Hogg
"First written thirty-five years ago and completed days before the Stonewall riots in New York, Hogg is one of America's most famous " unpublishable" novels. It recounts three horrifically violent days in 1969 in the life of truck driver and rapist-for-hire, Franklin Hargus. Narrated by his young accomplice, the novel portrays a descent into unimaginable depravity. What transforms this nightmare into literature is Delany's refusal, faced with our moral anxieties, to mutilate his appalling creation. Hogg's monsters wear our faces, possessing the human complexities of intense loyalty perverse admiration, and an integrity so pure that pity becomes betrayal."--BOOK JACKET.
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- I got back into using e-readers so I read a lot more this year than usual.
- More than Human by Theodore Sturgeon
- Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman
- Hogg by Samuel R. Delany
- The first dozen Discworld books (in publication order) by Terry Pratchet
- The Wall by Mary Roberts Reinhart
- Columbine by Dave Cullen
- Garth Marenghi's TerrorTome
- Stray Bullets: Killers by David Lapham
- Stray Bullets: Sunshine and Roses by David Lapham
I might be missing a few.
- I've long had a love-hate relationship with Delany's writing. He has perhaps the greatest amount of sheer verbal talent of any writer I'm acquainted with. Simply calling his work "lyrical" doesn't do it justice. He's a true poet who writes long fiction.
And he's used speculative fiction to brilliantly explore various social topics - including homosexuality - during a time when such explorations were unwelcome.
But to his detriment, he seem to be quite a. . . well, a pervert, in the most classical sense. I actually think that Delany delights in shocking his readers with detailed depictions of disgusting acts.
Reading his novel Hogg quickly becomes a kind of self-inflicted endurance test. It's just a non-stop description of graphic descriptions of murder, child molestation, incest, coprophilia, coprophagia, urolagnia, anal-oral contact, necrophilia, and rape. It's not that there's any one scene or act that's mind-blowingly horrible. It's more just the staggering quantity, and the unrelenting pace. There is literally not a single page in the book that does not describe some sexual or violent act. I found myself exhausted after each sitting, and extremely relieved when I finally reached the end of the book.
Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, his most recent major novel, is more of the same. (With the addition, I suppose, of sexualized booger-eating.)
The Tides of Lust is a study in pedophilia and sadomasochism.
A recent long essay of his in a major online publication (I can't seem to find it now) has Delany intimately describing his attendance at geriatric sex parties in random hotels. He lingers on the scene where he kisses a toothless man, describes the taste of his semen. etc. It's not educational or poetic. Again and again his desire seems to be to shock the reader.
And he has a record of defending NAMBLA.
He's a genius, no doubt - but my totally non-professional opinion is that he has something like histrionic personality disorder. And I certainly wouldn't trust my kids around him.
