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Hogg is one of America's most famous "unpublishable" novels. It recounts three horrifically violent days in 1969 in the life of truck driver and rapist-for-hire, Franklin Hargus. Narrated by his young accomplice, the novel portrays a descent into unimaginable depravity, a hell comprised of the filth and brutality civilization exists to forget. What transforms this nightmares into literature is Delany's refusal, faced with our moral anxieties, to mutilate his appalling creation. Hogg's monsters wear our faces, possessing the human complexities of intense loyalty, perverse admiration, and an integrity so pure that pity becomes betrayal. No reader can be prepared for such a story. It is a stunning achievement.

Samuel Delany wrote Hogg in San Francisco in 1969 and finished it just days before the Stonewall riots in New York City. Over the next four years he rewrote it, while working on several science fiction novels, including the internationally acclaimed Dhalgren. It took over twenty years for Hogg finally to be published in 1995 as a limited hardback edition of five hundred copies by Black Ice Books/Fiction Collective 2. A small paperback edition followed.

Over the years many book publishers, some eager to publish a Delany novel, would still not accept Hogg for publication after reading it. Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press, famous for first publishing Nabokov's Lolita and the novels of Sade, told Delany it was the only novel he "ever rejected solely because of its sexual content."

The unnamed boy who narrates Hogg is deliberately fashioned as the opposite of the "corruptible child". He is corruption itself. In contrast to all the rape that Hogg initiates towards women in this novel, he never has to force this boy to do anything. Anything Hogg wants him to do, he relishes. He wants to experience everything that comes his way. He craves all of the nastiness that Hogg dishes out. He doesn't have to learn to be a slave. There is even a second boy in the novel who is drawn to Hogg in the same way the narrator is, but Hogg rejects him.

The fact that Hogg is hardcore pornography may make it difficult, at first, to see the beauty of Delany's language, the poetry and elegance in his descriptions of bodies, objects, and places. The same magical style that sweeps us through much of Delany's writing is there, sharp and peculiar, lovely and vivid, holding everything together in a river of bloody, filthy, and downright evil sex and murder, which is occasionally punctuated by some illuminating dialogue.

Nothing is gratuitous in this novel. The excess of radical sexuality and violence in Hogg is reminiscent of Sade's novels, but without Sade's humorous and continual obsession with repetition and counting. Sade's characters are rarely more than two-dimensional cartoons, though at times he makes them utter remarkable philosophical musings. Delany's monstrous characters (Hogg and his gang of rapists) become uncomfortably fleshed-out humans. They elicit our sympathy. By the book's end, they seem far less distant than they do at the beginning.