Looking at this work in the context of those that precede it in Cooper's George Miles Cycle, Guide is both a progression and a distillation, like heroin cooking in a spoon. We hear echoes of the diseased admiration found in Closer, the gory violence of Frisk, the pornotopic longing of Try. The characters are trying to relieve loneliness by delving into others bowels with their fingers, their cocks, a knife. They are trying to find an adequacy to language that is unable to be realized much less sustained. Dennis, the character, is a magnet for fucked up people. Beautiful trash fires that he, inadvertently or subconsciously or maybe intentionally, stokes and bathes in lighter fluid.

At one point in the book, Sniffles, one of Dennis's objects of affection or desire, tells his roommates he is moving in with Dennis. The roommate replies, speaking of Dennis' novels "Have your read them? They're all about serial murderers. And all the victims are boys. And all the boys look like you."

The George Miles books are all about fantasy, but somewhere in a mind or on a page, these ghost boys are quite real, and the hauntingly floated prose here reveals their bruises in garish, or even loving, detail. Underneath the collapsing veins of junkies and through the caverns of gaped assholes, there is a tenderness here. It is a deep and important tenderness, but what the reader has to encounter or empathize with to access that tenderness says something about sickness or obsession on the part of the reader, not only the writer. ( )

review Mr. Cooper has a gift of making extremely controversial and uncomfortable subject matter compulsively readable. His books are obviously not for everybody, but his genius isn't hard to see if you can stomach the contents.
This is brave and important writing. ( )

In combination with the other George Miles books, Guide embodies and explicitly shows the brave reader the dangerous permeability of the border between fantasy and reality... and the terrible price of crossing that line in the wrong way. ( )