someone else’s misery can pass for an interest in the truth. Brad himself is the one person nobody really needs. He can disappear, survive, die, or turn out to be someone else entirely. The name will keep working anyway. The demand for Brad will outlive whoever is unlucky enough to end up being him.