The narrator of Hogg is a Huck Finn–like youngster caught in society's most sinister seams-but unlike Huck, he passes no moral judgments on the violence he takes part in . . . Hogg is the story of a man-a depraved trucker named Franklin Hargus, whom the people he works for call Hogg-and of the nameless boy who tells the story of three days of unspeakable sexual violence and devastation, which, together, they initiate in a small seaside American city in the middle of the last century. Hogg is a towering brute who makes his living as a rapist for hire. By the end of a series of vicious attacks, kidnappings, and mass murders, the reader will wonder who is more corrupt: the man or the boy. Samuel R. Delany completed his first draft of Hogg within a day, if not within hours, of the 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York City and revised it over the next four years, though it was not released until 1995.
"There's no question that Hogg by Samuel R. Delany is a serious book with literary merit."
Norman Mailer
"Hogg is a truly experimental novel. . . . A minimalist testing of a single hypothesis. It wants to know to what limits appetite can suffuse consciousness before that consciousness stops being human."
The Review of Contemporary Fiction
"Hogg is a truly significant book. It is distasteful, raw, and upsetting; it also treats some of the sexual taboos that Americans do not want addressed in either art or politics. Hogg is an artistic triumph, as well as a political one."
