Emerging From the Scary Shadows of Human Behavior : Books: From the chaos of emotions surrounding Dennis Cooper, chronicler of the seedy side of life, came a story in which goodness takes hold.

Dennis Cooper has just one word for the life he lived while writing “Try,” his current novel:

“Emotional.”

His best friend, Casey, a young writer, was trying to kick heroin. Cooper spent more than a year taking care of him, offering comfort during the intensely painful withdrawal. Eventually Casey quit heroin, but then announced a need for independence and pulled away.

Cooper was still in shock when his lover of five years, Mark, also dumped him--largely because of the writer’s devotion to heterosexual Casey. Cooper was left alone and in despair.

Recalling that time now, in the sunny afternoon quiet of his Los Feliz apartment, Cooper blows air through pursed lips and mutters with characteristic understatement, “It was hard.”

Yet it was also a time of growth, he says. He transformed the chaos of his life into the beautifully structured, linguistically pulsating “Try,” which he dedicated to Casey and which was universally praised by critics. He went to therapy for his depression, and he started thinking about “devotion and friendship, and why other people are important.”

At this point, Cooper fans may be wondering if their favorite author is going soft in the head.

Can this be the same Dennis Cooper who wrote “The Herd,” a novella exploring a serial murderer’s mentality? And “Frisk,” the chilling story of a man’s obsession with dissecting teen-age boys? And “Closer,” in which a beautiful gay teen-ager is used and abused by everyone around him?

Cooper, born and bred in Los Angeles, is best known for describing, in literary fashion, the kind of human behavior we read about with appalled fascination in the daily newspapers. Mutilation, necrophilia, rape, murder, pedophilia, drug addiction, porn videos are all staples in Dennis Cooperland.

Writer Edmund White calls Cooper’s work--three novels, a book of short stories and several poetry collections--”the stuff of Jesse Helms’ worst nightmares.” And even though his fictional world is always unself-consciously gay, Cooper once received death threats from a group of gay activists because of the violence in “Frisk.”

Cooper is the first to say that “Try” is different. In earlier works his characters yearn for tenderness but rarely get it. This time, “I guess I figured I’d try to acknowledge that tenderness or something,” Cooper says. “For a long time, I felt like you couldn’t really trust anybody. But through various things, including this friendship with the guy who was on heroin, I think I learned a lot about that kind of stuff.”

Set in the San Gabriel Valley, “Try” focuses on the gentle, platonic relationship between two teen-agers: Calhoun, the heterosexual junkie, and Ziggy, the hyperactive, sexually abused, possibly bisexual son of two gay men who adopted him when he was young. Among the minor characters are two girls--a first for Cooper, who says, “My world is opening up more.”

Like most of Cooper’s work, the book represents a struggle between the powerless and the powerful--sweet teen-agers versus exploitative adults. Yet the adults, truly evil in Cooper’s earlier works, are comically absurd in “Try.”

They include Ziggy’s Uncle Ken, a maker of porno flicks whose accidental killing of a boy turns into a farce, and Roger, one of Ziggy’s “dads.” Roger is a fatuous rock journalist who gets his hilariously pompous style from Cooper’s own early, fake-aesthetic writing about rock music.

The book’s most powerful force turns out to be goodness, suggested between the lines of the semi-articulate yet rhythmically beautiful language of Cooper’s damaged adolescents.

Dennis Cooper in person is surprisingly reminiscent of his fictional youths. Pale, lanky, unshaven, dressed in T-shirt and jeans, his words are liberally interlaced with “um,” “er,” “like” and “you know.” The youthful stutter recedes when he’s talking about ideas or literature, otherwise he might be an earnest, self-effacing 16-year-old trapped inside a 41-year-old body and topped with graying hair.

A recent Publishers Weekly profile, although laudatory, suggested that Cooper may be trying “to come to grips with whatever trauma he experienced at that age.”

“Maybe.” Cooper thinks hard, blue eyes intense. “I don’t know, I don’t know. . . . I don’t think I ever matured or something.”

In his heart, he is still the youthful rebel who was thrown out of the Boy Scouts for having long hair and expelled from Flintridge Preparatory School in La Canada in the 11th grade--ostensibly for having a low grade-point average but also for drug-taking and being openly gay, he says.

