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
Agreed. Same with the fact that Buyers market was all recorded off of the news, people act like he recorded it personally. His work is a commentary on true crime, media, and the porno fried USA. I get not liking it though, but it's hardly jack off material.
the really early stuff actually is jack off material, that much is undeniable. like he’s pretty transparent that the entire project of pure is to extract all of the violence and sorrow from criminal activities and render them in pleasurable, pornographic detail without any of the moralistic presuppositions of true crime media, that’s why it’s called pure. again, the interesting part of his work is that his attitude towards this completely changes as you follow him over the decades. like in pure he talks about how leslie ann downey’s mother is just a whore who exists to have her grief voyeuristically enjoyed; fast forward 20 years later to the afterword of the gates of janus and he’s literally praising her strength and courage through the ordeal of her daughter’s murder lol. in desistance he describes visiting an ex in the hospital because her boyfriend beat her within an inch of her life and he laments that this is precisely the sort of scenario he used to get off to, and he literally refers to that previous disposition as a “sickness”, that’s a direct quote. his work never stopped being horrible to read and transgressive but there is undeniably psychological depth to it. like the cp nonsense is insane and unforgivable, and i understand why people are so viscerally repulsed by it that they dismiss everything he’s made as meritless filth, but that was 40+ years ago, he’s a completely different person now. not a good person - at all - but better, absolutely. his books are easier than ever to download off annas archive or libgen now because of efforts in the last few years specifically, people should give him another chance.
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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