Period

George Miles Cycle #5

by Dennis Cooper

Period - the end of the sentence, and the final statement of Dennis Cooper's five-book cycle. Provocative and controversial, Cooper has charted a fearlessly radical path exploring the themes of sex and death, youth culture and the search for the ineffable, perfect object of desire. Period is the culmination of that exploration and features strangely irresistible but interchangeable young men, passion that becomes murder, the lure of drugs, the culpability of authorship, and the inexact, haunting communication of feeling, all set against a backdrop of secret websites, Goth bands, pornography and Outsider art.

Genres: Fiction, Queer, Horror, LGBT, Gay, Contemporary, American

109 pages, Paperback

First published March 28, 2000

About the author

Dennis Cooper was born on January 10, 1953. He grew up in the Southern California cities of Covina and Arcadia.

He wrote stories and poems from early age but got serious about writing at 15 after reading Arthur Rimbaud and The Marquis de Sade. He attended LA county public schools until the 8th grade when he transferred to a private school, Flintridge Preparatory School for Boys in La Canada, California, from which he was expelled in the 11th grade.

While at Flintridge, he met his friend George Miles, who would become his muse and the subject of much of his future writing. He attended Pasadena City College for two years, attending poetry writing workshops taught by the poets Ronald Koertge and Jerene Hewitt. He then attended one year of university at Pitzer College in Claremont, California, where he studied with the poet Bert Meyers.

In 1976, he founded Little Caesar Magazine and Press, which he ran until 1982. From 1980 to 1983 he was Director of Programming for the Beyond Baroque Literary/Art Center in Venice, California. From 1983 to 1985, he lived in New York City.

In 1985, he moved to Amsterdam for two and a half years, where he began his ten year long project, The George Miles Cycle, an interconnected sequence of five novels that includes Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, and Period.

His post-George Miles Cycle novels include My Loose Thread, The Sluts and God, Jr.
Other works include the short-story collections Wrong and Ugly Man, poetry collections The Dream Police and The Weaklings, as well as the recent Smothered in Hugs: Essays, Interviews, Feedback, and Obituaries.

Dennis Cooper currently spends his time between Los Angeles and Paris.

Reviews

[Meike · Rating 4 out of 5]

The final part of the George Miles Cycle vividly illuminates how Cooper's psyche is haunted by the love of his life whom he lost to mental illness and subsequently suicide: In a spectacle of mirror images, the story revolves around a writer who builds a literary fun house of worship for one George Miles, who as a fictional character then roams this house in various iterations. While this aspect of the text is rendered in a somber, longing tone ruminating youth, loss, and pain, there is a juxtaposing arc which, for once, satirizes the obsessions that determine the pentalogy: The novels in the cycle show extreme sexualized violence, drug use, alienation, loneliness, and depravity, so for a change, "Period" introduces a Satan-worshiping rock band on a murder spree whose members spit out pseudo-existentialist cringe content - it's a meta-commentary that counters the psychosexual imagery Cooper has up to this point employed to fictionalize his pain regarding the loss of George.

The five-part George Miles Cycle is more than the sum of its parts, and the more books I read, the deeper I understand how Cooper is using the novels as an exploration of an alienated consciousness and subconsciousness. Often, reality and hallucination / fantasy fall into each other, and the transgressive nature is not unsettling because of the extreme scenes that are depicted in detail (not so much in "Period", but oh boy the other parts), but because of the exploration of a disturbed mind under duress.

"Period" entails poetry that can be read in context of A Season in Hell (Cooper is an Arthur Rimbaud fanboy) and, like Guide, partly foreshadows The Sluts. As it is the mirror piece to Closer, it also tackles obsession with some parallel narrative methods. Still, the heart of the pentalogy, Try, is my favorite part, as it ponders one of Cooper's main concerns, friendship, in such a heartbreaking way.

20 years after the George Miles Cycle, Cooper published a more autobiographical text about his beloved George, I Wished, which appears as a coda to the cycle. Of course I'll read it next.

[Nate D · Rating 5 out of 5]

Five stars for the book, five stars for the 5-part cycle it closes.

Writing in another thread, I just realized that The George Miles Cycle, may very well be a definitive work on the cultural experience of the end of the 20th century. Taken as a whole, little else in recent memory is able to so fearlessly and complexly process its times -- media saturation, desire, alienation. Mirrored across so many formats, experience is reduced and repackaged as image and representation, divorced from context and realistic fulfillment, leaving us plunging in isolation after ideals left warped or unattainable. Even that the cycle is entirely framed in a minimalist pop melange of 90s youth subculture and celebrity worship actually strengthens the argument: what now has a deceptive gloss of frivolity may form a crisp insight and self-diagnosis for future anthropologists. Even the striking rawness (emotional, moral, descriptive) of Cooper's vision may be more readily and widely processed as time passes (though I hope nothing subsequent can entirely rob this of its inherent danger).

But whatever the future, Cooper is here and highly relevant now, and the George Miles Cycle may be his keystone work. Though his subsequent novels continue to evolve into arguably further complexities, this is his comprehensive vision. And it deserves to be read now.

Closing the cycle symmetrically across from Closer, this is the other book to deal directly with George Miles. But is it the same George Miles, or a mirror-world varient, as Period itself mirrors across its middle into symmetrical chapters, reversed arc, shadow duplicates of its characters as they fail to find resolution in either form. Cooper has suggested in interviews that Miles is the real inspiration behind his work, "the only one [he] would have wanted to protect", but in the subtle confusion of fact and fiction throughout the cycle (a confused and compromised authorial "Dennis" appears twice, in different forms, in parts 2 and 4, for instance) can even that be believed? In particular it seems too perfect that "George Miles" should so closely resemble "Georges Melies", that progenitor of the filmed version of represented image so relevant here and to the entire work.

