Victims

Rating:
Summary: Potential, derailed
Review: From Dennis Cooper's "Little House on the Bowery" series comes this first novel from Travis Jeppesen. Loosely chronicling the last days of a religious cult called the Overcomers, the novel is composed of fragments of the stories of Tanya, who joins the cult as a pregnant teenager, and of Herbert, her son who leaves the cult before its end. Various other characters appear, including two of Herbert's friends and the man who fathered Herbert, as well as the cult leader Martin Jones. Jeppesen's stark style is quirky and noteworthy, but the story threads unravel as the novel progresses, and by the end, the surreal quality of the fragmentary episodes overtakes the book and dilutes whatever meaning readers are supposed to take from it. Despite my problems with this book, Travis Jeppesen is definitely an author with a future.

Rating:
Summary: Tedious Drivel
Review: I always try to finish a book once I've started it, but "Victims" was certainly a chore. It's a vapid exercise in pretension, ovewritten in a style that verges on the purple and that sheds absolutely no light on its subject, cults, or on literature in general. Yet no sooner had I forced myself to finish it than I read a very positive review comparing it to Henry Darger and Adolf Wolfi. Puh-leese! These guys had some substance to them. And they'd never have the gall to say in their author bio, as Jeppesen does, that they live in an "undisclosed" Eastern European country. I can't see the point in keeping this information undisclosed apart from Jeppesen trying to give himself a mysterious aura that his text fails to do. So the positive review baffled me, until I came to the end of it and saw that the reviewer also reviewed (also positively) Dennis Cooper's twaddle, and Cooper is the editor of the series that "Victims" is a part of. Hmmmm. Very interesting. Is there some sort of connection here?

Rating:
Summary: Not bad but not great either.
Review: I don't see the Dennis Cooper comparison either on this book.
I feel Dennis Cooper is much more controversial.
Maybe in the syle of writing they might seem similar but not really.

This book was a bit of a chore to finish but I was curious about where it was all going.
I have to say I was disappointed at the end for it was too bland but it kept my interest flowing enough to reach it.

And I'm sure that that "has been rocker" had nothing to do with publishing this particular book. I mean yes it's his company BUT he gave Dennis Cooper the opportunity to publish HIS choices not the company's. It's part of the deal that Cooper signed on with Akashic.

Rating:
Summary: The Cooper Cult
Review: I just finished reading Victims. It deserves a lot better than a slash and burn job by someone blinded by hatred for Dennis Cooper. This is very unusual and interesting and compelling novel. Jeppesen is a lyrical and ambitious writer and I was entranced by his strange world full of vivid feelings and inspired ideas about belief and self. I highly recommend it to readers who long for novels that do more than follow the rules. I don't see the comparison to Cooper's books at all. Victims is something very different and special.

Rating:
Summary: a beautiful adventure
Review: I just finished reading Victims. It deserves a lot better than a slash and burn job by someone blinded by hatred for Dennis Cooper. This is very unusual and interesting and compelling novel. Jeppesen is a lyrical and ambitious writer and I was entranced by his strange world full of vivid feelings and inspired ideas about belief and self. I highly recommend it to readers who long for novels that do more than follow the rules. I don't see the comparison to Cooper's books at all. Victims is something very different and special.

Rating:
Summary: Do we really need a second Dennis Cooper?
Review: I picked this one up at my school library where I work, after it had been sent there for one of my co-workers (a Dennis Cooper fan) to review in some journal. He'd passed on it and told me that it was "puerile." I happen to loathe Cooper's novels myself, so since this is in a series edited by him, I thought I'd give it a read. I assumed anything a Cooper fan didn't like would be okay by me. Wrong! Even though my co-worker and I disagree on many things, Jeppesen's book is indeed puerile, not to mention utterly childish garbage. I'm amazed how indulged many of the more pretentious writers are today, usually by publishers (and readers) who wouldn't know good writing if it smacked them in the face. In fact, the more pretentious they are, the more they're indulged, and Jeppesen is one of the most pretentious I've come across. Even his author bio is pretentious, since he won't reveal the Eastern European country where he lives. (How mysterious! How über cool!) Who does he think he is, Salmon Rushdie or J.D. Salinger? I have no doubt that, since Cooper now has his own imprint, he'll continue to foist immature carbon copies of himself on this publisher, who's been foolish enough to release Jeppesen's book. Also, I'm sure that almost all of the books Cooper recommends in the future will be by men. Do yourself a favor and forget this one. It's even more self-indulgent and affected than Cooper's own writing.

Rating:
Summary: The Sum of Its Parts
Review: So what do you get when you buy a book published by a has-been rock performer, edited by an absurdly overrated cult novelist, and written by a young American trendoid with more pretensions than talent who lives in what is ponderously described as an "undisclosed Eastern European country"? A mindless, empty novel that manages to say absolutely nothing about its obstensible subject, cults, and that you forget the moment you finish it (if you can manage that). Spare me.

Rating:
Summary: The Sum of Its Parts
Review: So what do you get when you buy a book published by a has-been rock performer, edited by an absurdly overrated cult novelist, and written by young American trendoid with more pretensions than talent who lives in what is ponderously described as an "undisclosed Eastern European country"? A mindless, empty novel that manages to say absolutely nothing about its obstensible subject, cults, and that you forget the moment you finish it (if you can manage that). Spare me.

Rating:
Summary: Like watching your ten year old niece butcher Fur Elise
Review: Unlike most of the customer reviewers, I don't have strong feelings for or against Dennis Cooper -- I read _Try_, and I liked it, but haven't read anything else by him. With that preface, I have to say I agree with most of the other reviewers -- this painfully bad book is a waste of pretentious hot air, which Jeppesen seems to have no shortage of. He's tried to inflate a shoddy narrative structure and horrendous prose with "philosophy" and "ideas", but it just comes across as another one of those painfully cute (in a condescending way), kiddie attempts at being grownup, like when your neice butchers Fur Elise at her third grade recital. Sadly, most of us outgrow this phase before the end of our teens; Jeppesen apparently has been able to live out this extended adolescence thanks to an indulgent publisher. His interview on the publisher's website is a gem ... Here's a teaser:
"Without intending to, I ended up writing this book against the reader, to a large extent, at least to the reader who comes to this book with any preconceived notions of what a novel is supposed to be. This is why it is immensely gratifying for me, on a purely egotistical level, when readers have a negative reaction to this book; it merely confirms everything I suspected! I'd much rather people hate this book than like it. If people like it, that means it fails. Then again, failure is a lot more interesting than success . . . "

Then, ummm ... I guess it's a smashing success, Jeppesen! Congrats!

Rating:
Summary: The Cooper Cult
Review: When my friends and I heard that Dennis Cooper had been solicited to edit a new series of "groundbreaking" novels, we wondered how far his critical taste would stray from his own writing in his choice of authors. After all, he is notorious for promoting only guys in their early twenties who are slavish imitators of his work. We hoped that he would deviate just a bit and use this opportunity to be a little broader in his taste when choosing from the untapped talent out there. Some of us, though, felt that he had shown himself in the past to be completely limited in his preferences and that he would not change his stripes this time. Well, it turns out they were right. Travis Jeppesen is a writer who not only mimics Copper's style, but even resembles one of the young protagonists of Cooper's works. If I had been exposed to such a pinched literary viewpoint in the books I read when I was younger, I would never have become the reader that I am today. Such devotion to a writer as overrated as Cooper-and his cultivating that devotion-smacks of cultism, which happens to be the subject of Jeppesens highly pretentious book. Let's hope readers-and writers-move beyond the Cooper fad. Literature is so much richer than that.