GUIDE. <i> By Dennis Cooper</i> .<i> Grove Press: 176 pp., $22</i>

Since his writing first appeared in chapbooks in the late ‘70s, Dennis Cooper has been a uniquely disturbing presence in American literature, a major voice shunted to cult status by mainstream squeamishness, flawlessly fluent in the lingua franca of youthful alienation and its coolest, least affected recording angel. His early poems and short prose were memorably hailed by Edmund White as sounding like “Aeschylus with a mouthful of bubble gum.” When Cooper’s first full-length novel, “Closer,” appeared in 1989, Lynne Tillman wrote that the book “translates the moments and feelings for which we don’t really have a vocabulary.”

Cooper’s work claims the bleakest regions of American affluence with the sureness of Faulkner staking out Yoknapatawpha County. Widely imitated by writers such as Brett Easton Ellis and A.M. Homes, Cooper lacks their dazzling commercial appeal and desperate wish to shock; he lives where they go vogueing. His novels are peopled by all manner of rock ‘n’ roll burnouts, drug casualties, juvenile porn stars, aspiring serial killers, artists and geeks, materially comfortable or willfully marginal malcontents living way beyond the edge. Shock Cooper does, but not because he tries to. Like the scorpion in the fable, it’s his nature.

The burnished youths Cooper writes about--gorgeous on the outside, twisted on the inside--could have stepped out of Lauren Greenfield’s recent Hollywood photo essay “Fast Forward.” (One of Greenfield’s 13-year-old subjects reports, “My point of view in life was going out, getting messed up and staying out till the late hours of the night, having a big social life.”) In Cooper’s novels, the kids are complemented by equally messed-up grown-ups who are eager to consume them like candy. Their goals are hilariously fetishistic and short-term, utopian in the sense that “The Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom” is a utopian book. (In “Frisk,” the main character invites an old friend to join him in Amsterdam: “I want you to live here with me and participate in . . . this major transcendence or answer I’ve found in killing cute guys.”)

Cooper conjures his human wreckage revue with wildly flexible, intimate prose that offers occasional flashes of the author at his desk, a la Jean Genet, cooking everything up as he goes along, sometimes lowering a squeezed-out character through the trapdoor of nonexistence. Murder often happens as sexually assisted suicide, doubling as the killer’s effort to “really know” his victim. The author invites us to identify his proto-Sadean heroes’ proclivities as his own and to read his books as intricate acts of self-therapy. This probably has a sincere element--Bunuel said that an artist has to kill his father, rape his mother and betray his country once a day to flex his imagination--but the idea that the book is only therapy is also a put-on. Cooper’s assaults on the novel form are far too strategic to scan as memoirs. Think of a master tailor ripping a Chanel dress apart and reassembling it as a faux-Carnaby Street three-piece suit or a cape-and-codpiece ensemble.

Unlike Genet, Cooper has a genial, albeit bizarre, sense of humor about the ideas obsessively reiterated in all of his works, a major plus, because the material explores the anus as a magic keyhole into a hidden world. Body odors and excreta are privileged information, and intergenerational rough sex a presiding comic metaphor. (In “Guide,” Cooper reflects on why a guy he’s interested in doesn’t read his books: “As Luke has explained, he doesn’t understand why anyone would want to write about the subjects my novels recapitulate so automatically. Neither do I, so we’re even.”) The comparison to Faulkner seems truer: Cooper fashions unchanging content into one-of-a-kind containers, albeit his content may be intrinsically less digestible than Faulkner’s.

It isn’t quite accurate, though, to say the content never changes. Each novel carries some residua from the one before it, and the terrain is so unmapped by other fiction that its nuances take time to register. Cooper’s narratives play out in micro-worlds in which vocabulary attaches itself to sensation in startling ways, language itself being barely adequate for the dire events and mental states he describes. Acid trips and heroin highs, corprophagic snacks and dismemberments are all standard fare. Starting with “Closer’s” Schnitzler-esque rondelet of drug-inflected sex among Los Angeles latchkey teens, the author has been charting ever-larger quadrants of terra incognita that bring the reader queasily close to his or her worst nightmare. Closer’s precocious, self-absorbed adolescents read their dark fates in the brutally dysfunctional adult world around them; in their milieu, where being conscious and being stoned are synonymous, parents either molest their kids or ignore them entirely.

Cooper takes us into a world where the only attractive options are dangerous or lethal forms of self-transcendence, via drugs, death and/or other people’s bodies. This world looks a lot like America as depicted on afternoon talk shows without the healing jargon. Its culture is inscribed in Cooper’s teens and vulpine adults as weirdly nuanced death wishes and ingenious predatory impulses, acted out in a bath of rock music. (These books, somewhat frustratingly for older readers, can be time-framed in alignment with successive indie-rock trends.) In the novel “Frisk,” a narrator named Dennis, imprinted at an early age by bogus snuff photos he thinks are real, grows up with a compulsion to literally get inside the youths he’s attracted to, in the belief that their eviscerated bodies will reveal something important about them. He views his ultimate failure to act out murderous wishes as both cowardice and a defining moral threshold.

