Harolds End

By JT LeRoy

Last Gasp (2005), $19.95

Unlike JT LeRoy's last two autobiographical novels, which come off like gaping wounds that just won't clot, Harold's End is a brief but beautiful bruise of a book that unveils the faintest flicker of hope. In it the San Francisco author presents a gaggle of scrappy young Polk Street hustlers and their loyal animal companions. Oliver, the numb, saucer-eyed hero, meets up with a lecherous old man who offers him -- in addition to a warm Castro house in which to crash, plus bags of high-grade heroin in lieu of the cheap tar Oliver habitually abuses -- a pet of his very own: a snail. In this updating of a boy-and-his-dog tale, LeRoy manages to make you feel tremendous warmth, and eventually despair, for the slimy creature, a common garden pest, which spends most of the book munching mesclun salad mix and orbiting its home, a Starbucks coffee cup. And although LeRoy's writing has been criticized by some for being a tad too stylized, his elegant prose effectively suits Harold's End, especially when he's describing a sex act involving enema waste or a night spent inside a Godforsaken single-room-occupancy hotel. Australian artist Cherry Hood provides complementary watercolor renderings of the story's street punks, who look like big-eyed Keane kids coming down from a monthlong binge on crystal meth.