Sky Saw

by Blake Butler

I could go on at what these days were but the truth is I am tired. Would you even believe me if I did or didn't? Could this paper touch your face? I've spent enough years with my face arranged in books. I've read enough to crush my sternum. In each of the books are people talking, saying the same thing, their tongues thin and white and speckled.

I don't want to be here. I want to get older. I want to see my skin go folding over.

Someday I plan to die.

Books that reappear when you destroy them, lampshades made of skin, people named with numbers and who can't recall each other, a Universal Ceiling constructed by an otherwise faceless authority, a stairwell stuffed with birds: the terrain and populace of Sky Saw is packed with stroboscopic memory mirage. In dynamic sentences and image, Blake Butler crafts a post-Lynchian nightmare where space and family have deformed, leaving the human persons left in the strange wake to struggle after the shapes of both what they loved and who they were.

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Short Stories, Science Fiction, Surreal, Novels

248 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Blake Butler is the author of EVER, Scorch Atlas, and two books forthcoming in 2011 and 2012 from Harper Perennial. He edits 'the internet literature magazine blog of the future' HTML Giant. His other writing have appeared in The Believer, Unsaid, Fence, Dzanc's Best of the Web 2009. He lives in Atlanta.

Reviews

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Having read Butler’s debut novel, Scorch Atlas, I had experienced his style before so was somewhat prepared for the dizzying effects of this one. As with Scorch Atlas, this nearly overwhelmed me with its barrage of images relayed through contorted language; however, there is a consistent set of characters here that people a narrative of sorts, whereas in the earlier book the sections presented as barely linked stories. This does help contextualize the chaos to a degree, though an admittedly very slight one. What I’ve noticed in Butler’s writing is that it is very spatially focused. The characters are always exploring spaces, which tend to change shape often, as do the characters themselves. There is a lot of ballooning up and sometimes exploding, accompanied by the expulsion of solid or fluid matter. In this case, the trio of main characters—mother, father, son—each travel their own path through a world in its 'decomposing years' and experience fractures in their relationships with each other. They all undergo radical transformations and fail to recognize each other following these. There is a recurring overarching concept called the Cone and a persistent noise referred to as 'the tone', but these are not explicitly described. There are also sections with a first-person narrator, who may be the son, at least part of the time. The story—such as it is—grows increasingly more difficult to parse, perhaps as a simulacrum of the crumbling world it is attempting to describe. Multiple rereadings would be required to tease out any more connective tissue, as the initial read precluded most comprehension beyond visualization of the deluge of imagery as it shunted to my febrile brain. As I read, I hovered between horrified awe and boredom, especially as I passed the halfway mark. I found it difficult to read for long periods and I can’t say it was ever enjoyable, per se. But I have a lot of respect for what Butler is doing; it takes a very special person to write like this. And actually, if anyone would like to gain some insight into Butler’s process, he is teaching an online writing course that sounds fascinating called Logic and the Unconscious beginning on July 18, 2023. At the very least, reading the course description gave me an even deeper appreciation for Butler’s writing and what I am assuming to be his own techniques.

[Nate D · Rating 3 out of 5]

Open to a random page and you may read:

Through the wall he saw a child--someone standing just outside the plastic skewed with eyes as large as fifty fathers--eyes that grew into other space--rooms where he could see people he knew and had known, growing, eating, making fuck. He felt his body try to shout out through the pane to make it open, to thread himself into this once familiar air, but then the holes making the child's eyes had blinked and fleshed an moved away. In the place his voice had been inside him, then the water moved to fill his skin.

Which to say that it's all beautiful and ugly and weird and jarring. And as with a lot of Blake Butler that I've loved in the past beyond the derangement of language are underpinnings of recognizable loss and sorrow: this is essentially the story of a broken home, with that usual metaphorical sense of "broken home" being overwhelmed by the literal and phantasmagorically bizarre. It's the story of a mother-father-child trinity lacking an essential part, the weight of that absence, and of a seeking. This could be a little like There Is No Year, another story of rotted and collapsing family home, except whereas that and Scorch Atlas are set in a world (apparently) teetering on the brink of total disaster, the initial setting of Sky Saw appears to be post-obliteration, in an ill-resolved totalitarian horror-world. Hints of this thread are eventually submerged in the increasingly abstract personal, but they're there. You can't entirely put this down to an especially freakish expression of the familiar, as there is clearly something deeply unfamiliar about this world. So unfamiliar that, flirting as always with the line of overwhelm, this occasionally beats down the senses into a raw image bleed without beginning or end.

