There was a recent thread about “evil books” - some of the ones mentioned were the Turner Diaries, Mein Kampf and other Nazi works, and something called “Hogg.” Whoever mentioned it didn’t say much about it other than that it was really disgusting and that there was child-molestation, rape and other sexual perversions on every single page. So naturally I had to look it up; after reading the description: “Three days in the life of rapist-for-hire Hogg and his eleven-year-old accomplice” and the label of one of the most “unpublishable books” of all time, I had to order it.
Two days after it arrived in the mail, I finished it.
I figured Crash by J.G. Ballard would be the most perverted and twisted book I ever read. Well, sorry, Ballard, you’ve been dethroned. There’s no comparison between Crash and Hogg whatsoever. The activities depicted in Crash may be perverse, bizarre, sickening and extremely explicit, but everyone is so polite in that book. There’s no rudeness whatsoever; in fact, I think there are only one or two swear words in the whole book. Everything is clean, clinical, precise, and medical-sounding, as is Ballard’s style.
Hogg is a different ballgame entirely. Here’s a little sample:
Or how about the introduction of the title character…
Mind you, the narrator is 11 years old. The book starts out with him fucking his 12-year-old male friend; then the friend’s 15-year-old sister comes down and fucks both of them. Then a biker gang comes in and fucks the three of them, then a group of black men come in and fuck them, and then finally the 15-year-old girl’s father comes down and fucks all of them. Those are the first four pages of the book, described in the most explicit and filthy manner possible.
The whole rest of the book is like that, illuminating the reader with detailed descriptions of things like dick-cheese, self-mutilation of the penis, coprophagy, bizarre gang-rapes and bikers, all narrated in the most enthusiastic tone.
The reader is left with several questions:
Where is this story supposed to take place? It seems to be set in some kind of bizarre industrial wasteland; it talks a lot about truck stations, dockyards, tugboats, “garbage scows,” and most of the characters are described as wearing jumpsuits, work boots and other laborers’ clothing. Yet nobody is ever described as doing any actual work; the only “job” anyone has is Hogg, who is a rapist for hire. Other states such as Pennsylvania and Florida are mentioned but the location of the story doesn’t seem to be clear.
Are Hogg and his crew some kind of allegory? None of them seem even remotely real; they are all so over the top that I tend to think they are intended to represent something. There is Hogg, and two other men known simply as “Nigger” and “Wop,” and then a 17 year old boy named Denny, a compulsive masturbator and eventual penis-piercer who is their fuck-toy/accomplice. Nobody in the entire story exhibits any kind of morality whatsoever; they are essentially all sociopaths.
Is the narrator supposed to be black or white? Sometimes he’s referred to as having yellow hair and being a “white boy,” then others in the story call him “nigger” and insist that he’s at least partially black, though Hogg denies it vehemently. Or is his race deliberately ambiguous?
What on earth is the connection between this book and gay culture? The back of the book notes that it was “written days before the Stonewall riots” and that its author is one of the people “who has most changed our concept of gayness in the last century.” But I can find no genuine “gay” content in the book whatsoever. The characters have no sexuality; they simply fuck anything and everything. They’re sex crazed monsters who will rape any available living thing, including mules.
And finally - the book was written in 1969, yet there is not a single reference to drugs in the entire story. This surprised me; do you think it was a deliberate attempt by the author to avoid mentioning drugs because he perhaps thought that doing so would provide an “excuse” for the characters’ insane behavior, and that he wanted to emphasize the innateness of their mentality?
Has anyone else even read this?
