This Novel Is Made Entirely Out of GIFs

American author Dennis Cooper is known for his distinctively graphic, punk-infused poetry, fiction, and art that is one part William S. Burroughs and another part Arthur Rimbaud. Like Burroughs, his fiction is often filled with eroticism and transgression, and focused on troubled youth and drug use.

Some of these themes come together in Cooper's latest work, Zac's Haunted House, a "visual novel" created entirely out of GIFs, which allows him the space to stretch his style and content. Readers—or is it now "viewers"?—can experience it either online or download it onto a computer or tablet.

As the novel's title makes plain, this is a story about a haunted house—a digital structure composed of fragmented scenes locked in the GIF's digital straitjacket. Cooper's visual novel shares some of the experimental flavor of Daniel Z. Danielewski's post-modern horror novel House of Leaves, which also mirrored the internet with its hypertextual style. But where Danielewski's novel is a claustrophobic labyrinth of words, Cooper's novel is absent of any text. All meaning is to be derived from the individual GIF scenes, and Cooper's arrangement thereof in the novel's vertical scroll.

In Chapter 1, a girl bleeds onto a book, as if Cooper is killing the very idea of the novel. This is followed by other GIFs of water and showers, suggesting perhaps a rebirth of the novel in a new format. The next GIF shows a teenage boy holding a book and spasming on the ground. Maybe the boy dreads the loss of his traditional fiction, and is a proxy for Cooper, but the author is committed to this new form and proceeds.

From there, things are far less clear. Three depression-era boys are bisected by an animated assembly line of pancakes. Then a cartoon stick figure declares "I like trains," before a person in a Mickey Mouse costume and a railroad engineer hurdle toward the viewer on a train. The next GIF shows a train on a bridge that collapses into a river below, with the text "Shit" narrating the disaster. This sequence closes with the moon going through its phases toward darkness.

Chapter 1's other sequences feature skeletal arms in a black void, eyeballs (human and dog), guns, a rocket launch, knives, blood, a sleeping boy and dog, and various other images that remind the viewer that they are the temporary visitor in a digital haunted house.

Though publisher Kiddiepunk said that Cooper employed GIFs for their "tightly wound, looping visual possibilities, nervous rhythms, tiny storylines, and their status as dismembered, twitching eye candy", the viewer can scour the text more closely, decoding "its carefully detailed sequences and construction, a deep and fraught fiction puzzle."

Having viewed Cooper's visual novel, I'm not so sure what exactly there is to decode, or how to do it, but I perhaps need to spend more time with the work. As other viewers dive in, maybe some greater meaning will be assembled from things like the number of chapters, the source of Cooper's GIFs, the movie scenes from which many of them are culled, and so on.

Even if such attempts fail, it's still a strange sort of fun to watch Cooper play with GIFs in the name of that much older technological medium we call the novel. Those with a stake in the novel's survival—authors, publishers, readers—are wondering how it will evolve. Zac's Haunted House lights the way down one potential path. The real treat will be to see how readers and authors respond to the gauntlet Cooper just threw down.