The actual plot here, as with any Cooper, is harrowing and grippingly engaging. A ghostly fog-bound town, murderous Satanists, a novel of hypnotic obsession, mysterious brutalities, amnesia, mirror-worlds. Cooper's books can seem to consist of little but plot in fact, until it becomes clear that every lurid genre element contributes to an elegant conceptual map that underpins the whole.

It's short, but dense. It's the last part, but bites its own tail in endless ourobouric renewal. As such it's a fine starting point. In any event, it's amazing.

[Filip · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was very entertained and inspired by the abstract quality of this book. I can say I was quite confused but I think I got the overall general sense of it. I enjoyed the poetry and the style, and the overall feeling of suburban ennui. I am reading the George miles cycle out of order so maybe I’m missing bits. This is a unique book- I’ve never been exposed to something like it.

[Brian O'Connell · Rating 5 out of 5]

And just like that, the George Miles Cycle collapses in on itself, leaving nothing behind but ghosts. Period is a beautiful, poignant, haunting close to the sequence of novels that preceded it, an exceedingly mysterious and enigmatic text that Cooper has referred to as “a disappearing act”. While Period contains the superficial indicators of Cooper’s work (apathetic and lovelorn teenage boys, gay sex, murder, death wishes, metal music, etc.), the content has by this point been so exhausted by the other books in the cycle that it’s hollowed itself out, lingering as an insubstantial afterimage: only the skeletal structure remains. It’s like an eerie, enigmatic poem, rife with uncanny imagery and secrets hidden deep within its formal hall of mirrors; more than that, though, it’s a painfully sad elegy to the love of the author’s life, a memorial in words that tries fruitlessly to resolve Cooper’s feelings for George. The resounding impression is one of immense grief and failure. It’s astonishing, and deeply moving.

A fitting end to a series of books that has meant the world to me.

[Audrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

copper’s autobiography at its most fractured and detached until it becomes straightforwardly poetic. the most beautiful and profound eulogy i’ve ever read

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Between 1989 and 2000 Dennis Cooper published the five volumes of the 'George Miles' cycle and throughout the year I've been rereading the novels in sequence and have finally arrived, with Period, at the end, though 2021's 'I Wished' is, I believe, a sort of coda to the cycle. So what can I say about Period that hasn't been said already? because the novel carries praise such as:

"Period is an elegy to the nature of obsessive love..." Daniel Reitz, Salon

"Haunting and violent yet strangely gorgeous..." Scott Heim, author of Mysterious Skin

"Beautifully written...this will become many people's favorite book, a talisman..." Independent on Sunday (UK)

"...Period doesn't so much end as fly out of our atmosphere and into orbit, ever circling, ever refracting." San Francisco Sunday Examiner

"...(Period) is about loneliness and desire...' L.A. Weekly

"A Chinese puzzle of a book..." Mondo (UK)

"...(full of) subversive brilliance and considerable wit...(in) this darkly comic ride through the looking glass of marginal youth culture..." Publishers Weekly

"...a dark elegy, a formally intense tribute to love lost..." Uncut (UK)

I could go on and on quoting from long vanished print publications (which rapidly becomes, for me, a morbid journey through a lost way of discovering and understanding the world) but even this small sample demonstrates how indefinable this novel is. Everything that I quote, and all that I didn't, is true but also meaningless.

At its most important it is the conclusion of The George Miles cycle which explored not so much the George Miles that Dennis Cooper knew as his own obsessions but also his art and all sorts of other aspects for his life. That makes 'Period' as much a continuation of 'Guide', though for the first time since the first novel in the cycle 'Closer' George, as in George Miles, is a named presence though I doubt the George in 'Period' can really be described as having any relationship to the 'real' George. He is the George that Cooper has been haunted by and reworked through his fictions. I am tempted to say all his fictions because I think there is a lot of George in his first book 'My Mark' and in many? all? the stories in the collection 'Wrong'.

I don't think 'Period' works by itself in the way the other four volumes of the cycle do but that may be because I am too immersed in the George Miles cycle. I do think there are signs in 'Period' that Cooper himself was growing too distant from the world of his characters, he was 46 by the time Period was published. It is interesting how he resorts to referencing not simply specific actors but in particular films, Lukas Haas, Mars Attacks; Richard Lloyd, Marquee Moon; Vincent Kartheiser, Another Day in Paradise; Matthew Barry, La Luna. I am only a few years younger than Cooper and even on first reading the novel over 20 years ago none of those names or films, with the exception of La Luna, meant anything to me. Giving actual physical form to his 'type' (and it is a type, if you search out pictures of all these actors at the time of the films mentioned there is an incredible sameness) doesn't actually add anything to the simple descriptions in earlier books like Closer, Try or Frisk. In many ways putting a face to a character in a novel makes it impossible to see or relate to them except in that specific form.

There is every indication that Cooper, by the time of Period, was moving on or growing past his absorption of what he had created from George Miles (though I would never say that the real George has ever left off haunting Cooper). At one point in the novel he says (both as author and doppelganger in the novel):

'...you can't predict with teenagers. They're still developing. They're just human transitions...'

Which is certainly true of all the young actors he mentions (just look them up on Wikipedia). Maybe part of Period is the final exploration of the fantasies he explored in his earlier novels. Or maybe his final attempt to explain it was fantasy, a process he began in 'Guide', and not descriptions of things he did or wanted to do.

Like all Cooper's work I think Period is stunning. In barely 100+ pages he draws you into a complex web of characters and situations as well as moral and ethical questions. Cooper doesn't preach but is stunningly honest and invites the reader to be as honest. I do think Period is less satisfactory than earlier novels but it is like saying that 'Boy Bitten by A lizard' is less satisfactory than 'The Cardsharps'. It is not like you can say the world would be a better place, or Caravaggio's reputation would be greater, if 'Boy Bitten by a Lizard' were to disappear. So it is with Cooper. All his words are too precious to lose and, like Caravaggio, in 400 years Cooper's novels, including Period, will be the treasures our descendants will judge us kindly because of.


