SOURCE: Ford, Michael Thomas. “Brilliantly Psychotic?” Lambda Book Report 8, no. 6 (January 2000): 24.

In the following review, Ford comments on Cooper's blurring of the lines between fiction and reality as expressed in his novel Period.

Sometimes it's difficult to tell if an artist's success is really deserved or if he's simply developed a dedicated following because his work is so peculiar that people can't decide if it's brilliance or pretension. Dennis Cooper's success has certainly been accused of being both things. To some he is a master stylist, exploring the worlds of violence, sex, and desire in shocking ways that challenge readers to re-evaluate their views of morality and to confront their own, perhaps frightening, obsessions. To others his work seems nothing more than the psychotic visions of a mind fixated on young men, murder, gratuitous sex, and violence just for the sake of getting himself and readers off and...