Steven Zultanski's Methodical & Tender Bribery

Just before the New Year, Ugly Duckling Presse published Steven Zultanski's newest book, Bribery, an unabating narration of criminal acting and readyfound atrocity that "should be put on trial for the violation of United States obscenity laws," as Ed Steck has put in his closing argument at Fanzine. Steck grasps the work's tenderness, too: "As much that Steven Zultanski’s Bribery is a video nasty, it is also a note on the anxiety-riddled tenderness between individuals (and strangers) in a country (world, space, atmosphere) overwrought with information sickness."

He "looks at" (or entertainingly reconfigures) the entire oeuvre as it's currently set:

...I’ve read Pad, Cop Kisser, and Agony by Steven Zultanski, and if I was going to decapitate, surgically meld, reimagine coagulation, and night stalk each book for the purpose of creating a full-bodied Zultanski monstrosity (much like the book’s President Frankenstein [see: Death Race 2000]), Bribery would be the failure to re-embody the ominous central nervous system that has resisted reunification. . . .

Bribery has also just been reviewed by Peter Vanderberg for The Volta.

Over the course of the book, a strange character is revealed and develops in an anticlimactic way as a narrator on a mission to become the worst person he can possibly be. Indeed, heinous crimes are confessed, but as the book progresses, the insight and razor sharp perception of human behavior exhibited by the narrator reveals a multidimensional persona that challenges the reader to consider the observations of this alleged psychotic mind. Throughout the book, there are moments when the insane narrator seems to grasp a kind of truth. The power of the book is in its deceptive wisdom — if King Lear’s fool wrote a book, it might be something like Bribery.

The crimes our narrator confesses to include petty theft, home invasion, murder, sexual assault, stalking and harassment, but in each confession, the mind of the narrator is revealed in dark and interesting ways.

[ . . . ]

The narrator engages in these acts of criminal violence, but his deliberation about the methods of his crimes, his focus on how the crime will effect his victim’s psyche, his intense drive to create the perfect series of acts that will make him the worst person he can possibly be, beyond grand visions of glory or notoriety, renders a narrator that achieves a kind of anti-nobility. Even as I write this I cringe to say it, but there is something admirable in the narrator’s dedication to his strange mission.

Do be warned however, the crimes confessed to in Bribery are not cute. Tricking someone into surrendering their cell phone is one thing, but at one point the narrator confesses to having not only killed, but also dismembering and beheading one of his victims. But the real anti-beauty to this crime is not in the act itself, it’s in how the narrator sees the act, and what he does with “the item” (the victim’s severed head).

You can check out photos from the December 9 book launch at UDP's Tumblr (all photography by Garrett Kalleberg, including the image at top). Buy, read, and weep over Bribery here.