Dennis Cooper has a reputation, and that is what he writes is very gay and very disturbing. If you look him up that is basically all you'll hear about, how transgressive he is and how his books are the most disturbing thing you'll ever read. Its true, he does write about very disturbing stuff and is good at it, but I wonder if its become a sort of albatross around the neck of his reputation. God Jr. bucks the trend in that it is Dennis Cooper as he is but with none of the prurience that hes otherwise known for. There's no pedophilia, no rape, no disturbing fetishes and no sex at all gay or straight. It is still the same casually cruel world that Cooper is so excellent at writing. I feel the need to elaborate a little more, because casually cruel is an apt description but I know people will take it to mean in the literary sense of a nasty child ripping the arms off of dolls, which I think is far from the reality of the writing. I mean casually cruel in the sense that bad things happen, all the time, and people still go on with whatever mental and physical wounds even when there's no reasonable answer to the question why. In God Jr.'s case its a father accidentally killing his teenage son and how he tries process it.

The story starts as Jim, now wheelchair-bound, is at his work, a business that makes formal wear for children exclusively staffed by the disabled. His goal in life at the moment is to construct a strange structure from his son's drawings on a vacant property he owns by his house. Its in mid construction and has become a kind of minor curiosity. Things are not going great for Jim, self-medicating with weed he and his wife are clearly struggling with losing their son, but also with never knowing him. Jim is clear in his minds narration that he never really knew his pothead slacker son and that building the monument is his last remaining way of connecting to his son. Of course the inverse-quixotic quest to build is ruined by a revelation: the drawings the son made were of a level in a video game his son could never get to so he drew it while stoned. This leads Jim to try to chase after a connection to his son via getting to this level he never managed to get to, in the process mimicking his image of his son constantly gaming and smoking pot all day to the detriment of his connections around him.