As I am not the first to note, Dennis Cooper is the GG Allin of queer fiction, maybe of American fiction in general. That is both compliment and critique. Allin shocked and awed the punk-rock universe (and continues to amaze fresh waves of children who grow up to discover him) with his primal S&M theater disguised as rock 'n' roll: eating his own poop, cutting himself and others, getting suuuuuuper high, and sodomizing himself with whatever was handy. He had a band, the Murder Junkies, but Allin's fans came for the madness, not the music.

Cooper has done the same to his readers with his cruel fiction. Some representative samples from a snuff scene in his 1991 novel Frisk: "Blood poured out around the knife, down his body. I pulled out the knife and made a light horizontal cut across his stomach, which dribbled more blood... I leaned over and French-kissed his mouth for a while, sucking juice from his lips, biting them until they leaked a little blood... The hair got all goopy with blood and brain tissue or something... I drank his blood, piss, vomit. I shoved one hand down his throat, one hand up his ass, and shook hands with myself in the middle of his body." (I was first introduced to Cooper during high school by an older friend, a writer and bartender who lent me his copy of Cooper's novel My Loose Thread. As he handed it over, he said, "I feel like I'm committing a crime.")

Grim stuff. But Cooper, like Allin (and de Sade before both of them), turns flat after a very short while. You can only stuff your characters' cocks into so many gaping ax wounds before it's old hat. To be fair, (a) an evil soul is extremely difficult to parse (Iago continues to give critics fits 400 years after the fact), and (b) Cooper's flatness seems intentional. His characters are as affect-free and blank as his prose because they are more animal than human, suspended in a two-dimensional universe that contains only pleasure and pain: snorting drugs, peeping into your windows at night, kidnapping children, fucking and killing (sometimes simultaneously).

They occasionally contemplate consequences and abstractions but are, for the most part, creatures of an eternal present. They are amoral—or at least have a moral code so completely divorced from ours that it has no traction in our world and can teach us nothing, except that some people's souls resemble ingrown toenails and we hope to meet them about as much as we'd hope to meet a hungry tiger in a moonlit grove. Nature, red in tooth and claw, I'll castrate you with this old bone saw, etc. Got it. Next?

What a lot of us didn't know—those of us who don't read Spin magazine and missed his first nonfiction collection in 2001, anyway—is that Cooper has been paying his rent over the years with a string of surprisingly nuanced and entertaining nonfiction: reviews, essays, profiles, and a handful of intelligent obituaries. In the preface to his newest collected nonfiction, called Smothered in Hugs, Cooper apologizes: "Honestly, I still think nonfiction and my particular writing ability do not make a natural couple. And every time I take on a journalistic gig to this very day, it feels as though I've embarked on a difficult formal experiment as much as set out to make a valid case about something or someone."

Maybe that struggle makes the writing better. His nonfiction feels so much more alive, and not just because it stars fewer corpses. Some of the best pieces, in fact, concern corpses. Here's Cooper's adieu to William S. Burroughs: "In a way, Burroughs died in the late '70s when he was resurrected from relative obscurity and repackaged as a kind of outlaw comedian/philosopher... To most of the plethora of rock bands, filmmakers, and advertisers who dropped Burroughs's trademark exterior into their product, he was a signifier of their own daring, and little else." (It's curious to see Cooper write a simultaneous hit piece about and homage to Burroughs—it's a little oedipal, watching the son eat the father with both insolence and mourning. Cooper and Burroughs share little in the way of style, but they have similar literary profiles as writers whose work is more talked about than read.)

And to River Phoenix:

In a profession that divides its young into marginalized wackos with integrity, like Crispin Glover and John Lurie, or hipster sellouts, like Christian Slater and Robert Downey Jr., Phoenix was that once-in-a-­decade actor honest enough to connect powerfully with people his own age, and skillful enough to remind members of an older generation of the intensity they'd lost.

And to Kurt Cobain: "He wrote consistently great lyrics about not being able to express himself adequately, he sang like God with a dog's mouth, and he believed in the communicative powers of popular music." (I'd trade every last word of Cooper's snuff fiction for the phrase "He sang like God with a dog's mouth.")

And to the seedier side of gay fiction (though Cooper has tried his damnedest to keep it alive):

With one steamy reference to the homosexual underworld, any writer transformed his or her novel, no matter how conventional its shape, into something outré and avant-garde. But with liberation, the subject was effectively normalized. So began the age of the traditionally plotted, realistic, worldly gay novel in which likeable gay characters dealt likeably with traditional everyday traumas.

Smothered in Hugs goes on and on like this, 373 pages of an intelligent mind wrestling with American—and occasionally German and occasionally British—culture. He writes about Courtney Love for Spin, about David Wojnarowicz and Robert Bresson for Artforum, about William T. Vollmann for Bookforum. And he conducts a hilarious interview with a post–Bill & Ted but pre–My Own Private Idaho and Point Break Keanu Reeves in what is, probably, the book's most candy-coated moment:

Cooper [about Philip K. Dick]: Well, he was on speed all the time.

Reeves: I want to be on speed! I've never been on speed. I want to be a speed freak for a while.

Cooper: It's really—

Reeves: Is that a stupid thing to say?

Cooper: No, no. I love speed. I mean, I used to do speed all the time. Trouble is, you do get really depressed for three days afterward.

Reeves: It burns you out?

Cooper: Yeah. It's ultimately not worth it. I used to do crystal meth, which is scary. I'd snort it.

Reeves: Yummmm! Wild!!!

Cooper: I know. It's "yum" indeed.

Cooper's cultural criticism isn't Nabokov-on-­Kafka terrifying—it's more amiable and familiar, something nice to curl up with, illuminating but not blinding. And now, over a decade after I youthfully dismissed Cooper as a one-note obsessive who kept rewriting the same dead-eyed horror show page after page, I've gone back to his fiction to see if I missed something. I haven't found it yet—old Cooper is still on about sexual torture, including Jerk, a theater collaboration with a French performance artist about the Texas serial killer Dean Corll that came to On the Boards a few seasons ago—but I'm looking. And even if there's nothing new to find, even if Cooper is simply a critic who mistook himself for a novelist, Smothered in Hugs is more than enough.