Hogg by Samuel R. Delany

A Brutal, Disturbing, Necessary Read

Hogg by Samuel R Delany

Hogg by Samuel R Delany

“You know what I am?”

“I’m shit, cocksucker. Hogg is all shit…”

These words hit like a slap in the face.

No metaphor. No escape.

From the very first pages, Samuel R. Delany throws the reader headfirst into the obscene, the filthy, the inhuman — and yet, something furiously alive.

Hogg isn’t a novel you simply read. It’s a novel you crawl through. On your knees. With dirty hands. With your heart clenched. It’s not read. It’s endured. And in that endurance, you begin to grasp how far literature can still go — if we dare let it.

Hogg by Samuel R.Delany: A quest before the reading even begins...

Before I even cracked the first page, I had to find the book. A damn obstacle course. Barnes & Noble? In stock — but no shipping to the UK.

Amazon? Seven-month delay.

I finally found it through Blackwell’s, tucked away like a forbidden relic in a sealed attic .Even the quest to obtain it said everything: Hogg isn’t a book that wants to circulate easily. It doesn’t care about being liked.

It’s here to disturb.

To provoke.

To exist anyway.

A read that leaves a taste of blood in your mouth.

No traditional plot. No hero. No redemption. Just a language that oozes. A world stripped bare. A raw truth no one wants to look at. But you have to look. Because maybe it’s in that darkness that we begin to understand what literature can still dare to do.

Delany sets the stage in the margins with brutal clarity — a filthy, precise rhythm, like a language-induced trance.It’s not just “shock value.” It’s a spiral.Identity here is expressed through claimed degradation.The narrator is an anonymous cocksucker, ageless, rootless, absorbing and spewing back without emotion.

“I’m shit… and proud to be shit.”

It’s a provocation.

But also a mirror. Disgusting. Twisted. Hypnotic.

And if you’re still reading after that, it means you’re ready to hear what Hogg really has to say. And what it has to say is unforgivable.

The cocksucker: the cold witness

The cocksucker — this nameless, ageless narrator with no past beyond violence — never indulges in pathos. He watches. He calculates. He chooses. And his choice, as chilling as it is, is a strategic survival tactic: Better to be “sheltered” under the wing of a pig like Hogg — someone he can please, be useful to, even grow attached to — than be at the mercy of random violent men, the prison system, or the nameless gutters that would chew him up and spit him out.

He internalizes the surrounding horror.

Not to justify it.

But because it’s the only landscape he knows.

He isn’t broken.

He’s shaped by this world.

And what Delany pushes to the extreme is this grotesque truth:that in a world saturated with violence, power flows through sex, through chosen submission,and through the strategic use of the body.

The cocksucker: strategist, not martyr

The cocksucker is neither a willing victim nor a passive object.He’s ambiguous. Fascinating.He wants the filth. He desires it.

He keeps coming back for more — not just because he has no choice, but because it’s the only world he knows.

He’s everywhere. Watching. Swallowing. Consenting.He sucks, he follows, he narrates.He’s at the center of everything — but never in control.He’s active in his passivity. A vessel for the world.There’s never any distance. He’s involved in every scene — yet it’s as if his body belongs to everyone but him.

This character raises questions.Not only through what he endures, but through what he doesn’t question.

He’s obedient. He even seems to enjoy it. And that’s where the unease becomes unbearable —because Delany offers us no moral compass.The reader is forced to confront a child who never says no, never runs, who even seeks out these monstrous father figures.

It’s not consent.

It’s survival. Mimicry.

A forced adhesion to the environment — just to avoid disappearing.

And it’s in this character, even more than in Hogg himself, that the ultimate tragedy unfolds:a world where refusal no longer exists,where evil is the norm,and where bodies adapt to it like mutant organisms.

He doesn’t suffer like a tragic figure we can easily pity.

He wants this rotten world. He is both witness, accomplice, and orphan of all innocence.

He grew up in this shit —it’s all he’s ever known,and he’s made it his home.

And that, for a reader, is more violent than any classic victim-abuser dynamic:It’s the banality of evil through immersion. Sexuality wrecked from the very start.

The pact of possession

When Hogg tells him, in the truck scene:“You can stop sucking if you want, but I’ll blow your fucking head off.”

It’s not just a threat.It’s a contract.

A pact of ownership:“You’re mine. You belong to this filth. There’s nothing else left for you.”

And the kid stays.Not just out of fear. But because it’s the only bond, the only logic, the only sense of belonging he’s ever known.

And that...That is the real horror.

The horror of a world where even desire becomes a prison.

Hogg, the man without a mask

Hogg is filth. A rapist. A shit-stirrer. A guy who reeks of sweat and stale beer.But Hogg is also the perfect survivor in a world that expects nothing from you — except that you sell yourself or die.

He knows he’s vile. He doesn’t care.He turns his basest urges into income.

He rapes, he spits, he reeks, he invoices.

And the worst part? In his world — it works.

