SOURCE: Hitchings, Henry. “Perverts and Their Prey.” Times Literary Supplement (27 October 2000): 23.

In the following review, Hitchings alleges that Period fails to take a clear stand, and that Cooper's intentions are obscure and “illegible.”

For twenty years, Dennis Cooper cultivated a reputation as a subversive, stylish, gay poet. Then, in 1994, he published Closer, the first in a series of loosely connected novels. His new book, Period, concludes this quintet of edgy, risk-taking volumes. As the title suggests, it is intended to bring the sequence to a definitive close; but Cooper, who is seldom content with the standard formulae of narrative fiction—its tired resolutions and coy denouements—chooses to complicate this composed but malignant last installment with self-reflexive ironies and technical sleight of hand. The implicit aim is to show the reader that the idea of closure is merely a construct; there can be no such thing as a...