Before I wrote this review I posted an interview with Dennis Cooper from The Nation in 2021 at the time of the publication of the novel 'I Wished'. I am retaining it because it says more then I, or probably anyone else could, about the George Miles cycle:

"George Miles, when he first appears as a character in Dennis Cooper’s debut novel Closer (1989), is beautiful, nervous, and eerily vacant. A high school acidhead, George is plagued with a psychic pain that is only exacerbated by the way other people treat him; his cute looks and hyper-passivity make him a target for a range of obsession, lust, and cruelty. There is, for example, his friend John, who wants to be an artist and tries to paint him, but George “twitch[es] and tremble[s] so much” he makes John think of “a badly tuned hologram”; instead, he uses George’s body as a “prop,” to imitate the pornography he’s seen. Another man, Philippe, develops a drastically more debasing sexual routine with George that makes him (and others who witness it) puke. Tom, a murderer, mistakes George’s ambivalence about being alive for a death wish; he spares his life but badly maims his body. Only George’s friend Cliff (a stand-in for Cooper) shows him anything like tenderness. Unable to tell George how he feels about him (he can’t utter something as clichéd as the word “love”), Cliff can’t really console him either. Instead he reports on George, “Now there was nothing between him and ‘it,’ as he called what he currently felt…. I’d never grasp it…. Saying so wouldn’t help.

"The novel, with its waves of hallucinatory and unnerving imagery, its punk lyricism, pitch-dark humor, and propulsive narrative, established Cooper as a luminous and subversive talent. (Then 35, he’d already been publishing poetry and novellas with alternative presses for a decade, in addition to working on his own press, Little Caesar). Closer was the first in a series he’d long wanted to write about the real George Miles, a profoundly important friend he’d met in high school (Miles was three years younger) in the late 1960s in Southern California and later established an intimate relationship with. In the subsequent novels, the character is not always named George, but as Diarmuid Hester points out in his recent critical biography of Cooper, Wrong, “Miles is a flickering presence in the Cycle.” He becomes the “hysterical” little brother Kevin, undone by insecurity in the novel Frisk (1991); the ever-stoned Ziggy, who edits I Apologize (“A Magazine for the Sexually Abused”) in Try (1994); Chris in Guide (1997), who’s obsessed with dying; and George again in Period (2000), where, per Hester, he also haunts the novel’s other troubled teens.

"Themes of longing, adolescence, predation, sex, death, automatism, and fantasy course through all of Cooper’s many books (as well as his performances and films), but the George Miles Cycle has a definitive arc, shaped in part by real-life events. Cooper began working on it in 1986, a few years after he left Los Angeles to live in New York and then Europe. He and Miles had tried at different times to be together as a couple once Cooper and then Miles were in college in the latter half of the 1970s, but Miles’s conservative family and his diagnosis of bipolar disorder made the relationship too difficult. Eventually Cooper lost touch with him, writing letters but never receiving a reply. The series’ last book, Period, was written after Cooper learned, in 1997, that Miles had taken his life a decade before, at age 30. No one at the time had told him. “Miles,” Hester observes, “had never seen a single page of the celebrated work that was inspired by him and written as a monument to him.” Against hope, Cooper’s work had not kept Miles alive—it had never had the chance to.

"Long after learning of Miles’s death, Cooper was still deeply affected by it. In Cooper’s interview for The Paris Review with his former agent Ira Silverberg in 2011, Silverberg writes, “When we talked about his friend George Miles, Cooper broke into tears; it was the first time I had ever seen him cry.” Every loss means a lack of resolution, but in this case Cooper was also confronted with a dearth of information. What remained accessible of Miles by then was almost all of Cooper’s own construction. A uniquely disturbing and wildly inventive artistic achievement, as well as a deep act of homage and love, the George Miles Cycle imagined many parallel lives and circumstances for its muse. What it could not account for, though, was the life Miles actually lived, and the lingering confusion and distress that Cooper still endures.

"In I Wished, his most explicit elegy for Miles and his first novel in a decade, Cooper recounts the predicament of looking for remnants of Miles and finding himself instead:

"I’ve talked about my friend in so many articles and interviews. If you do a search using his name, pages and pages will turn up, and every one that’s not about some far-flung namesake is either by me or about me, or it’s something made by someone who only knows the characters I’ve named for him.

"It’s unclear if Cooper believes he’s taken over something of Miles’s memory by harnessing him to his fiction. I Wished, nonetheless, questions how artworks can inexorably shape their subjects—as well as their creators. The novel is told in short, poetic chapters suffused with a kind of nonlinear dream logic. Many of them portray some version of an artist, not least Cooper, scanning the motivations of their work. One fable-like section is ingeniously set inside the Roden Crater, the volcanic cone in the Arizona desert that James Turrell is still in the process of transforming into a monumental site of land art. Cooper takes the crater—which “had looked its best when nothing was alive with the IQ to appreciate it other than as something to be scaled or walked around”—and gives it a voice, one that obsesses over its maker. “Maybe I’m in love with him,” the crater says longingly. “Sorry, I mean the artist who’s curtailed me…. I think that means the artist loves me too,” it continues, “but I’m never sure if I’m a circumstance that lets him love himself.”

"Cooper doesn’t exclude the possibility that what passes for reverence or love might just as easily be a form of solipsism. What real love may actually consist of, however, is debated throughout the book. Cooper wonders if Miles ever genuinely loved him, and if not, whether his own feelings are authentic. Writing in both the first and third person, he proposes enigmatically that “if George didn’t love Dennis, and there’s no evidence he did, then I guess I never loved him. I loved something else that this is torn from.”