[Brooks Sterritt · Rating 5 out of 5]

I started reading Blake's latest the way I started with only two other books: The Double by Saramago and Libra by DeLillo. Not because of similar styles or content (though someone might be able to find affinities if they looked), but because it felt necessary and rewarding to pay very close attention. I started reading these books factorially, as in: I read section 1, reread section 1 and added section 2, read 1-3, read 1-4, read 1-5, etc. In using this method there comes a point though, as you might guess, where the stimulation is almost TOO MUCH, and you basically have no choice but to BLAST through the rest of it.

Sky Saw seems to interact with There Is No Year in interesting ways, yet is clearly its own object. The lists are amazing. It seems more overtly self-referential in places, with lines like "I would feel okay if you did not turn the page" and "Right now I can remember I am the father in this book." The numbering of characters worked for me; placing the numbers of Persons 1180 and 811 together yields 1180811, to make one small observation. There are any number of choice phrasings I could quote, like "a billion bodies lost and rotting," "further reams of film frames spooled in congregation," "black cracking igloos of birth pellets," and a man getting "upholstered with new skin and hair."

Along with the self-referential aspect (occasional, not overwhelming) Sky Saw seems to move in very specific ways and contain weavings of multiple voices. There is also, though using this word feels somehow wrong, certain brief dippings into a "fanciful" mode, e.g. "a swan, a goose, a chicken--all of them pecking at my head from the inside."

Sky Saw contains 2D lard, hidden tracks, representation vs. the real, an acid called ideas, multiplicities, a certain kind of breakfast cereal, mobile houses, stagnant bodies, and the feeling of teetering on the edge of finding something--what else is there?

[Michael Seidlinger · Rating 4 out of 5]

Perforate through the light and look into the disgust contained between the covers:

We see a child’s veins bloat and stiffen; a war on war itself, anything to be battled made to be already fought; a city where ex-felons are punished by being forced to share their own blood; a woman giving birth dozens and dozens of times, the result of each child being less important than the birth itself; a man that has visited every single house and stolen one important thing; a Cone that isn’t a cone at all but rather something sinister, something sincere, the passage of time, aging; replications of the same likeness, plenty of numbers; a woman picking through a wound only to open a new realm; children inside of children; men inside of men; woman again and again fraught with affliction.

[J.A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I panicked at the opening pages of Sky Saw (Tyrant Books / Dec. 2012), which are filled with this dense, complicated language, fearing Blake Butler would hold me hostage for the novel’s duration in a swamp of unclarified narrative, a poetic mire that, while beautiful in its bruising, wouldn’t lead me forward through a story. But then Sky Saw opened like the mold-blooms of his previous works, and there was a narrative to wrap my eyes around, and the book held me captive in a completely different way."

Read the full review at The Nervous Breakdown: http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/ty...

[Edward Rathke · Rating 1 out of 5]

Thought about giving this two stars because the writing's pretty interesting and the intense body sensations of his prose are top notch, but, I mean, how much does that matter when it's so hollow?

Comparisons to Burroughs are sort of strange and bewildering. Burroughs was a cultural, social, and political critic who was hilarious while being shocking and innovative and playfully inventive. This is none of those things. It's prose, disjointed and cacophonous and sometimes interesting, but with nothing underneath it. It's simply prose. It's writing. This is sort of like the body horror of Cronenberg mixed with the repulsive strangeness of early Lynch but with nothing else there. Only the horror, the otherness

The only other book by Butler I've read was Scorch Atlas, which I enjoyed a great deal. It was intensely peculiar and the prose was similar to Sky Saw, but more directed towards a goal, less disjointed. Scorch Atlas was a vivid and grotesque read that made me want more and more, while Sky Saw quickly became boring and tedious with its repetitions of the weird and disgusting.

I can't recommend this. It's just empty. I can't think of anything worse than this emptiness, to be honest. At least a lot of bad books have emotion or some kind of core, but this is just sort of nothing. It's words.

Without a doubt, the most disappointing and worst thing I've read all year.

[Melissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

SKY SAW magnificently contends with the mystery of being alive and how we are expected to stay alive in the weirdness and do or build something with it, despite not knowing what or why. It's a book of survival, but more than that it's a book of our simultaneous sameness and strangeness--how even though we are all the same atoms, bound by blood or meat or rings, we can never fully get inside each other. Not totally. This book feels very fucking true.

[Robert Kloss · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whenever you get down about things like TV celebrities getting $4,000,000 advances or fan fiction authors outselling... everything with their soft-core pornography, remember that Blake Butler exists, and that he wrote this book.

