An excerpt from Chapter 1 of “Zac’s Haunted House .”

Dennis Cooper lives in Paris, so, in order to discuss his latest work, which consists of sequences of GIFs—those moving-image files that were first created in 1987 and have evolved into a kind of online lexicon of reaction shots—we scheduled a Google Hangout, a form of instant messaging that allows, should one require it, the exchange of GIFs. I had drafted my questions beforehand, and Cooper responded with long, carefully phrased blocks of text. I frequently paused before a blinking ellipsis icon, which indicates that your correspondent is mid-response, perhaps thinking over his reply.

Cooper told me that he sees his GIF projects as continuous with his prose fiction, composed according to “the same principles and planning and structuring” as his work in print. Now sixty-two, he is best known for fiction that features clinical explorations of sex and violence. His Prix Sade-winning “The Sluts,” for example, details a fabricated murder scenario on a hustler message board. His most famous work may be a sequence of novels called the George Miles Cycle, published between 1989 and 2000, which follow damaged characters who seek the cipher-like figure of Miles, an actual person from Cooper’s life, who appears both as a character called “George Miles” and as a kind of abstraction—a symbol for the youthful purity that is inevitably ravaged by the needs of those who desire it.

To a younger group of writers who have come of age on the Internet, Cooper is known largely for his openness to contemporary novelty and an ethos of anything goes. A self-professed anarchist, he thinks of every writer as a “potential peer.” His blog, DC’s, is home to image-heavy posts on topics like esoteric spy technology and abandoned night clubs, and it provides an online meeting place for these young fans. It was here where I first “met” Dennis, as many do.

The blog also featured Cooper’s first “stacks,” or vertical columns, of GIFs, and early versions of chapters for his GIF “novel,” “Zac’s Haunted House.” The regulars at DC’s quickly took to the project, despite, or perhaps because of, its strangeness. Some critics have written appreciatively about it, too, though labelling the work has proven a challenge. In Bookforum, Paige K. Bradley wrote, “You could call Zac’s Haunted House many things: net art, a glorified Tumblr, a visual novel, a mood board, or a dark night of the Internet’s soul.”

In our Google Hangout, Cooper explained that, in his view, the GIF works complete an inversion begun by “The Marbled Swarm,” his previous book. The labyrinthine quality of that mystery emphasizes structure over narrative, and makes “characters” no more important than other things that recur: tropes, references, motifs. Cooper told the Paris Review that he wanted the reader’s experience of that novel to be “three-dimensional,” as if the reader were “chasing different story lines and recurring ideas as they waver and scamper about and hide inside the prose.”

In “Zac’s Haunted House,” recognizable characters, so far as they exist at all, serve an ancillary function to patterns and themes; they mostly help to illustrate the claustrophobic logic of the house. Frightened, similar-looking adolescents are tossed forcefully down stairs or dragged into the shadows. The novel contains five chapters, as well as a preface and afterword; you can read it carefully in about thirty minutes. Cooper’s second GIF work, the forthcoming “Zac’s Control Panel,” is a collection of eight short-form pieces, previously debuted on DC’s. He thinks of some of these as taking on traditional literary forms, such as “poem” and “short story,” while others have what Cooper calls “nondenominational” forms, such as “documentary” and “reenactment.”

The GIFs themselves, he says, offer “a sequence of jewels before me that need to be cut and polished, each in necessarily unique ways.” Flow is important to him: margins of white space mark off sections and groupings of GIFs that are meant to scan as cohesive paragraphs or stanzas. He chooses particular GIFs in large part for their structural similarity, weighing “technical stuff,” such as, “is the circle turning in one GIF a good match to the ‘circular’ motif in the GIF beside it?” The HTML page displaying the GIFs is just “the paper I’m making them on,” he says.

I asked Cooper if he intended a resemblance to Duchamp’s optical illusions, and if he, like Duchamp, was attempting to move from the “retinal” to the “conceptual.” But Cooper avoided the brainy angle; the work, he told me, is more “emotion- and sensation-based.” Like the passive, youthful bodies that fascinate characters in his earlier novels, the GIFs are meant to be regarded with a sensual, gut-level appreciation.

The basic question with these pieces is, of course, how do you read them? In previous interviews, Cooper has equated that process with being in “a broken, dropping elevator,” the rhythms of the GIFs mimicking language and turning “the eye into an ear.” One sequence in “Mum,” a GIF “poem,” shows a slowly undulating stereo speaker matched just below with a cartoon explosion radiating infinitely outward, the images moving in odd synchronicity. One can see, in the result, traditional literary qualities, like parallelism and repetition.

Cooper uses these repetitions to modulate the speed of the action in the pieces. A “very simple” short story called “The Absolute Motherfucking Truth” is elongated through repeated images, so that it becomes “stretched out like a slinky.” The images that repeat show grasping hands and raised weapons; these pictures, interwoven with others that suggest erotic longing (a butt being firmly squeezed, a man’s rapt face with tongue lolling), imply unconsummated desire. One sequence shows a still hand with ghostly traces dancing above it, then a married couple reaching to hold hands, then a hand being forcefully held down by a gloved assailant who drives a power drill through it. Cooper says the short pieces have a “go for broke” quality, unfolding frenetically like strings of firecrackers.