"Love, here, most often misses the mark of another person and cathects to something inanimate or abstract instead. Love is “imagination,” and a novel—such as those that Cooper wrote for Miles—is a “brazen act of love.” In one chapter, also titled “I Wished,” Cooper writes revealingly about the complex genesis of his work, disclosing a horror of his being an unlovable person and a wish for death “to love me enough to kill me and take me.” In another, “X-Mas (1970),” he reimagines Santa Claus as a would-be conceptual artist, tired of not truly being loved or cared for by others despite his generosity. He’s willing to settle for “making things that sell for millions…a decent substitute for being personally loved.” Later in the chapter, Santa becomes an intermediary, as well as a cipher, for “Dennis”; he also recognizes George as “the most amazing sentient being who has ever lived.” He offers Dennis an equation to divine George’s feelings for him: “I will suggest, by my admittedly skewed logic, that he must love your generosity at least. Or if that thing + gratitude for thing = love for thing’s originator isn’t logical, I’m fucked. Giving gifts is all I got.”

"Clearly, Cooper is not attempting a commonplace, coming-of-age account of his relationship with Miles, one in which the narrator would likely grow by the end to realize that love can be real and disappointing at the same time. At one point, he tells us, “Dennis” did try to write some version of that conventional book: “Dennis recounted everything they’d done and said as honestly and artlessly as he could write, hoping that his pain and lack of stylishness would read as hugely more than them.” But this doesn’t get him closer to the core of what he feels. It’s just “cathartic crap” that makes him see “everyone but George and him were right about them.”

"It is also perhaps too painful to address the story of their connection head-on: “Whenever I would speak about him honestly,” Cooper writes, “like I’m doing now I felt a complicated agony beneath my words that talking openly can’t handle.” I Wished is not a transcription of Cooper and Miles’s relationship, but rather a meditation on the interminable nature of its loss, and that loss’s totalizing emotional impact; this is a ghost story in both content and form. Cooper’s poetic, slightly off-kilter syntax almost seems to glitch in the face of its subject matter. He gives the book an amorphous, spectral field of action: Scenes flash by, and things within them transform quickly. A telephone that Miles holds to his head, talking to a disembodied voice pledging its love, suddenly becomes a gun. The Roden Crater section ends with Miles digging alongside James Turrell, telling the crater his backpack has also magically manifested a gun inside of it. Cooper then steps back, reflecting on the fairy tale template he’s been employing, when a “massive UFO or sheet of metal” interrupts, as if unbidden by his imagination, flattening and killing everything and everyone.

"There is one chapter, though, that does bring us closer to Miles as the author may have known him: It traces the evening the two first met through Miles’s older brother at a school dance, when George, then only 12, was struggling through a bad acid trip. The story also appears in Cooper’s Paris Review interview: “Jay led me to George and, yeah, he was tripping pretty heavily. I took him out to the football field and just sat with him for about four hours and tried to talk him through it.” In I Wished, the story is recast with patient timing and Cooper’s careful sense of language. As he guides Miles through the uncertainties of his trip, they study each other’s faces for a long time. Because of the acid, Cooper can’t fully access Miles; his eyes have “completely lost their windows-of-the-soul-effect, and just loo[k] cretinous to people who [are] sober.” But every time he looks away or tries to take his hand off him, Miles protests: “No, come back, I’ll fall,” he says. A complete communion is impossible from the start, yet Cooper’s presence and caring are what bring Miles over to the other side, at least in the moment.

"As we know from the very beginning of I Wished, this will not last. The Roden Crater becomes, toward the book’s end, a different type of hole—the one in George’s head, which Cooper also imbues with a voice. This crater, too, needs an artist in order to speak. Joe, the paramedic, is studying the exit wound, fascinated, when it asks, “Why are you so interested?”

"“I’m an artist,” he says. “I look at everything artistically. It’s easier that way.”

"“I was an artist too,” the crater says. “Or I tried to be.”

"“What kind?” Joe asks.

"“My body played guitar,” the crater says.

"It’s telling that in his novel most ostensibly about Miles, Cooper gives this head wound almost more of an opportunity to speak than he does his friend. Miles, in a sense, is the mutest character in the book. Ultimately, Cooper doesn’t believe that drawing a detailed portrait of Miles will lead us any closer to him. Portraits like these are “just distractions from whatever wish was dying in the writer as he typed it.” Like Dante’s Beatrice, whom the poet was said to have spoken to only twice in his life but also wrote volumes about, Cooper seems aware that Miles has become so deeply entwined with him, and so much a synonym for his inspiration, that his ghost can never be given up fully. By the end of the book, Cooper has not moved through a process of grief so much as arrived exactly where he started from: bereft, shattered, in love. “I love him so much that I’m nothing but that. Everything else I feel and do is like a habit or a doomed revolution,” he writes of Miles in the book’s final pages.

"For some, this opacity might make I Wish unsatisfying as a novel, one that leaves too much untold about what is certainly one of the epic love stories of 20th-century letters. Even more than in the Cycle’s books, Cooper here refuses to meet the standard novelistic expectations for character growth and plot. Perhaps other readers, though—especially those who’ve had their own experiences with losing someone close—might feel, as I did, that by portraying loss as intractable, with its own highly personal landscape of images and associations, a wellspring of feeling that continually regenerates and renews, Cooper has simply rendered it with strange accuracy and truth. In any case, we are not the book’s intended audience, Cooper reminds us, more like “imaginary witnesses.” It was written for one person, and one person only: George Miles."

[Jason Pettus · Rating 1 out of 5]

[UPDATE: All five of my "George Miles" reviews, including this one, are now collected and available as a standalone book at Amazon!]