Such experiences left him permanently suspicious of authority and conventional morality. If he has a code of behavior, “it’s an embarrassingly simplistic thing, that people shouldn’t exploit other people.” He believes that “adulthood is a corrupt state” and he is moved by young people, especially young writers like Casey, because of their idealism and their uncompromising originality.

“I think when you get power you have to disburse it. Because I’m publishing I try to help as many young writers as I can.”

Born in Pasadena, brought up in Arcadia and Covina, Cooper comes from an affluent family that was torn apart by his parents’ long and difficult divorce. His father, head of a company that makes parts for the space program, left home when Cooper was 11.

Like the disaffected teen-agers who populate his books, Cooper did drugs, wrote poetry, dabbled in rock music and art. After a trip across the United States, two years at Pasadena City College and one year at Pitzer College in Claremont, Cooper was encouraged by his mentor, poet Bert Meyers, to leave school and work full time on his art.

Launching his career in his own magazine, Little Caesar--a kind of literary punk-rock journal--he was later published by small presses such as Seahorse and the Crossing Press, and now by the more widely known Grove Press.

Except for a couple of years in New York, Cooper has always lived in Los Angeles and he is deeply involved in the city’s artistic scene. He curates art shows, collaborates on performance pieces and writes about rock for Spin magazine. Between 1980-83, Cooper was program director of Beyond Baroque, the 26-year-old arts center in Venice. Tosh Berman, the center’s executive director, says Cooper is still “a dominant force in the Los Angeles literary community.”

Cooper gets a more complicated reaction from gay people. Some are loyal fans. Others see his fictional violence as a threat. In 1991, on a book tour for “Frisk,” Cooper was reading at A Different Light Bookstore in San Francisco when some people handed out flyers saying “Dennis Cooper must die.”

Cooper was so upset he canceled the tour. Later, he spoke to a representative of the group on the phone, who eventually agreed that it was wrong to put out death threats.

Critics say that Cooper’s work is not fiction of exploitation, but a genuine voyage of discovery. Like the Marquis de Sade, Charles Baudelaire, Jean Genet and William S. Burroughs--with whom he is often compared--Cooper is a thinker who wants to know where certain thoughts will take him, and if there is a language to take him there. Bizarre as it may sound, violence and sex form the intellectual framework for his unsentimental meditations on the difficulties we have connecting with each other.

Cooper’s interest in such topics was sparked at the age of 15 when he read De Sade’s “The 120 Days of Sodom.” What drew him, he says, was De Sade’s view that the extremes of human passion are “like windows into the soul.”

“They’re also areas that are rarely written about except as shock,” he adds. “I’ve always been interested in trying to write something that allows you to, like, enter them--so you can see past the glare on the surface and actually see what’s happening.”

He’s fascinated by the connection between love and violence--the neon version of the anger we all feel at times for those we love intensely.

Cooper’s work is so claustrophobicly authentic that he sometimes gets queries from people about snuff films or how to track down boys for sex. Cooper says they’re misreading his work. “Even though I write about sex a lot, I’m not really that sexual a person. It scares me or something. That’s why I write about it.”

He’s also ready to move on. “There’s so much amoral interest in (serial killers) now, like Jeffrey Dahmer T-shirts and ‘Oh, isn’t that cool.’ I think it’s really intense, but I don’t think it’s ‘cool.’ ”

Right now he is working with artist Keith Mayerson on a graphic novel based on the early Cooper short story “Introducing Horror Hospital,” about a rock group, that now takes place on the night actor River Phoenix died. A film also is being made of “Frisk,” directed by Todd Verow, with music by Bob Mould of Husker Du and Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth.

For his next novel--”very mulchy” at the moment--he wants to fictionalize a youthful breakdown he had after an LSD trip and examine child pornography as a fairy tale. He also has a “new best friend” he met at a rock concert whom he wants to write about--or rather, he says, “about what emotions he produces in me.”

So Dennis Cooper fans can relax. Obsessive, hermetic, valiantly pursuing the seemingly unpursuable, Cooper is still the same person who once wrote to a young man:

I’ve thrown

out hundreds like you, and

found only art can remain so

aloof in its make-up that I’ll

stare endlessly into its eyes

like a kid with a microscope.

Only now there’s more material under the lens.