Justice & Law Quote by Peter Sotos

Sotos is describing an origin story, but it reads like a mission statement for transgression with a paper trail. The “better than average chance of being read” isn’t a throwaway metric; it’s the point. He’s not just writing about Ian Brady, the Moors murderer, or introducing Brady’s own text. He’s engineering proximity to the blast radius: victims’ families, police, even Brady himself. The audience is chosen for maximum moral voltage.

That’s the subtextual pivot. Most true-crime writing seeks legitimacy by citing research and distance. Sotos is advertising the opposite: contact, contamination, the thrill of crossing the line where “content” becomes an act that lands on real desks and real kitchen tables. The phrase “people involved in Brady’s life” quietly flattens a brutal hierarchy of suffering. Parents of victims and Brady are placed in the same grammatical bucket, as if the story’s social ecosystem matters more than its ethical asymmetry. That flattening is doing work: it signals a writer who treats outrage and grief as part of the medium.

Context matters because Gates of Janus is already infamous: Brady’s attempt at self-mythologizing through the language of criminology and remorse. Sotos positions his introduction as a kind of delivery system, a way to piggyback on Brady’s notoriety while maintaining the plausible posture of a “writer” doing paratext. The intent is not confession but calibration: to write something that might be read by the people who least want to read it, and to let that risk function as artistic proof. The effect is chilling precisely because it’s so procedural, like harm reduced to circulation statistics.