In 1985, Dennis Cooper left Southern California for Amsterdam. There, the 32-year-old writer and poet started work on a project he’d come up with when he was a teenager: the George Miles Cycle. It’s the series of five novels Cooper is now best known for, which he wrote as he “was coming out of a period of intensive experimentation with drugs, sex, and extreme behavior … a kind of artistic quest to gain firsthand knowledge and understanding of certain fantasies I’d had since I was a kid,” he wrote decades later on his blog.
Over the course of the cycle—made up of the books Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, and Period—the “form of a novel” would be “gradually dismembered to nothing,” to “reflect the damage caused by the violence, drug use, and emotional turmoil of the previous novel.”
