Tool. (Peter Sotos) - SIGNED

Opening with an excruciating set piece inspired by the crimes of Ian Brady, Tool unfolds through a sequence of vivid metafictional narratives that rain hard light on the blackest recesses of a Sadean abyss, limning a ferocious tableau vivant thronged with victims and whores and jaded cops, with grief-stricken mothers, writhing AIDS casualties, and abased gloryhole habitués. In one deeply resonant chapter, Sotos renders a coruscating account of his fateful arrest and interrogation.

Written in lean, exacting prose, Tool stands as a deftly structured, pornographically sifted psycho-literary inquest, a pneumatic masterpiece marked by preternatural acumen, stark verisimilitude, and implacable emotive gravity. Originally published by Jim Goad in the 1996 omnibus, Total Abuse, the text has since appeared in the Creation Books collection, Proxy. This is the first stand-alone edition. It is presented with a publisher s introduction and a new afterword by Peter Sotos.

"We do not find in Sotos the customary delusions about childhood misery and wounded lives. For this latter-day homo sacer, wounds are not to be healed but poked and worried until they bleed. Sotos is literature's outcast, carrying stigma like a rat carries plague." -Mikita Brottman, author of Thirteen Girls

"I don't think Peter Sotos' work needs to be upgraded or explicated by anyone, me included, and I think its inability to present the details and factors and signals that would facilitate an argument for its value as literature is one of the reasons it's among the most important writing being done today. It is scary, intense, ugly, honest, original, problematic, profoundly challenging stuff. It's also highly intelligent, refined, and kind of a masterful example of writing at its most rendered and self-investigating, all the more so because its art refuses to give an inch to readers who need something conventionally beautiful, however offbeat and subtle that beauty, to justify a book's assault." -Dennis Cooper