SOURCE: McCarron, Kevin. “‘The Crack-House Flicker’: The Sacred and the Absurd in the Short Stories of Dennis Cooper, Denis Johnson, and Thom Jones.” Yearbook of English Studies 31 (2001): 50-61.

In the following excerpt, McCarron examines Cooper's depiction of existential angst, irreligion, and the impossibility of transcendence in his short fiction and series of novels, offering comparison to the work of the Marquis de Sade.

Even an image he'd thought religious this morning is just a snap of some junkie on hands and knees, beckoning over one shoulder, eyes drugged to pitch-black, asshole fucked so many times it resembles an empty eye socket.

—Safe, Dennis Cooper

His chest was like Christ's. That's probably who he was.

—‘Dirty Wedding’, Denis Johnson

‘You heard a voice from God?’ ‘Seemed like I did’, Ad Magic said.

—‘Quicksand’, Thom Jones

In his essay ‘The Nature of Knowledge in Short Fiction’, Charles E. May cites...