[Ashley Crawford · Rating 5 out of 5]

Readers who know anything of Blake Butler will already know that he literally doesn’t sleep. Instead he writes and he writes with an insomniac fury. He launched onto the scene in 2009 with the all-too-brief darkly dystopic Scorch Atlas. That same year he produced, Ever, a slightly less successful novella. In 2011 he hit us with the utterly brilliant There Is No Year: A Novel (www.21cmagazine.com/Blake-Butler-No-Y...) and the bizarre self-portrait Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia. 2012 saw the release of the strange little tome executed with Sean Kilpatrick, Anatomy Courses and what is arguably, along with There Is No Year, his tour de force thus far: Sky Saw. Alongside this outpouring he has also maintained one of the most interesting alt literary sites on-line: HTML Giant. As mentioned, the man doesn’t sleep.

Atlas, No Year and Sky Saw read almost as a linked trilogy depicting a world of madness that rivals anything that William S. Burroughs ever penned. No Year garnered comparisons with Ben Marcus brilliant The Father Costume (the books appeared within a year of each other) with Marcus proclaiming: “Blake Butler, mastermind and visionary, has sneaked up and drugged the American novel. What stumbles awake in the aftermath is feral and awesome in its power, a fairy tale of an ordinary family subjected to the strange, lonesome agony known as daily life. There Is No Year is a merciless novel cleansed of joy, pumped full of fear and awe.”

Indeed, if that’s your kind of thing, Sky Saw takes it a few damn steps further. Just prior to Sky Saw, I finished reading Extreme Metaphors, the collected interviews with J.G. Ballard. It seems all too easy to forget what a searing impact JGB made with both Atrocity Exhibition and Crash. Throughout, Ballard makes reference to his admiration for the ground-breaking approach also taken by William S. Burroughs, who also, of course, shattered a few boundaries. But then literature in general seemed to slink back into a safe hole a la the likes of Tom Wolfe and Jonathan Franzen. But during the last decade there seems to be a resurgence of experimentation with such writers as Grace Krilanovich, Steve Erickson, Matthew Derby, Brian Evenson, Brian Conn, Matt Derby, Ryan Boudinot, Joshua Cohen and Mark Z. Danielewski, amongst others pushing the envelope.

Like Butler’s previous book, There Is No Year, Sky Saw is essentially narrative in structure but veers strongly into new waters via both pure language mutation and a powerful sense of visceral Surrealism. I’ll digress for the moment and recall the works of a number of precedents; Lautreamont’s Maldoror, Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, Lawrence Durrell’s The Black Book, Bataille, Cocteau, Giorgio de Chirico's Hebdomeros, Henry Miller, M. Ageyev’s Novel With Cocaine, Sacher-Masoch, Strindberg’s, Inferno / From an Occult Diary to attempt to give this book a safe(ish) nest or context.

There was one point in Sky Saw where I couldn’t help think of a zombie orgy: “…he saw among the heavy glow how all the space was stuffed with sleeping people, their mottled bodies packed in naked, flesh to flesh conformed and still conforming. Many of them had no faces. Many others had no heads. Even those that did seemed to blur where they were built, their features changing in floods of color and old mud.” And elsewhere: “bodies full of sick sound noise and vomit, aching blistered, bumpy, long. The sludge was full of men and they were full of sludge.”

And then there are the parasitical horrors: “The men burst men each from their seams, leaking others of them from the holes they carried.”

The numerization of individuals – especially the central characters; the father Person 811 and the mother 1180 – whilst perhaps not the most original concept, remains chilling. One recalls Kafka and Orwell, especially in the sense of there being a totalitarian bureaucracy behind the scenes: “in his memory the state said to have erected around each and every neat locale, and were claimed to have caught the brunt of the crap and cancers and what all else some god had dreamed to wear their lives—the state’s voice the only clear one through and through him, ordering his veins,”

In all, a terrifying book. A nightmare that rings of horrific truth.

[Mel Bosworth · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s a skin sausage stuffed with language in your father’s bloody bathtub by ten headless men. It’s frothy color spun at your eyes. It’s a wild ride for sure, and as soon as you attempt to assign clot to anything you fall off the painted pony. So don’t do that. Just spurt, yo. Spurt and air and cream. Maybe smear. It’ll come to you. It’s all there, and it eases you off the milk slide and into your meat chair. It’s true. It just happened to me.

[Sheldon Compton · Rating 4 out of 5]

- Review first appeared at Heavy Feather Review


In Blake Butler’s lyrically imagined new novel, Sky Saw, due out in December from Tyrant Books, you’ll find the his name spelled Blk Btlr on the cover and on each page.