2021 reads, #47. This is volume #5 of my five-book read this month of the classic LGBTQ "George Miles" cycle by Dennis Cooper, one of the heralded "New Transgressive" authors of early Generation X that also included Poppy Z. Brite, Kathy Acker, Bret Easton Ellis and others (but for a lot more details, see my review of book #1 in the series, 1989's Closer; book #2, 1991's Frisk; book #3, 1994's Try; and book #4, 1997's Guide). Here as we finally finish out the series, it's worth asking why the entire cycle is titled after some unknown person named George Miles in the first place, given that he never actually appears as a character in any of the books, and that all five of the volumes seem to be about entirely different sets of people living entirely different sets of lives that never overlap? The answer, as Cooper divulged at the end of the previous novel, and has since elaborated on in numerous interviews, is that Miles was actually a very real person from his actual true life, a 13-year-old he knew back when he was 17 who he developed a debilitating yet chaste crush on, not returned by George although apparently they did have some sort of weird awkward tryst once when both of them were almost thirty years old, a decade later. Cooper's young feelings for Miles were intense and scary to him, influenced by being exposed at an early age to violent pornography, which he found himself responding to physically even though emotionally and morally he was repulsed by it (apparently having a recurring fantasy that we see pop up in these books again and again as well, that George was so impossibly and angelically beautiful that the only way Cooper could respond was with this deep desire to physically destroy him, as a way of internalizing this beauty into himself in much the same way Jeffrey Dahmer did); and apparently all five of these novels were attempts by Cooper to work out these feelings and try to come to some sort of resolution about them, which years later he admitted in further interviews that he simply failed at, now in his sixties still as confused about these intense feelings as he was way back when he was 17.

That's all fine and good, and in the first four novels of the cycle, they at least feel somewhat connected, in that all of them take place in the vacuous suburbs of Los Angeles, and all of the characters are described as looking virtually identical (think Keanu Reeves circa mid-1980s, or the bassist from Blur circa mid-1990s, two specific references that Cooper himself makes in the novels), and all of their drugs of choice vary within the limited range of marijuana, downers and heroin, and all of them are vaguely into the same '90s Generation X pop-culture (zines, Husker Du, Guided By Voices, outre artists like Joel-Peter Witkin, etc.), and all of the books are written in a fairly straightforward style, some clearer than others but all of them at least traditional narratives that take us from point A to B and then C. So that makes it all the more baffling, then, that to close out the series on the cusp of the 21st century, Cooper takes this huge left turn into uncharted territory, and sets this last novel among rednecks in the Deep South who all take crystal meth and fashion themselves as Satanists. And not only that, but now the narrative isn't straightforward at all, but rather deliberately artsy and super-pretentious, a sort of unsatisfying blend of bad poetry and bad prose that makes these circular loops in logic and plot, featuring literally unreadable tripe on every other page like abstract poetry presented as timecoded transcripts of an insane person talking to themselves, and sometimes pages and pages and pages of pure looping dialogue in the spirit of something like Waiting for Godot, to say nothing of the sections whose margins have been squished so far in that the text now only exists as this barely readable one-inch ribbon right down the center of the otherwise blank page. To be precise, it doesn't feel like a George Miles novel at all, but that Cooper just happened to be halfway through a brand-new, much more experimental book, then suddenly decided one day that he just wanted to be done with the subject of George Miles altogether for good, and that the turn of the millennium seemed like as symbolically good a time as any to do so, so he just arbitrarily declared this "the last George Miles novel" then ran off to cash his advance from Grove Press before the check bounced.

It's important to remember, though, that Cooper was actually a widely published poet for an entire decade before he ever published prose for the first time; and not just a poet, but a poet who loved the abstract, arty nature of the avant-garde, writing in his young years for such publications as Artforum, curating evenings of performance art in the hippie California town of Venice, and once devoting an entire issue of a self-published magazine to the work of Arthur Rimbaud. And it's also important to remember that Cooper was almost 50 when he finally published this last book in the cycle, now a pop-culture figure himself whose previous two commercial hits had made him a mainstay among hipsters at SPIN magazine and MTV, and as far as I can tell was feeling quite ambivalent at that point about the brain-dead morons who kept snapping their fingers and demanding more of the kiddie-porn snuff-film dog-and-pony show that he had become somewhat cartoonishly known for by then. (Clap clap! "Make with the Tarantino already, Cooper!" Clap clap!) As someone who's in my early fifties right now myself, and who has been similarly going through a period of weary ambivalence about the monetization of creativity, I can attest how tempting it is at this particular age to really take a step back and reconnect with the pretentious yet earnest teenaged artist you once were, public reaction be damned and public paychecks be damned; so I think it's entirely fair to assume that a certain amount of that was going on with Cooper at this point in his life too, and that the switch into much more abstract and challenging writing here can be largely attributed to that, especially given the fact that we talked about last time, about how nearly all the New Transgressive authors during this time period went through spiritual crises as they approached the new millennium and the end of their cartoon sex-and-violence popularity, and how all of them came out the other side of 9/11 suddenly talking about Jesus and Buddha and Hillary Clinton needing a village, and so forth and so on.

Still, though, that doesn't necessarily make a novel good; and let's be honest, this is a real stinker, really only the size of a short story once you remove all the masturbatory abstract poetry that Cooper has the gall to expect you to read like it's a three-act plot. It's very much a case of this series ending with a whimper instead of a bang; and it's telling, I think, that Cooper has only published four more traditional novels in the 21 years since, now spending the vast majority of his time and energy on avant-garde plays, experimental fiction projects, and collaborations with various musicians and filmmakers, including his own imprint through the beloved Akashic Books that has helped introduce an entire new generation of transgressive authors to a general audience. You can very much see the start of Cooper running out of enthusiasm for traditional novels here in this book; and to be honest, I don't really think it should be required reading at all for those who are interested in the first four novels in the George Miles series, especially since he so nicely wraps up the mystery of who Miles is at the very end of the previous book, which feels much more like a natural bookend to this series than this frustrating mess of a fifth volume. Although I'm glad I went to the trouble of finally reading all these books for the first time in my life, after him being such an oft-referenced pop-culture figure in my own Generation X '90s youth, I can pretty honestly say that I'll never pick up a Dennis Cooper book again; an interesting journey that taught me a lot about the rise and fall of transgressive literature at the bizarre, chaotic end of the Postmodernist era, but a series of novels that ultimately I just did not enjoy as simple reading experiences in any way whatsoever.

