By Peter Sotos

Void Books

256 pages, $45

The kidnapping and subsequent murder of eight-year-old Sarah Payne by convicted pedophile Roy Whiting in July 2000 was one of the most high profile child murder cases in Great Britain's recent history. The official aftermath of the crime extended over the course of several months, then years, as Payne's parents—particularly mother Sara—became immortalized in the press as celebrity victims. Sleazy U.K. tabloid News of the World seized the moment, embarking on an opportunistic campaign to seemingly rid the U.K. of the threat of pedophilia through pushing the passing of Sarah's Law, which would alert the public of pedophiles living in their neighborhoods. This witch-hunt resulted in a full-blown riot on the Portsmouth Housing Estate—cars were overturned, police officers were attacked, and alleged pedophiles were severely beaten by an army of concerned parents and toddlers.

The latest book by Peter Sotos, the world's foremost literary brutalist, is in many ways a diagnostic fucking through “the art of Sarah Payne”—this propagandistic prostitution of the victims' pain by the media, who unwittingly produce another kind of porn for the alert pedophile. Another kind of violation arises from the ashes of this murdered corpse, a violation that is public—available to everyone. As Sotos writes about Mother Payne, “Mothers like you start sucking cock, in the pejorative sense, soon after you let the press comfort and then define you.”

The “narrative,” if you can call it that, consists of newspaper clippings interspersed with the narrator's accounts of and reactions to the events comprising the Sarah Payne case. As with Sotos' other books, this one drifts in and out of the narrator's non-fantastical forays into cheap sex clubs, filthy glory hole joints, where men wait in desperation to suck on anything that's put in front of them—the same perverts, infers Sotos, that masturbate over newspaper clippings of little Sarah Payne. Comfort and Critique also explores the world of online kiddie porn, Jamie Gillis's crackwhore videos, and includes a brilliant reading of Sex: the Annabel Chong Story.

Sotos tells us again and again that there's no point to any of this. His biggest attachment is to his archives—these collections of articles, photo clippings (a generous portion are included in the back of the book), mediated filth—and his biggest conflict is whether or not to make a magazine as a sort of shrine to this information, to share it with others. His inner landscape is one of depravity and rot laced with the sort of laziness that encapsulates any perversion, and yet with Sotos there's a buried desperation to communicate his obsessions, to scream out at the victims who allow themselves to be raped and deconstructed in the public eye: “Is it possible that the mother of the loudest campaign to rid the world of pedophiles ever has come through these hard slow days without a clue as to just how selfish pedophiles are as a small breed.”

Then again: “What do I care about your little fucking murdered child when there are human toilet bowels who say they care just as much as you.”

Finally, Sotos acknowledges the distance that separates the author from the material, rejecting the superficial “closure” necessitated by any supposition of inherent worth—whether the object in question be a small book, a small girl, or lurid headlines addressed to the desperate, pathetic masses, stretching from here to infinity: “It's true of any art project. The real worth of the piece is only going to come later when it's fit into a real world. When the way one acted can no longer be excused by sentimentality or learning difficulties. After the experiments are done.”