Peter Sotos: Writing as Pornographic Act

Peter Sotos, an American writer celebrated by authors like Bruce Benderson and Dennis Cooper, faces repeated legal actions. His latest book, 'Predicate,' about the 1996 Dunblane massacre, had its distribution stopped after complaints from victims' families. Sotos's work, including 'Index' (1999) and 'Au fait' (2005), recycles documents such as pornographic video covers, psychiatric reports, police questionnaires, and news articles about child murders. These earlier books used a sophisticated cut-up and intertextual structure that allowed readers to take refuge in literary virtuosity. However, 'Égoïste, infime' (2006) abandons that formal complexity for a direct autobiographical approach, exposing the reader's own pornographic relationship to the text. Sotos's writing is an act of extreme violence that degrades the author himself. The recurring figure in his work is Lesley Ann Downey, a ten-year-old victim of the Moors murders in 1960s England. Sotos states, 'All the books I have written begin and end with Lesley Ann Downey. Without exception.' His mission is to relentlessly track signs of pornography in all forms, from explicit to unintentional.