The Ultimate Male Power Pornography: Samuel R. Delany's Hogg

I read one of the most extreme works of fiction ever published so that you never have to.

This post is NSFA (not safe for anyone). It includes discussions of fictionalized sexual violence. If you are sensitive to those topics, please be advised.

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I arrived at the novel Hogg, by Samuel R. Delany, on a journey down the dark, subgenre side-road of “extreme horror fiction.” It was rough and exhilarating travel to be sure. I thrilled to the depraved antics of Richard Laymon’s various monsters in works like The Woods are Dark and the Beast House trilogy. I despaired at the fate of Meg in Jack Ketchum’s brutal trauma-factory The Girl Next Door. And I stalked New Orleans with Poppie Z. Bright’s lovelorn cannibal serial killers in Exquisite Corpse.

To be sure, “extreme” is an apt descriptor for these books. They offer a level of pulpy debasement, depravity and despair that would be out of place in the comparably mellow horror landscapes of Stephen King, Dean Koontz and Grady Hendrix. The subgenre is all ick and id. Flesh peels and oozes, blood splatters, meat proliferates, sickness spreads unchecked, rape and murder occur with frightening frequency and startling nonchalance, and the limits of sadism, bondage and cruelty are regularly tested and broken. That is, after all, what the audience is after.

Readers of extreme horror are often on the lookout for the worst of the worst to test their boundaries. So, like any subculture, they trade their favorite titles on forums dedicated to the subject.

While exploring these threads, I often came across Hogg. What set the novel apart from other recommendations was that even among those who loved the extreme, the book was offered with an abundance of caution and reluctance.

Overall there are parts that are somewhat graphic enough that I personally had to skip lines due to how well explained and described they were and it felt too real and how disgusted I was. For those who wish to read then as warning it is not poetic in anyway this book is blunt and from corner to corner of each page is filled with filth and stomach twisting details that make you reel.

- u/_the_bends on r/disturbinglit

Truth be told, I’ve been struggling to decide if I even want to provide a synopsis. Because to simply even describe the plot is to yeet your psyche into a pit of unparalleled ugliness. There is literally no way to soften it. But, here it goes:

The story follows a 12-year-old (ugh) narrator, only ever called cocksucker (yikes), who randomly falls-in with a self-proclaimed “rape artist” (yeesh) nicknamed Hogg. He takes the child on a journey of horrifying sexual slavery, murder and debasement (oof) during which Hogg and his gang of deranged monsters engage in necrophilia, incest, coprophilia, coprophagia, urolagnia and brutal acts of sadism (holy-FUCKING-shit!).

Okay. Sorry. Here is a picture of a puppy.

Feel better? Alright. Let’s move on.

Why the Fuck Would Delany Make This?

We should start by saying Delany has only ever classified Hogg as pornography. And it’s absolutely a wild detour for one of the most lauded modern sci-fi writers of our day. And while I take him at his word, this is not pornography as I (or hopefully you) understand it — media meant to appeal to our base sexual desires. In fact, Delany admits in his essay (and preface to Hogg) titled The Scorpion Garden, that he can’t imagine there are many for whom the book might be titillating. But I don’t think that’s really his goal.

Delany starts The Scorpion Garden with a definition of pornography from Auden: “That’s simple. It gives me an erection.” He then goes on to argue that the novel, regardless of who has written it, is informed at its core by structural misogyny. His claim is that any novel, his own included, upholds well-accepted cultural norms around the victimization of women:

Man has created the institution of womanhood, all to his own profit. And any woman who would move even slightly beyond the allowable margins of that institution is likely to become man’s hunted and hounded victim, economically threatened and jeopardized at every turn, jeered toward any slough of guilt and madness she can be shoved into: Man will commit any indignity upon those human beings he has set aside into that minimal area he has reserved for women.

That control and subjugation over women’s lives and bodies, Delany argues, is what makes men’s cocks rise. And I believe that’s what’s at the core of Hogg.

In his essay, Delany explains that even though he believes misogyny is at the core of any novelist’s work, he has struggled to correct the trend in his own. He offers numerous examples of how, despite his best intentions, he continues to create women characters who lack agency and depth and the “psychological richness” he gives to male characters. He categorizes this problem as a “compulsive neurosis” shared by every novelist in the West. He notes it is a sexual problem he suffers from.

How is Hogg pornographic then? Not in the way any of us might recognize. It’s pornographic because its depictions of violence and subjugation over women showcase how society provides ultimate power to even the most socially marginal men. And that idea? According to Delany, that’s what gives men erections.

This is what Delany’s so called Scorpion Garden is — it’s the rot and ugliness within him, built on the foundations of the institutional misogyny he is trying desperately to escape as an author. Hogg, he claims, is the “honest fictional exploration” of that ugly place of pornographic male power.

Is it distasteful? Yep. But the shock in the narrative is twofold. First the depravity constantly escalates (and considering it starts with cocksucker being pimped out to men in a basement, that’s saying something). Second: the nature and quality of that depravity feels terribly true.

The character of Hogg is the perfect archetype for a particular conservative vision of male power. He exerts his control over children and women’s bodies, and in fact profits from their abuse. He encourages the same violence in his peers. He commits his heinous acts at the behest of the wealthy, who seek to keep themselves clean and distanced from the violence Hogg deals out. He believes the hurt he delivers is moral and dutiful because instead of dropping bombs on villages and laying off thousand of employees, his violence is personal and one to one.

This tracks with our current post-Roe cultural moment. Hogg is the logical conclusion of red-pilled men’s rights activists and violent incels. True now and true when Delany, who is a gay, black author, started writing Hogg in a New York City simmering before the Stonewall riots.

Delany calls Hogg a didactic novel. And I think the attempt is to teach via a form of psycho-sexual shock therapy. He has to be as extreme as he is in the text in hopes of fostering a disgust of male power in even the most entrenched misogynist.

Is it successful? I’m not sure. In creating it, Delany was able to probe those darker places that had taken root in his psyche. So it was successful in that respect. But I highly doubt it’s taught anyone anything. That said, the novel has been described as a “culturally charged object,” and it is. So, maybe there is value simply in its existence as the most extreme novel ever published.

Okay. But Why Would You Fucking Read it?

I would categorize taking on Hogg as “stunt reading.” Look, the world is full of people who take on dangerous and morally dubious challenges in order to test themselves. Free climbers risk certain death and the grief of friends and family to take on impossible ascents. Certain professional eaters consume unconscionably massive meals that could feed whole communities. Land speed record holders burn fossil fuels and risk fiery doom to race across the salt flats.

Hogg is not deadly, but it is dangerous on a psychological level. It lodges inside of your brain and is distinctly hard to remove. It’s also an incredibly challenging read. But unlike other difficult books, like DFW’s Infinite Jest, or W.S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, or Danielewski’s House of Leaves, Delany’s book is hard to read on an existential and perhaps even moral level. And for some people, maybe that’s all they need to hear before attempting to get though to cocksucker’s single bit of dialogue, which punctuates the end of the book.

For my part, I read Hogg to appease my endless intellectual curiosity. And like those who have written about it before me, I will not recommend or encourage anyone read it. Better to regard it as a cultural object. Better to know that the depravity and evil in men’s hearts was given voice and it is more disgusting and terrible than you are prepared to imagine.

At the same time, I think we need to take a cue from Delany in regarding what he’s written. After the experience, he imagined that the charged document would be so incendiary that it would blind people passing on the street outside his East Village apartment. But, of course, as he regarded the work, that was not the case. After all was said and done, he concluded, “it is only a novel.”