Yes. It’s like that.

I toyed with the idea of writing this review without vowels. But I was concerned some might have a problem fully understanding whatever I may have to say of interest on the subject.

Nd ‘d sr ht t d tht.

See?

Much like those first exposed to the Beats, there will be folks, including writers, who will not find the ability to see themselves either within the worlds created in such works or envision themselves writing something similar. At such a time, the writer, in my case, must simply view the work for what it was intended to be and not in light of how I, or anyone else, may have approached it.

The author of four prior books—Ever, Scorch Atlas, There Is No Year and Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia—Butler has said in at least one interview this newest book was written in approximately one month.

That said, a few points are worth mentioning early on. Lyrically, it is stunning. For its type, experimental, it is ambitious (though Butler maintains the story is traditional). Any work of more than 200 pages written in such a short timeframe is impressive. However, there were times when though lyrical, ambitious or impressive, the work began to take on the feel of that strange phrase some critic in a moment of struggling must have conjured up—purples prose.

In a fictive world where at any moment rooms can become liquid, humans have lost names or memories of names and are now numbers handed out by a faceless “state” and men live within men for thirty-seven years, Butler invents new ways to present images in nearly every sentence. Where a great deal of everything is dependent upon the never truly revealed “Cone” and a woman is made of glass here and then reduced to puddles beneath her tombstone there and words are writ in the sky and doppelgangers abound, the young and wildly popular Butler seems to look at freshness in language and smile the smile of one with a secret, then proceeds to show readers how fresh and different and beautifully strange three or twelve words in combination can become, such as the following passage:

And still I could not stand beside you in the color of the cone, for each inch of me that wanted and would be cleaning there was ten feet of me that stunk, each rung of each of these connected more rungs in a cribbage system I could by no length of me infer, I did not have the body, no mind, nothing left on which to brand, suddenly I was wearing all these bracelets and these groancrowns and I was looking down upon the earth, the legions of pixel bodies screaming underneath me and raising with their hands, the curdlife in their eyes forming diagonals that split each into new soil, blood encrusted, cowing, bigger babies squirming in their tendons to get out of their whole heads and making war from underneath, bruises formed in trombone to regale me with acid squench…

Some have called me a Southern storyteller, and it’s a pegging I’m fine to have tossed across my shoulder. But, this mentioned, I cannot propose to fully see the entire traditional story Butler says has laid out in this new book. Instead, I immersed myself in the language and evidence of the enviable talent displayed at such a consistently effective level throughout the full-length work.

In an attempt to give a brief glimpse into Butler’s most recent imagined world, it seems the all-powerful “Cone” holds tightly to the survivors living in this illusionary world in which Person 1180, a birth-giving machine of a mother bringing into the tortured world a great number of failed children while Person 811, the father, twists and turns inside a house wrapped in one huge acid blotter and filled with other fathers and men upon men. The house in this way becomes a character, an antagonist in and of itself. The theme of rooms and homes taking on as much importance as characters in Butler’s work has now become a staple of his work.

But it was the language that kept me turning pages while others, in private blog reviews here and there online, said the “fattened prose” became a burden or a bore. I felt much like Nabokov while teaching (though it’s generally accepted he was not the best instructor) telling his students he cared little about their stories, their plots, he only cared about the language.

Such endurance of talent across a full work brings to mind the effort Pound may have been immersed in while penning his Cantos, the obsessive and immediate spilling of words in perfect combination. I think of Eliot and his Wasteland, Joyce and his wake of Finnegan. Fine company, no doubt, I would suppose.

The book has already snatched up a starred review in Publisher’s Weekly, considered a favorable one at this point, but which says essentially the already established fan-base Butler has enjoyed since his first published works would likely find themselves in a comfortable and satisfying place with Sky Saw. Then, almost as an afterthought, saying for those hoping to dive into Butler’s work this latest novel could be a good starting point.

I would kindly disagree. Readers seeking an introduction to Butler would do well to read first Scorch Atlas. Because for all his talent, and for all he and others working on the front lines of the crew of folks hoping to usher in a new and brave way of sharing their worlds on the page, Scorch Atlas is a fine work with just enough of the hallucinatory and just enough familiar structure to work as a primer, if I should be so bold as to suggest one would be needed.

No need in jumping too far ahead with a writer such as Butler only to discard him before seeing what came before, likewise denying themselves the pleasure of anticipating what is sure to be another solid work from a writer with the obsession, talent and courage needed to build new monuments to honor the written word no matter the risk.

[Emily Warfield · Rating 1 out of 5]

Imagine if William S. Burroughs and Mark Z. Danielewski had a son who had nothing to say.

