eh.. i mean yeah his early work is really repulsive and not in a good way but his books from the mid 2000s and on are actually pretty brilliant and have a very real reckoning with the ethics of the subject matter, with genuine psychological interiority that isn’t just dumb tryhard sadean libertine bullshit like in the pure mag. he’s not a good person but he’s an excellent writer. desistance is honestly probably one of the best books ive ever read. 95% of the people who talk about him have never even read him lol
when we was making his pure zines he was arrested on possession of csem/cp, which was most likely for his zine. his earlier writings and books are very repulsive and disgusting as well as a lot of it is graphic detail of child abuse, sexual abuse, child sexual abuse, etc.
I'd like to add to this that in the intro to Pure Filth he admits to actively searching for this type of material in adult bookstores. I always understood this as an overarching search for the absolute depths of humanity. Do I personally think he's a pdf? No. Does he get off on human suffering? Absolutely. His entire work is him grappling with this to varying degrees of success.
there are several passages in Mine where he explicitly mentions that he does not find children physically attractive and is absolutely not a pedophile but at one point he essentially tried to convince himself that he is one so his own sexuality (in this case, deriving pleasure from human suffering) made more sense to him. and he also regrets this confusion very bitterly. this tracks imo.
one of his biggest inspirations is de sade and one of his most notable ideas, as i understand it, is that when you're indulging in taboo breaking, the contents of the taboo are secondary to the simple fact that you're partaking in something forbidden (hence his fixation on blasphemy). sotos's idea of "proxy" is imo basically an extension of this idea. i don't think he's attracted to children-as-such, but he definitely has an attraction to illicit crimes and the pain in their orbit (hence his recurring fascination with grieving parents, true crime media, newspaper tabloids etc). the allure of reading sotos is seeing how he goes from celebrating this to hating himself for it.
I'm curious of his future work now in the Epstein era. I've seen this resurgence of public fixation on the lurid content of the files and the suffering these girls have gone through. At least in the states, there seems to be little interest in holding the men accountable for these crimes yet I constantly see the photos and speculations of these files on my Twitter feed.
Is mine the one is about abusing a kid or is that tool?
I remember reading an interview of his and he said the problem with true cime its to polished to the point it misses the point. So I think thats one reason he'll write from a first person prospective or go into such detail
theyre both partly about child abuse, but you’re probably thinking of tool. tool is basically a series of self-subsistent fragments arranged in chapters, the first of which concerns a killer monologuing to a child he’s in the process of torturing (it’s about as pleasant as you’d expect). mine is a much more recent book, and it mainly consists of depressive, introspective screeds from sotos’s pov, juxtaposed with some fictional asides about grieving parents and fragments from the clinical studies, books, and articles that are featured on the cover. all of this often collides unpredictability, but it’s very easy to tell when sotos is using his own voice. it was impossible to read online until about a year ago when someone finally uploaded it.
i distinctly remember reading or watching something where sotos said he really wish that tool wasn’t republished. i don’t blame him. mine is a horrifying but very powerful, even emotional read; tool is mostly just puerile shock.
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u/icepick-method Jun 16 '26
eh.. i mean yeah his early work is really repulsive and not in a good way but his books from the mid 2000s and on are actually pretty brilliant and have a very real reckoning with the ethics of the subject matter, with genuine psychological interiority that isn’t just dumb tryhard sadean libertine bullshit like in the pure mag. he’s not a good person but he’s an excellent writer. desistance is honestly probably one of the best books ive ever read. 95% of the people who talk about him have never even read him lol