REVIEWS Book Marks Richard Labonte | March 14, 2005 The Sluts, by Dennis Cooper. Void Press, 296 pages, $50 hardcover. Sex and boys, sex and fear, sex and pain, sex and blood, sex and death – Cooper has long dabbled with unsettling themes. That fascination with dark desire is distilled, intelligently and deliciously, in The Sluts, a sickly hilarious fictional excursion into the depths of hustler fantasy. The hustler is Brad – who may or may not be underage. He's an angelic twink submissive who aims to please – no kink too perverse, no fetish too intense. He's dead by novel's end – or is he? His story is told through e-mails, chat-room conversations, and website postings – a nifty literary device by which Cooper nimbly both borrows from and parodies how the Internet has enabled extreme sexual adventurers to inflate reality, traffic in exaggeration, and worship sexual extravagance. And by extreme, we're not talking whips and fisting – think mutilation, castration, and amputation. The Sluts isn't for the squeamish; it's for readers who appreciate Cooper's astonishing ability to dig truthfully into depravity. (This edition, signed and numbered, is limited to 550 copies; for info, www.void-books.com.) Dinah! Three Decades of Sex, Golf, and Rock 'n' Roll, by Michele Kort. Out Traveler Books, 163 pages, $18.95 paper. There is "sex" in Dinah!: sections of Kort's exultant consideration of the Dinah Shore Weekend party scene in Palm Springs bring to mind an intentionally lesbian installment of a Girls Gone Wild video. There is "golf": her account of what started in 1972 as the Colgate Dinah Shore tournament (renamed in 2000 as the Nabisco Championship) highlights the history of women's golf; kitschy cutout "LPGA Trading Cards" profiling great women golfers and a tongue-in-cheek glossary of golfing terms help plump out the book. So do hefty sections on songbird Shore's big-band, television, and cookbook-writing careers, on how Palm Springs evolved into a gay place to live, and on where to stay – and even play golf – when visiting the desert mecca. As for "rock 'n' roll": the annual trek for hearty partying, says Kort, is the dyke equivalent of a gay circuit party. What started as a few women enjoying spring-break pool parties 30 years ago, with a little golf-watching on the side, has blossomed into a blowout weekend for 15,000 lesbians from around the world – with a little golf-watching on the side. Deep Water: A Sailor's Passage, by E.M. Kahn. Southern Tier Editions, 242 pages, $14.95 paper. Boats are demanding objects of affection. So are boyfriends. This is a beautiful love story about both. Kahn's memoir recounts his passion for the several boats he sailed around the turbulent waterways of New York City and Long Island, through Cape Cod's hellish fog banks, and among the islands of the Caribbean. Any nautical romantic with a yen for the wild freedom of wind, sail, and sea will relish his tales of time spent aboard small boats. In a profoundly moving parallel story, Kahn also remembers his sometimes stormy but always sure romance with Kevin, a skittish, skinny young man he met in 1978. Kevin sailed – and shared life – with him for almost 15 years, until his AIDS death in 1992; any gay man who grieves for a great love will share Kahn's great loss. Deep Water is a powerful, poignant, and graceful story about sailing on through life – on another body of water, with another body at your side – after sorrow descends. Five Quarts: A Personal and Natural History of Blood, by Bill Hayes. Ballantine Books, 304 pages, $23.95 hardcover. Early transfusion techniques are described in gruesome detail; modern blood banks are depicted as essentially bloodless. A hemophilic woman depends on clean blood for survival; the author's own partner is living with blood tainted by the AIDS virus. The consecrated – and sacred – blood of Christ salves religious souls; the vampires of legend feast – profanely – on the blood of innocents. These are a few of the fascinating hematological references coursing through this riveting scientific, literary, and historical – and surprisingly personal – biography of blood. The science of blood is selective but informative: Hayes offers thumbnail accounts of the Greek doctor Galen, whose treatment of injured gladiators gave him insight into how blood flows, and of Jay Levy's work in isolating the AIDS virus. But it's his exploration of the culture of blood – from menstrual taboos (Hayes grew up with five sisters and their periods), to the nicks from a boy's first shave, to how blood defines race and even class – that makes Five Quarts such an intellectually nourishing book. Featured Excerpt: While I was vacationing in Europe, my girlfriend Wendy drove to Dinah with a group of our friends. I heard the details on a transatlantic call, and even though I was in the mountains of Switzerland and she was in Southern California, it seemed like I was the one who was missing out on something. The sun, the pool, the cute golfers, the parties, the drinking, the dyke dramas. Actually, it seemed like the drinking and the dyke dramas went hand-in-hand, because as soon as a certain amount of alcohol had been consumed, so-and-so was kissing so-and-so instead of her own girlfriend. It sounded lewd, decadent...and I couldn't wait to go. — from Dinah!, by Michele Kort Footnotes: BOOKS TO WATCH OUT FOR: James Earl Hardy concludes his B-Boy Blues series with A House Is Not a Home, the sixth novel – coming in June, from HarperCollins – about the love between Mitchell, a Buppie from Brooklyn, and Raheim, a homeboy from Harlem... CHRISTOPHER BRAM'S NOVEL Father of Frankenstein comes back to life in August from Perennial, retitled Gods and Monsters, to ride the fame of the Academy Award-winning (Best Screenplay) film that was based on it, and with a new afterword by Bram... THE CLASSIC CAMP NOVEL Whores of Lost Atlantis, set in a bitchily hilarious Off-Broadway world, is also back in print, coming in May from Carroll & Graf – with the same title as the earlier edition, but with a new ending by actor, playwright, and author Charles Busch... NOVELIST MITCH CULLIN, whose short stories have appeared in Christopher Street and Harrington Gay Fiction Quarterly, imagines life at 93 for a crotchety and solitary Sherlock Holmes, comforted in his retirement by the companionship of his housekeeper's young son; it's a Doubleday Book due in April... YOUNG-ADULT AUTHOR David Levithan (Boy Meets Boy, The Realm of Possibility) is back with Are We There Yet?, a book about two brothers who are rivals in love, from Pantheon Books in July. Richard Labonte has been reading, editing, selling, and writing about queer literature since the mid-'70s. Previous edition Book Marks