Dennis Cooper is  a novelist and poet and dramatist and critic and editor, who resides outside the mainstream cultural industry.  We apparently went to the same small liberal arts college in Southern California at roughly the same time, though he would have been a couple of years ahead of me. I don’t remember him.

Going through his bibliography just now, I don’t seem to have read him before today, either, though it is a stretch to call what I just did reading.

He calls his new work, Zac’s Haunted House, an html novel. It works like this.

Click on this link. Scroll down. Follow the directions.

I downloaded the html folder, opened the file inside it called index.html with Chrome and I was good to go.

I would imagine if you have fast internet and give each chapter time to buffer, it would work fine online, too.

Zac’s Haunted House is made up entirely of GIF files artfully arranged. If I understand correctly, these were all files found online, then resized and put in order by the author.

As you scroll down the page you will find correspondences and themes, mostly to do with transformations and blood letting, lots of horror/slasher imagery, though there is humor, too. If you take such things to heart you may find it disturbing.

I found it pretty amazing, even if I’m not sure it is anything more really than a fabulous trick. Fabulous tricks, after all, are fabulous.