this has a clippy writing style with good forward momentum and some unusual but instantly comprehensible metaphors. i don't really get the comparisons i've seen made to genet; i think a more accurate comparison is delany but more gen X. scenes and people are only sketches until the ideas and debaucheries, when the style abruptly changes. the debaucheries are extensions and elaborations on the ideas. nominally.

call me a gigaqueer but i need more emotional connection to appreciate literary debauchery. i can't read it with an erotic interest, so i need it to be, like, romantic. there's nothing more boring than fantasies of committing loveless rapemurder. again, call me a gigaqueer. i decided when i finished the book that i'm too much of a sap and not enough of an aesthete for cold libertinism. then (please un-mort the auteur for a second) i found an old interview with dennis discussing the george miles cycle. was this written as an expression of intense feelings of love? the answer, apparently, is yes.

so it's weird that i can't personally wring much of those feelings from frisk. i do understand from the text that dennis has hangups about socially unacceptable things, and he seems to feel strongly about them, yet i can only know this intellectually and at a surface level. i don't feel the love. it's like studying the internal processes of a beetle: i still don't know in my human heart what it's like to feel as a beetle feels, and the book hasn't really told me, except for a couple spots that i can't explain without it turning into a boring trauma dump.