The remote possibility of nontoxic love sometimes holds a wistful attraction for Cooper’s protagonists, who nevertheless deflect situations in which feelings (as opposed to manias) threaten. While each of his books has a large, variegated cast, everyone in them shares a protective numbness that functions as self-control. They’re terrified to expose their emotions, so acclimated to abuse that they’d rather be beaten to death than risk romantic rejection. Cooper’s third novel, “Try,” twists the pattern of earlier books; Ziggy and Calhoun, though even more extravagantly damaged than Cooper’s previous heroes (Calhoun’s a junkie; Ziggy’s been molested by two fathers and an uncle since he was 8), muddle their way through acres of psychic grand guignol to a place of tentative mutual trust.

Cooper’s new novel, “Guide,” really is a guide, or gloss, that revisits most of the places where Cooper’s fiction has been, laying out a multi-tracked plot with brisk efficiency, then scattering the pieces like so many colored tiles in a graffiti-enhanced mural. The narrator calls himself Dennis Cooper and tells us he’s writing the book we’re reading; his previous work is familiar enough to his teen characters that it’s the butt of numerous jokes. (“You’re not going to kill Luke, right?” a boy with “five little barbells through each eyebrow” asks Dennis anxiously. “Look,” Dennis explains, “I’m like you. Only you put scary decorations on your outsides, and I put scary decorations on my insides.”) Like “Try,” “Guide” has a platonic gay love story at its center, a familiarly semi-abject attachment of an older for a younger man. These lovers edge toward each other, sort of, while a circus of drug overdoses, kiddie porn videos and violent deaths swirls around them. “Guide” reveals how much a novel really is a wish construction: Chris, the boy Dennis discards to make room for Luke, his new obsession, gets castrated and dismembered by an insane dwarf (consensually, one hastens to add).

The dwarf is one of the book’s most inspired bits of pathology, a pure extract of the ravening id that powers so much of Cooper’s mental theater. Another wonderful narrative device is a comic strip drawn by a minor character named Scott that depicts Dennis’ inamorata menaced by a cave-dwelling monster, which Cooper scatters in verbal close-ups, a few frames at a time, throughout a long section of the novel. There’s also Mason, Dennis’ cohort, shown raping the adored bass player of Smear after putting Rohypnol in the guy’s Pepsi; Pam and Sue, lesbian pornographers, trying to dump the body of a kid who’s died from natural causes in their studio; and Drew Baldwin, a much-adored teen who succumbs to Mason’s charms after the latter knocks him unconscious with a skateboard. (“But he told me why he did it and . . . I understand, and . . . I’m cool with it.”)

This book’s form achieves what a lot of contemporary novels try and fail at, a kind of pull-focus effect that blurs past and present, not so much by jump-cutting across chronology as by eliminating time as an overall narrative element. Each episode has its discrete temporality. “Guide” is structured in musical intervals, with recurring dominant chords and minor motifs, a scheme that allows Cooper’s first-person narrator to fold in events he’s not involved in, even introducing himself in certain scenes from inside other character’s heads. It’s an extraordinarily risky method, continually reminding the reader that the supposedly obsessive author he’s reading is placing things before him with a high degree of calculation. “Punk’s bluntness,” Cooper wrote in “Closer,” “edited tons of pretentious shit out of American culture. . . .” Cooper does the same kind of editing job on the modern novel’s conventions, especially in the area of verisimilitude. In a sense, Cooper has sliced such a big window into his own prodigious fantasy life, which is also ours in one or another variation, that it no longer matters if events in his theater of cruelty seem “believable” or not: The fact that he exposes them is more than enough.

“Guide” is much broader farce than Cooper’s previous novels; a small but plangent part of its intention is to revise the scary image of its author those other books have created (“ . . . even though my imagination’s a freezer compartment for violent thoughts, I’m a wuss”). Happily, this revision doesn’t approach the drastic self-bowdlerization John Waters accomplished with “Crybaby” and “Serial Mom”; if anything, “Guide” amplifies the horror that is Cooper’s specialty by further breaking down the glass wall between the imaginary and the real. I don’t want to take anything away from this book’s outrageousness by saying that it’s the most seductively frightening, best-written novel of contemporary urban life that anyone has attempted in a long time; it’s the funniest, too, and does for Clinton America what “The Tin Drum” did for postwar Germany.