Much (if not most) of the criticism around Delany’s work to date has concerned itself with the relation of his work to myth. Most of this that I have seen, well intentioned as it is, is trivial. Those critics with adequate scholarly equipment for the task get caught in a labyrinthine search for more and more tenuous plot parallels to more and more obscure myths; those with inadequate equipment (the majority) usually founder on the simple problem that, having no clear picture themselves of the way myth works, they have no clear position from which to examine Delany’s. Intermittently, Delany’s works have contained mythical ornaments (at least that’s how I have always seen them), which encourage this type of criticism—e.g., the Faust-foam swirling on The Tides of Lust. But what is centrally mythic in his work is the quality, as in Hogg, I have just mentioned.

The first critic to note this quality in print, seven years ago, Judith Merrill, actually caught the distinction which subsequent critics have tended to ignore: The work is mythopoeic (to borrow her terms) rather than mythopoetic: It makes myth, rather than merely utilizes and refers to it.

Though the treatment of Harkner suggests Delany has a great understanding of how modern myths are generated (by administering some shock to a media-solution super-saturated with cant and cynicism, searching among situations well beyond morals and hopelessly into the pathological for something to moralize over), while Harkner perhaps becomes a myth figure for the world of the fiction (Frontwater, Crawhole, Ellenville, Fairhaven and the adjoining towns), Hogg himself is the myth figure who emerges from the novel into our world—horrible as Frankenstein’s monster, vicious as Dracula, and stolid as Babbitt.

“HOGG!” proclaims the blurb: “An eleven year old boy stumbles upon an act of brutal rape—but this is only prologue to a weekend of sexual mayhem, destruction and mass murder.”

What a suggestive blurb it is! But it also, I suspect, will help begin a popular mythology around the book that will confuse Hogg with the mass murderer, as Frankenstein is confused with his monster, or as Faust is confused with Mephistopheles—phenomena Delany himself has commented on in Tides. But the situation of Hogg is far more complex than the blurb suggests: Hogg, a murderer and a monster himself, is morally and psychologically responsible for precipitating Harkner over the edge into his far more monstrous death-rampage—and is then responsible for bringing him (however temporarily) back! It takes some mature considering to figure out what, ethically, is going on here.

It is not a simple book.