You can hate him — in fact, you should. But you can’t say he’s lying.Hogg is a machine built to survive the worst.A pure product of a violent, rotting ecosystem.He’s not a supernatural monster. He’s what’s left when everything’s been wiped out — ethics, tenderness, law, even dignity.

A rotten bloodline: from degeneration to domination

In Hogg, we learn that the eponymous character comes from a lineage where sex, abuse, and incest were the norm. He’s not some freak that fell from the sky.

He’s a cog. A product. A continuation.

He inherits the worst — as if the world he lives in never had another model.

That hereditary dimension instantly reminded me of Zola and his Rougon-Macquart cycle: each member of that cursed family is tainted by an invisible doom, poisoned by genealogy, damned before they even act.

In Delany’s work, just like in Zola’s, there’s no personal salvation: evil is systemic. It’s transmitted, repeated, hard-coded. Hogg doesn’t become a rapist — he continues a tradition. He fits into an already-built framework,a sordid mechanism no one escapes from.

Social, sexual, and familial determinism is total. And even then, Hogg still manages to be the worst seed from a degenerate tree.

And that’s where Hogg becomes a political statement.Because by showing raw violence, with no filter, no aesthetic sugarcoating,Delany doesn’t just shock.He accuses.

He points to the system.

The one that crushes.

That recycles horror.

That turns oppression into natural reproduction.

This isn’t about some twisted headline or an outlier character. This is about a world normalized through perversion.

And that’s what many can’t stand:the sociological clarity of the book. Its way of saying that what we call “deviance”is actually a perfectly normal product of a world that’s rotten to the core.

It’s unflinching naturalism — carved straight from the flesh.

Ultraviolence with no polish: beyond Kubrick

The rape scenes are unbearable.

They echo A Clockwork Orange, but without Kubrick’s aesthetic distance.There’s no classical music. No precise framing. No visual irony.

Nothing to sublimate. Nothing to soften.

Just filth. Repetition.The sickening rhythm of the acts — like a sticky drumbeat pounding you into numbness.

And that’s deliberate.There’s no artistic escape hatch.

No stagecraft to let the viewer breathe.You don’t watch Hogg — you’re locked in with him.As if the book refuses the role of clean voyeur, and forces you to feel what the narrator feels.

Delany doesn’t film the violence — he dissects it.And he makes you stay. Understand. Gag. Accept that this isn’t spectacular fiction — it’s a warped mirror of what our real world produces.

This rejection of the sublime, this obsession with the visceral —that’s where Delany’s radical edge cuts deepest. He strips away aesthetics.

And leaves you with the structure of the world.

An autopsy of the soul

This novel doesn’t flatter anything .It doesn’t stroke the reader with narrative comforts. It splits you open.

It shows you what you didn’t want to see —and worse: it makes you understand why the narrator stays.

And that, you don’t forget.

Hogg won me over not in spite of its ugliness — but because of its clarity.And this read, in 2025, hasn’t aged one bit. On the contrary. It feels more relevant than ever in a world where systemic sexual violence, toxic family legacies, and the commodification of bodies still shape the lives of the most vulnerable.

Hogg isn’t a relic.

It’s a contemporary warning.

A mirror for our time

Many say Hogg is unreadable.

That it’s pornographic. Monstrous. Abject.

But those people miss the point.

Hogg isn’t an apology for rape — it’s a radical critique of the world that allows it, encourages it, systematizes it.

It’s not a novel about a raped child. It’s the story of a kid learning how not to be a victim.

In a world saturated with violence, the narrator chooses Hoggbecause it’s the only place he can survive with a shred of control.

It’s not love.

It’s not even consent

.It’s strategy.

A Sadean reading.

Clear-eyed. Ironic. Merciless.

A warning novel

Because it throws something back at the reader —something they don’t want to see: Sometimes, in a world rotten to the core,consent isn’t a light.

It’s a survival strategy.

The cocksucker is the eye of vice, that’s all.

An indefinable young human, drifting through grey zones.

This isn’t a novel about perversion —it’s a novel about imposture.

And what about me?

I’ve had a stroke.

I have a rare illness.

I’ve known poverty, misery, abuse.

I live in a system that crushes me.

That suffocates me.

That forbids me.

I’m not looking for beauty. I’m looking for truth.

And sometimes, the truth is atrocious.

I don’t read Hogg to hurt myself —I read it because I see clearly.

Because even in the filth,I want to understand what a human being is capable of becoming.

A fearless literature

Hogg puts the reader in the role of a silent witness.

No moral.

No psychology.

No comforting trauma arc.

What disturbs isn’t so much the violence —it’s the lack of distance.

This book doesn’t say, “Look how awful this is.”It says, “This is what it is.”

And then…it leaves you alone with what you feel.

Why I’m opening my blog with Hogg

Because this text doesn’t flatter.

It splits you open.

It looks at the world without filters.

Because it sticks.

Because it burns.

Because I too am borderless, excessive, hungry for meaning.

And if I’m going to introduce myself, might as well do it at the edge of the abyss.

With a book you don’t forget.

With a book you don’t offer to just anyone —but which, for the right readers, becomes a key.

A novel for mature readers, yes —but above all, for aware readers.