Dennis Cooper has a reputation, and that is what he writes is very gay and very disturbing. If you look him up that is basically all you'll hear about, how transgressive he is and how his books are the most disturbing thing you'll ever read. Its true, he does write about very disturbing stuff and is good at it, but I wonder if its become a sort of albatross around the neck of his reputation. God Jr. bucks the trend in that it is Dennis Cooper as he is but with none of the prurience that hes otherwise known for. There's no pedophilia, no rape, no disturbing fetishes and no sex at all gay or straight. It is still the same casually cruel world that Cooper is so excellent at writing. I feel the need to elaborate a little more, because casually cruel is an apt description but I know people will take it to mean in the literary sense of a nasty child ripping the arms off of dolls, which I think is far from the reality of the writing. I mean casually cruel in the sense that bad things happen, all the time, and people still go on with whatever mental and physical wounds even when there's no reasonable answer to the question why. In God Jr.'s case its a father accidentally killing his teenage son and how he tries process it.
