Book Review: My Loose Thread by Dennis Cooper

Title: My Loose Thread
Author: Dennis Cooper
Published: Canongate Books, 2002
Rating: 4.5 of 5
Page Count: 120
Total Page Count: 564,470
Text Number: 2135
Read Because: once again, this gay incest book list, hardback borrowed from Tacoma Public Library via ILL
Review: Fellas, is it gay to have sex with your kid brother because you're both in love with the same guy? Also, gun violence. Insufferable and gladly suffered, this has the heightened-but-stunted emotional register that best evokes adolescence, plot placed between the staccato, sparse, dialog-first lines of scenes where the protagonist repeatedly bumps against the limit of his emotional capacity. More than 120 pages would be too much, and yet I'm putting the rest of Cooper's oeuvre on my TBR & this one on my list of books to reread. It really worked for me.

Manga Review: RG Veda by CLAMP

Title: RG Veda
Author: CLAMP
Published: Darkhorse, 2016–7 (1989–96)
Rating: 2.5 of 5
Page Count: 2070 (197+200+192+208+208+208+200+200+192+264)
Total Page Count: 566,540
Text Number: 2136–2145
Read Because: still working through manga referenced in that "the joke is that Hannibal is quite specifically a 90s dark shoujo anime/manga/light novel" Tumblr post also I just like CLAMP, borrowed from Multnomah Public Library via Hoopla
Review: This feels as it is, CLAMP's first effort: their later structure and themes are present, but in trial form. The mythic inspiration and structure, combined with retrospectively familiar and not particularly complex characters, keeps early chapters of this at a distance: character archetypes bond while defeating episodic, oversized villains; meanwhile, big and intense and much deeper interpersonal relationships are forming, queer and indelibly rooted in violence or social transgression, but these are backloaded into a too-little-too-late denouement. I'm glad I read it, it's certainly relevant to my interests, but I'm more glad CLAMP realized what they were able to achieve here and carried it forward; X in particular shares DNA, a mythic quality cut with more interpersonal, character-driven arcs, but the balance in X is significantly better and also it's one of the best manga (let's go ahead and say) of all time, so—it takes practice like this to achieve something like that.