An interesting side-note: The finest science fiction writer in the American language, Theodore Sturgeon, once stepped across his genre’s boundaries to deal with the same theme as Delany, a dozen or more years ago, in an exquisite (if the rather saccharine opening pages are excepted) short novel, Some of Your Blood. Sturgeon’s temporary field for this work was the Psychological Mystery. His very effective character study (of another human “monster”) is presented as a palimpsest of portraits of a young army recruit (a perfect model for e. e. cummings’s “i sing of Olaf”) whom we learn, in about the third portrait down, has a sexual fetish for human blood. As effective and moving as Sturgeon’s tour de force is, it is finally marred by the happy resolution using a technicality involving menstrual blood and cunnilingus (all implied with pyrotechnical discreetness). It is believable for the length of the story only because the actual psycho/sexual mechanics are kept pretty much in the background. Examined closely, however, the technicality seems rather flimsy, i.e., very few people whose sexual fetish is human blood would be completely satisfied with, let us say, an occasional polystyrene container from the local blood bank. Comic vampires aside, such fetishists do exist, they have been somewhat studied, and the method of acquisition is usually part of their fetish and involves some violence, no matter how ritualized. Sturgeon’s “solution” avoids this.

Delany’s method for handling this theme is to explore, and keep on exploring, the psycho/sexual relations of his monster with a host of other monsters, a more ambitious undertaking that Sturgeon’s and, as much as I admire the earlier tale, I feel a richer one.

To explore this richness, I am going to discuss the language of the book, the structure of the book, the political template that underlies it, and, finally, the book’s significance.

II

It is the novelistic effects of Hogg, most readers will agree, that give it its power.

A reason for this, I suspect, is that the serious approach to Hogg’s type of material in the past has been very different. We are more used to the violence, the sordidness, the degradation, the brutality that fill, that clutter Hogg’s pages, presented in the hysterical, sparsely punctuated prose of a Hubert Selby, Jr. or a William Burroughs. Such things must be shouted about, must excite some harangue, some dithyramb, or other Dionysian mode of rhetoric. …

After two, single sentence paragraphs, stating the major and minor themes of the book, Delany confronts us with the blatant mechanics of his relationships, but in the calmest, most off-hand manner possible. He commences his description—and suddenly our heads are locked, fixed inches from the appalling parts; and, with the exception of a page or two here and there, our gaze is never let deviate; we are not allowed to draw back an instant, even to take breath.