Hogg (novel)

Hogg is a pornographic novel by Samuel R. Delany. It was written in San Francisco in 1969 and completed just days before the Stonewall Riots in New York City. A second draft was completed in 1973. At the time no one would publish it due to its graphic descriptions of murder, homosexuality, child molestation, incest, coprophilia, coprophagia, necrophilia and rape. Hogg was finally published (with some further, though relatively minor, rewrites) in 1995 by Black Ice Books; as is Delany's wont, each subsequent edition has featured some correction, up to and including that published by Fiction Collective 2 in 2004.

The novel is told from the perspective of an eleven-year-old boy who, after being pimped in his friend's basement, joins up with Franklin "Hogg" Hargus, a trucker and rapist-for-hire. The boy, without name but frequently referred to as "cocksucker", satisfies the extreme sexual demands of everyone around him without, until the novel's final word, ever speaking. The narrator witnesses brutality after brutality as a passive observer, describing events in a flat tone of photorealism. He is treated by the men as property or disposable, even being sold to an unemployed dockworker for $15. The book's climax comes when Hogg finally expresses affection for the narrator, who is already plotting an escape.

Delany provides little information about the narrator, but some have suggested that he is a thinly veiled version of the author himself, as his proclivities and his intelligence (he plays chess well at 11) match Delany's. In updates to the most recent edition, Delany has made it clear that the narrator is, like Delany himself, a light-skinned African American. The incidents in the novel bear no resemblance to Delany's descriptions of his middle-class, cultured childhood, as per his pseudonymous autobiography. However, readers of Delany's semi-autobiographical novelette, "Eric, Gwen, and D.H. Lawrence's Esthetic of Unrectified Feeling" (in Atlantis: Three Tales, Seattle: Incunabula, 1995) will recognize a prototype for Hargus in Eric, the foulmouthed milkman from the second chapter.

Despite the book's pornographic appearance, respected authors have given their endorsement. Norman Mailer, for instance, said "There is no question that Hogg by Samuel R. Delany is a serious book with literary merit."


 * ISBN 1573660493