SOURCE: "The Strange Case of William Vollmann," in Esquire, Vol. 117, No. 2, February, 1992, p. 35.

In the following essay, Hooper favorably reviews Whores for Gloria and discusses Vollmann's approach to literature.

It could have been worse. In William Vollmann's novel, Whores for Gloria, the hero, an optimist burnout named Jimmy, wanders the Tenderloin district of San Francisco collecting stories and venereal diseases from street hookers in order to flesh out his somewhat sketchy vision of true love, Gloria. There is one queasy moment early in the novel when Vollmann looks to be teetering on the edge of American Psycho. Jimmy contemplates how Gloria might look assembled on his bed from the hacked limbs of his whore friends, but he quickly retreats into more spiritualized country—Gloria as "a sky-goddess feasting upon the smoke from sacrifices." Vollmann says he decided against the mass-murder route after reading newspaper accounts of real-life psychopaths...