To me, the series can be seen as a single body being alternately tortured and repaired in a certain way, so that the form of the novels mirrors the content. Closer is that body. It contains everything that will appear in the succeeding four novels. It’s very solid, airtight, compacted. Everything in Closer—the violence, love, sex, art, drugs, whatever—has the same weight and is caught up in the overall rush and chill of the style. Frisk is that body damaged. It’s structured like a dismembered yet living body. It’s still extremely organized, but it’s more revealing of its internal workings—its desires, fantasies, fears, hopes, et cetera. Try is that body repaired, restored to life. It’s an attempt to live and function normally, given the damage it’s incurred. Guide is that body after a second dismem- berment. It’s laid open, and what is revealed is an elaborate, rather delusional self-justification. There ’s little of the body left; there’s mostly just the mind overcompensating for its physical sparseness. Period is the final rebuilding of the body. It’s essentially a skeleton, a barren structure, an attempt to create an illusion, a mystique, a sense of meaning around what is essentially a decimated work, a zombie, the walking dead.
I guess it’s a strange way to think about the novels, and it’s not necessary that readers think about them in those terms, but I do.
— Dennis Cooper on the George Miles Cycle, in conversation with Richard Canning for Gay Fiction Speaks: Conversations with Gay Novelists, Columbia UP, 2000.
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