Hogg by Samuel R. Delany

From the Publisher

Acclaimed winner of the William Whitehead Memorial Award for a lifetime's contribution to gay and lesbian literature, Samuel R. Delany wrote Hogg three decades ago. Since then it has been one of America's most famous 'unpublishable' novels. The subject matter of Hogg is our culture of sexual violence and degeneration. Delany explores his disturbing protagonist Hogg on his own turf--rape, pederasty, sexual excess--exposing an area of violence and sexual abuse from the inside. As such, it is a brave book.

Publishers Weekly

Hugo-and Nebula Award-winner Delany-whose early books were fascinating but whose recent efforts have grown increasingly obtuse-has been trying to get this pornographic novel published since 1973. The main narrator here is an 11-year-old boy who joins up with a raping, murdering pederast named Hogg. Coprophiliac Hogg violates women for pay. He enlists the help of other pedophiliac murdering rapists-Nigg, Dago and Denny-and the group sets off to perform acts of hideous violence. After the attacks, a biker friend of Hogg's sells the boy into sexual slavery to dockyard slum resident Big Sambo, who keeps his 12-year-old daughter for prostitution and his own perversions. The traumatized little girl is gang-raped by Hogg's crew as well. Meanwhile, teenaged Denny goes on an insane mutilating and mass-murder spree, eludes the police and finally returns to Hogg and the hopelessly confused narrator, who has been ``rescued'' after Hogg murders Big Sambo. Gang-rape attacks and criminal sex orgies are detailed at excruciating length, with photographic realism. This potent emetic is all the more disturbing for want of modulators of honest outrage. In other works, Delany has examined the role of the criminal within society; with Hogg, he apparently was content merely to inhabit the criminal mind without exploring it. (Mar.)

What People Are Saying

Norman Mailer
There is no question that Hogg by Samuel R. Delany is a serious book with literary merit.

Elizabeth Hand
Hogg [is] a terrifying journey into the body and soul of a man who embodies all the nightmarish excesses of our century, a creature as much a part the fever dream of American life in the 90s as Jeffrey Dahmer...[we read] of such monsters as Delany's Hogg with pity and horror...

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