[Jonathan Norton · Rating 1 out of 5]

Bill & Ted's Serial-Killing Adventure, a blandly-written attempt at meaningless shock, gesturing toward banal ideas. To contrive some interest in the zero-dimensional characters and cliched, slack writing the author attempts a number of half-baked tricks with mirror-worlds of reality/fiction and reversed names, stories-within-the-story, blurring mythology and factuality, the loss of identity in the anonymously virtual world of the internet (a new-ish thing, when this was published)... all to zero effect, except on undemanding critics who have wasted too many hours in seminars about Bataille and Blanchot. Cooper himself is the untalented, incompetent artist noted on pg.95, and his fans are the Goth kids who confuse "intricacy as enlightenment" (pg.57). Like Stewart Home, a chancer embracing non-conventional modes because he has no skill and nothing to say.

[ra · Rating 5 out of 5]

absolutely insane ouroboros of a novel/cycle. nothing will ever come close

— "I get sick of fiction.
I’ll be sick of George
too, I’m sure, but
never of myself. I
hate how that works."

[Maria Bodin · Rating 3 out of 5]

”The sun’s creepy, a hard piece of scalding red shit that has no consciousness of its own, so Nate can’t tell it anything real like, Go away. Everything should have a mind. So he could communicate with it. So he could say, Grass, get taller and cover me better. Or … School bus, stop there, right this second, and dump all your passengers on the road so I can fuck, rob, or kill them. He wouldn’t mind if the bus said, No way, you’re too fucking lowly a jerk to waste time on. Or if the sun said, Oh go ahead and burn up, you asshole. Or if he could say to this road, Hey, can you glisten a little? ’Cos that would look so unbelievable. And it would glisten for Nate, to be nice. Then it might say, Okay, now you walk on my surface awhile. And Nate would, even if it got him arrested. ’Cos the road is so peaceful or something.”

[Erin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am uncomfortable with the fact that I read this and other Dennis Cooper in high school. Reading it now, I might be able to intellectually engage with the text on a level I couldn't at the time, but I really don't want to. The stuff he deals with is just scary (more so in other books than Period), no matter his "disquieting genius" of a literary style. Goodreads describes Period as an exploration into youth culture, and as a youth reading it, I used it as a way to explore the darker limits of what a human being is capable of creating. Having read Cooper's work, I can no longer bear any of the "dark voyeurism" that is so popular nowadays - Dexter, Criminal Minds, all those other myriad books and shows and movies about serial killers and violence - it is unsettling to experience, and equally so that people are so open about enjoying this disturbing media, clearly for that voyeurism of seeing how horrifically terrible another person can be. I guess I can be thankful that I at least got over that phase in high school, though I am ashamed that people I knew at the time saw me reading books like Cooper's, and who knows what they thought I was getting out of it.

[Brett Glasscock · Rating 5 out of 5]

?????? I think this was incredible ??????

its like if Cooper wrote a novelization of Mulholland Drive. a novel whose form is perfectly mirrored, reflective.

unlike Cooper's other novels, Period's experimental, dreamlike narration doesnt have a real world referant. you cant peel back the layers of fantasy and definitively say "this is what happened." instead, fantasy and desire circle and circle each other and make a dream world with its own mythos where nothing is real but beautiful young boys and the wish to love them by destroying them. a perfect end to the George Miles Cycle.

[jules 🫀 · Rating 5 out of 5]

horrific and beautiful and all-consuming. the best of the best.

[Peyton · Rating 5 out of 5]

"So there’s someone exactly like you. In that mirror. Am I right? Another you. You like you were before that awful thing happened."

What if we all killed ourselves during sex

[Ethan Ksiazek · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Maybe the sun’s an incompetent artist like him, who drew the world in hopes of replicating some idea a million times better. Maybe they were drawn on the earth in hopes of nailing some love too profound or psychotic. Maybe he’s a sketch of someone he doesn’t start to resemble, being too crude relative to the sun’s imagination. Maybe…”

[Kitty]

incredible end to the george miles cycle. reminded me of the sluts in the best way. honestly i would not recommend the george miles cycle as a whole, but reading try and period may be enough

[Kira · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well, I read this really fast, and never read the other (4?) books before it in the series. I'd say it would make more sense if I hadn't read it that way, but I doubt it. It made enough sense for me anyway. This book gave me one of the closest approximations to the feeling of semi-dreaming right before you wake up. When you're not asleep and dreaming anymore, but you're not in touch with your surroundings, either. Minus the killings, granted. Definitely minus the obsession with some connection between killing, sex, memory and photography, which seems to run through this book.
I noticed that the whole thing has a sort of tone, rhythm and perfect/crazy word-choice that's more poetry or songy than novely. Parts of it sound a lot like Coil lyrics. Through the whole opening (which I love is entitled "Chapter 1" when every other chapter has some specific name), I was hearing "Bad Moon Rising". And when I think about it, it's clear that the themes, even that tone is pretty damn close to those songs ("Brave Men Run", "Society Is A Hole", etc). Which was nice, for me.
What I like best is the way Cooper keeps bringing you back to the vulnerability of telling someone you love them. The book makes it clear that this is more difficult, more significant in the end than all the Transgressive events it describes over and over like a Lydia Lunch spoken word. In fact, I wonder whether all of those trappings are not there just to offset the thing about love and vulnerability.
A lot of this sounds very much like In Watermelon Sugar. Fortunately, this book actually makes some sort of a point. The line about mistaking intricacy for enlightenment, and how we crave novels that are surface-complex and deep-simple shows that Cooper is well aware of the dangers of writing this kind of book (that it becomes just an intellectual game to write it/read it). I spent like a day trying to "figure out" that other book when I first read it, but I don't think I'll do that for this one. It's pretty satisfying anyway.

[Zweegas · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was at a wedding yesterday and had this book underneath my seat when one of the other guests who I just met for the first time was making small talk and asked me what book it was. I was like, "Oh it's just something to read on the train and the bus, etc. The author is Dennis Cooper," but then she asked what it was about and I said, "Oh did I say Dennis Cooper? I meant to say it's, um, The DaVinci Code." I don't know what this book is "about". What was I going to say? "Well there's some murders and a band and they talk to Satan."

