SOURCE: Howard, Gregory. Review of Period, by Dennis Cooper. Review of Contemporary Fiction 20, no. 3 (fall 2000): 147.

In the following breif review, Howard offers the opinion that Period is a “deeper and darker” work than its predecessors, and that the book contains a complex structure and extensive vision.

Period explores themes and motifs familiar to Cooper's readers. Here again is a world of boys bored with everyday life, stimulating themselves with drugs, sex, and violence; here again is sexual confusion, thwarted desire, and misdirected affection. This book, however, is a deeper and darker work than its predecessors, more complex in its structure and more expansive in its vision. Gone is any locational detail, replaced by stark and desolate landscapes—an unnamed, rural town, the highway, an unnamed city. Much of the “action” takes place in virtual spaces like the Internet, the telephone, and radio. Gone, too, is any sense of...