Hannibal lecture.

Dennis Cooper says his latest book is the fifth and final of his gay-teens-and-homicide novels--period

At an early age novelist Dennis Cooper figured he was screwed. It began with the Marquis de Sade. Then came Rimbaud, Gide, Genet, and Burroughs. As a burgeoning bard Cooper read each of these renegade writers' works, felt an ineffable kindred connection, and saw the author he was destined to be: One who takes language and twists it into new and unsettling forms, fashioning a fiction that bursts the bubble of bourgeois expectations. Problem is, he realized, such writers are less likely to find their names atop best-seller lists than be relegated to the role of social outcast--and occasionally land in jail.

"I was pretty aware of the rough road ahead of me when I started because all the writers I ever loved were marginalized," says the 47-year-old Cooper, speaking from his home in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles. "That's how great they were. But I knew I could make it if I was lucky."

His determination paid off. Not only has he managed to avoid the slammer, but the transgressive author has also gone on to publish several volumes of poetry, one collection of short stories, and five thematically linked novels about youth, sex, and death. Period, the final installment of the five-book cycle that includes Closer, Frisk, Try, and Guide, is an ambitious and disturbing stow about a group of troubled teenagers, murderous goth bands, and weird Web cults, told through an interplay of absent meaning and imagistic mirroring.

Even more than Cooper's other books, Period's language is skeletal and spare, the interchangeable characters are barely defined, and its plot is as tangible as smoke. So how is one expected to read a book like this?

"With as little expectation as possible," he responds in a sincere and soft-spoken voice. "Pay attention and don't think of characters and plot because none of that stuff is going on. Approach it clean. It's got a certain kind of physical beauty that's really important. Just let yourself enjoy it."

Of course, enjoyment is not what many people associate with reading a Dennis Cooper novel. Noted for his skillfully unnerving renderings of sadistic gay pedophiles (imagine Lolita's Humbert Humbert crossed with Hannibal Lecter in a film by Gus Van Sant), Cooper rubs some people the wrong way. In 1991 the publication of his second book, Frisk, which depicts the grisly murder of a 10-year-old boy, incited a San Francisco faction of Queer Nation to threaten Cooper's life. Fortunately, the furor died down and Cooper was left to publish in peace. Now with Period, Cooper says he is closing the door on gay teenage sexual violence and ready to move on to other subjects, such as heterosexual teen snipers, the likely topic of his next book.

"I'm not gonna write about that sex-and-death stuff anymore," he says. "I still have my own interests in it, but I think I've exhausted the subject and I'll just repeat myself."

Cooper will, however, continue to push the boundaries of fiction stylistically and thematically--something he doesn't see most contemporary writers doing, straight or gay. "Gay fiction is in gruesome shape," he says. "Though there are several books coming out in the next few months by young writers who happen to be gay, and their literature's fantastic."

He cites J.T. Leroy's book Sarah and Brian Pera's Troublemakers, both due within the year. "I like that they explain language in an individual way," he says. "They don't just do the usual plot and psychological-portrait crap found in conventional fiction. They think about what writing can and can't do."

As for Cooper, he'll continue to write about what interests him no matter how twisted it seems to others. "It's weird," he says. "But I've been doing this so long now, and I'm still the most extreme guy out there."

Bahr also writes for The New York Times, Time Out New York, and Poets & Writers.