Why do I love Dennis Cooper books? They're gay (and, oh yeah, I'm gay - HAPPY COMING OUT DAY!!!!!). They're raw. They defy convention. They're ideological. They're reasonably brief. They're transgressive. They're ultimately beautiful in their own shitty way. Dennis Cooper books explore things which I feel the need to explore and for all those reasons, I love Dennis Cooper books.

[Christian Campos · Rating 5 out of 5]

Teenagers r just human transitions. Dude the copies got stuck in the metaverse. The same story. Even natures mirror comes into play. The longing, the lust the emotion the emptiness all collapsed and disintegrated in this final book of the cycle. Novel as blog. A writer stuck in his head without the help of real words to describe his dilemma. He gets close again and the world is wiped away. What an interesting and amazing way to end the cycle.

[Designated Hysteric · Rating 2 out of 5]

Period is an aggressively abstract scrap of bizarro slam poetry, pissing over the edge of self-parody, so as such, it finally persuaded me that a serious share of Cooper's onanistic psychotherapy is a monomaniacal scrutiny of a single trauma that he tragically nurtured into his personal Ouroboros - accursed psyche cycles, incapable of expansion.



"Nate lies by the road. It weaves off into the mountains out there. And it reeks. He’s been here for hours, partly obscured by the brush, awaiting the right car to pass, and a nice passerby. Someone in elegant clothes, whom he can fleece. God forgive him, he’s broke. The sun’s creepy, a hard piece of scalding red shit that has no consciousness of its own, so Nate can’t tell it anything real like, Go away. Everything should have a mind. So he could communicate with it. So he could say, Grass, get taller and cover me better. Or … School bus, stop here, right this second, and dump all your passengers out on the road so I can fuck, rob, or kill them. He wouldn’t mind if the bus said, No way, you’re too fucking lowly a jerk to waste time on. Or if the sun said, Oh go ahead and burn up, you asshole. Or if he could say to this road, Hey, can you glisten a little? ’Cos that would look so unbelievable. And it would glisten for Nate, to be nice. Then it might say, Okay, now you walk on my surface awhile. And Nate would, even if it got him arrested. ’Cos the road is so peaceful or something. Anyway, everything understanding everything. People’s guns saying, No, not him, asshole, kill him. And Nate’s pistol would swing itself around and do the shooting for him. And he’d just go, Well, hey, I didn’t make the decision. And his gun would go, Yeah, I made the fucking decision. And what could the cops do? Melt down the gun? Well, they could. And maybe that would be sad, ’cos if the gun had a mind, Nate just might be attached to it. Shit, he can’t win. There’s no way the world’s ever gonna be totally perfect, unless nothing and no one had minds. If everyone just kind of lay there, only moving around when the wind kicked them up, or if the rain got too hard, or if there was a flood. Natural things. Nate would lie in the grass here for days, weeks, spacing out, then some storm would move him twenty feet that way, and his world would change, and he’d get to know new blades of grass and new dirt and new flies or whatever. He wouldn’t die, just change. Dry out, get wet, smell one way, smell another way. No boredom, no love, no fear, no being broke, no Leon, no … nothing. Maybe that’s what will happen at world’s end, after one of the millions of viruses sneaks in folks’ bodies, and no one, no matter how total a genius, can cure them. They’ll just … collapse where they are, and never see, feel, or do anything, and eventually everyone will lose sight of each other’s existence, and just become … what? Lumps of nature. In Nate’s case, a small, smelly thing lying out in some brush. A stupid thing drifting through history, no worse or better than trees or the bugs or his gun. Oh, he longs for that day. But until then he just loves this road."

"Etan’s sort of asleep by the scribbly dirt road. He’s been out here for days, smelling rank when the sky’s blue, and very bunched up when it’s starred and cold. How can he possibly know shit? That’s the lame-ass conclusion he’s reached, drawn by eerily dumb, revolving thoughts. Everything’s just a result of the sun gradually eating the earth, he guesses. Even that idea’s too rigorous for his brain. He’s nothing much, a smalltown boy overly stuck in his head, which tends to refine one fantasy about The Omen and him, ’cos they’re the only tape he owns. As far as he’s concerned, they’ve driven down this exact road, picked him up, murdered him so many times that the picture’s worn down to what’s just so painfully personal to him. He can’t come anymore. He’s all raw. The batteries died in his boombox. Now it’s him and the world again. He can’t ignore the fact, seeing as how it’s so gigantically around him. Not just the shit he can see. He means the world down this road, past those far off, unclimbable, fogged-over mountains. A place where folks merely exist, he figures. Like the trees, bushes, grass, et cetera, growing unevenly on either side of his head. Maybe they’d move around more, but less meaningfully than the stupidest animal he’s ever seen in the woods, even ants. That’s ideal. Not wanting anything, even to eat food or shit it back out. No one would care how they look, much less how any other guys look. No one would want to screw, love, or kill Etan, nor would he want to do that to anyone else. There’d just be him, and a shack, and his stuff, and everything would be able to talk, and every sentence would trigger appropriate words in return, that’s all. Like in some cartoon he saw. So his shirt would be as cool as his friends. It could fascinate him, or else he wouldn’t give a shit if it was boring. If it just talked about what it was made from, or how weird it felt to be faded or ripped. Everything would have the same consciousness, and pretty close to the same flat voice. No individual minds, no hearts, no instinctual shit, just movements and ideas that fit in a pattern too simple to notice. Maybe that pattern would be the thing folks call peace, if anyone ever thought about peace, which they wouldn’t. That’s a pathetic thought, he’s very well aware. He just needs to eat."

[Jack Owens · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truly unlike anything I’ve read before, including the four preceding books in the cycle.

[fiona · Rating 4 out of 5]

a fucking trip!
finished in one sitting

p.s. i forget lestat is an actual significant cultural icon and not just my little obsession… always a shock to see his name pop up lmfao

[ezra · Rating 5 out of 5]

maybe 4.5 ⭐️. maybe 5. hard to make up my mind yet.

this was a fucking amazing trip. i read the entire george miles cycle over the course of five days, and i personally think that’s the perfect way to do it, though i think it’ll only get better after one or two re-reads.

this book was the finale of the cycle, and reintroduces george miles as an actual character (as he was in book one, and sorta in book four). the narrative mirrors itself, constantly leaving you questioning whether what you are reading right now is “reality” or “the novel”. who is who, who is when, who is where? which one is more real, nate or etan? leon or noel? when/who/where is walker? is dagger george, is george the only one in either reality?

i would say as far as the violence and gore factor goes, this book is by far the most harmless in the cycle, but it is also the most mind-bending. cooper makes many stylistic choices, which show why he is so hailed as a transgressive writer, much beyond just the subject matter of his books.

overall i was FASCINATED by this series, and i’ll have to do my hardest to stop myself from doing any more research on it until i’ve re-read it at least once, so i don’t let my own thoughts and ideas be influenced and led by those of others (even including the author himself, lol). yesterday, after reading guide, i was a little weak and ended up looking at cooper’s blog, where i read his explanation of the narrative structure of this series, and i was amazed to find that i had correctly interpreted it thus far (yes i’m easy to please, thanks). i’d love to get deeper into it and write a proper analysis, but then again, what right do i have to do so after only reading these books once?

maybe if i’m still annoying enough after reading them a second time i’ll add onto this. until then, catch me in the reviews section of virtually any other cooper novel.

[adri ☆ · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5✩

— One night, George shot himself, just like in Period, and Walker's order collapsed. He hid his emotions in poems, numbed them with Nate, buried them under his fan mail, then joined his fans' escapades into the novel. But where they saw dense, hairpin mysteries spiraling into some ever backpedaling truth, he just saw machinery, designed to change someone too painful to love into something so perfect, it would transcend mere attraction.

— Long story short, Period is about a mysterious house, set in some sketchily rural locale. It's the work of an artist, "Bob," coincidentally. He's obsessed with a younger guy, "George," who'd killed himself years before in an identical building. "Bob" hopes that by replicating the context where "George" died, the guy might return to the world in some fashion. It's an ickily heart-tugging quest that defies nature's laws and conventional logic, but it does end up serving a purpose. Thanks to him, "George" reemerges, better than new. The only question is whether the artist's success is an example of love co-opting form, as some would have it, or the complete opposite.

— I'm still his inattentive admirer.
There is someone that wild about him still alive looking
over my shoulder at such an illusion of him—a boy
I would kill myself to see.

— Dagger's blank, graphic face edged fractionally from the loose web of lines, eyes first. They loved Noel for coercing them back, even if nobody else saw anything but some loose pencil marks.

[joe]

Far sparer than the previous 4 novels. Stripped back in its brevity, that’s clear and obvious, but also in the removal of any contact being played out between the characters. We rarely witness them coming into direct contact with one another, and tend to focus on the wanting and the longing for something, as opposed to the acting upon said want. This splitting of characters - this keeping everything at a distance - coupled with empty, robotic, to-the-point journal extracts that seem to come from the victim/s, brews up a gentle creepiness that, in effect, feels far removed from the force-fed brutality that we’re so used to receiving from Dennis Cooper. I feel like the short length of the book takes away some of that new creepiness that we see Cooper explore, but it still had an effect overall. Addition of communication with Satan was a powerful end to the cycle, uncovering further, more candid threads to provide reasoning and explanation for the darkness we’ve swam through in all 5 novels.

[Micaela · Rating 5 out of 5]

You know, I got what I wanted out of Cooper with Period and Try. The two novels from the George Miles Cycle that I’d describe only to the correct audience as being beautiful. With both Period and Try, Cooper best accomplishes his goal with the reader—to have them feel a sense of protectiveness for his dead friend and true love who’d been failed by the adults in his life as a child. Period wraps up the cycle (and after having read all five of the books in the series, it makes sense as to why cooper describes them as a “cycle” and it’s important to read them in order). It breaks the format of the other books where George appears as different characters, an underaged boy facing abuse at the hands of adults, and serves as Cooper’s explicit love letter to George. It deals with grief and confusion, the longing for friendship and desire, community and connectedness. We see a suggestion of The Sluts. We see Cooper, not named as himself. We do and don’t see George. Close to perfect.

[Ian Taylor · Rating 3 out of 5]

The fifth, and final, segment of the infamous George Mills Cycle... every second of this series was haunting, disgusting and disturbing, but also strikingly beautiful in all of it's putrid glory. It was difficult to rate any pieces of the Cycle due to their abhorrent nature, but don't let the 3/4 star reviews take away from the fact that this series is truly art. Immensely disturbing art. But the level of infamy the Cycle has maintained to this day doesn't come from nowhere - it is deviously well-deserved, and I loved every twisted moment of it... now excuse me while I take a scalding hot shower to cleanse myself of the deviance.

[Oliver Shrouder · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 - there is a tragic understatement to this book that made a lot of the story feel ghostlike and restrained - this book nearly abandons the hyperviolence and horror of the previous four and places focus on the internal life and character relationships - we learn about the function and purpose of the cycle in a way that feels both messy and galvanised. Every word is deliberate, and the cleverness of the book is how naturally it flows despite this.

Fantastic end to a peerless collection of writings, and works as a haunting capstone to Cooper's opus.

Additionally, I Wished (Cooper's most recent work) is absolutely necessary as a coda to this series, and I would recommend everyone to read that after Period.

[Dylan Nicol]

Got halfway through before I realized this was book 5 in a 5 part series that I hadn’t read any other books in and then it made sense why I had no idea what was going on

Probably read it again after I read the first 4 books in the series

[ashfaq · Rating 4 out of 5]

just realised years overdue that "bob" spelt backwards is also "bob"