I was going to give Sky Saw two stars since I appreciated some of the imagery, as repetitive as it was. Then I read the last few agonizing pages (or, you know, some of them) and felt like I was the butt of a particularly mean-spirited prank. Yes, you made me read a bunch of bullshit words. I fell for it, bro.

[M. Sarki · Rating 2 out of 5]

I tried hard to give this novel a good going over as it was my first venture into the work of Blake Butler, but it was just not my cup of tea. In the link below this text I explain in full my reasons why.

https://rogueliterarysociety.com/f/sk...

[reqbat · Rating 1 out of 5]

blindingly repetitive and dull. disappointing.

[in8 · Rating 4 out of 5]

creative engagement with it here: http://www.5cense.com/13/artchival_ma...

[Steve · Rating 1 out of 5]

I will probably throw this book away.

[Adam · Rating 3 out of 5]

Before I said things about There Is No Year and the purview here is similar. The two books were published quite close together. By miserable coincidence, I forgot how to sleep last night, and in my exhausted fury it occurred to me what Butler's prose precisely is--hypnagogic. There was also a game of mortal combat the young narrator of Garden, Ashes related, wherein he believed that if he could catch sleep sneaking up on him and evade it at the critical moment, then by such sparring with the "little death" he would be indomitable when The Big Sleep loomed. I think Butler's strategy involves the myoclonic jerk as alarm system for death.

By such fits and shocks, he endeavors to create novel cuts between the thematic elements in his fictive dreamscape, mostly light, bodies, space, time, interiors, others, and memories. Such things are situated well enough in our mundane daylight logic, which Butler will have nothing to with. Whether the effect is one of flashes or syncopes will depend on the reader, for none of this can be flattened with explanation, only sifted with experience. I won't quite say that the meaninglessness of the whole is redeemed by particular awe-struck phrases (although this is a dominant tendency) because I think something singular and "unlike" anything else takes form by the end. But the ostensible meaning seems to flit between lack and excess: lack, in the sense that the text is the mimesis of a crumbling ontological nightmare in which nothing fits together but everything is coated in the same calcified ash, and excess in the sense that the repetitions encountered in the text invoke the context of a significant discourse without fully committing to its rules of play but intimating that Someone could let you in on the secret. In brief, it's very fucking weird and must be taken or left accordingly.

[Samuel Moss · Rating 3 out of 5]

Butler, from what i can tell, is a writer that has found his style, revels in it, milks it for all it is worth. Revels in its iconoclastic and polarizing voice. He regularly achieves glowing critical response from a range of sources and literally multiple videos of people burning his book. The style Butler uses in Sky Saw and Nothing at least (I haven't read his earlier works There is No Year, Ever and Scorch Atlas) can at best be described as dream like or nightmarish. Logic for the most part seems to be absent, though over time an internal logic appears to form. There are images, or frameworks for images (liquids coming out of a character's mouth, eyes other orifices, endless travel through dark ominous hallways or rooms, descriptions of light and air within a character's organs or body) that reoccur and form a fairly large part of the novel. In fact if I were to place a novelistic element that 'drives' much of Butler's writing it would be imagery over anything else.

In a certain sense I find Butler very Lynchian in the way that he has these ideas, tropes almost, that he adores and juggles around, mixing and matching in his books, looking for new and interesting ways to combine them to achieve a variety of results with a minimum of range. This, I think, is one of the reasons you have these videos above (and no surprise here): Butler not only writes very differently from others but seems to take the opposite approach to novel writing that many other writers do. Where many serious novelists attempt to touch on the entire range (or at least a very broad range) of the human experiance Butler takes about two handfuls of objects, images and emotions (terror, despair, confusion...that's about it) and sees how much life he can squeeze out of these. It is almost as if he has created a new sort of minimalism where, rather than attempting the greatest economy of prose he has achieved economy of ideas. What is impressive is that he pulls it off.

One of the recurring images is that of large white birds which either live in or are created from the bodies of the characters. They have an ominous presence and are described as being very large and menacing. The scene in which Butler introduces these birds stands out to me as a particularly strong passage:

'They kept coming up out of her in a chain, all gushing and aflutter-silent-each one imprinted all through and through their gristle with a word, one word for each all written in their linings and down the contours of their suits, the word and word again all densely textured.'

The construction of these birds as words is one of Butler's tricks and he uses it again later in the book where another character finds himself in a room where every object is denoted by it's text (apologies, I am deeply ashamed at having it sound as if semiotics has anything to do with this). Bringing the medium into stark focus (as if Butler is saying "Remember! You are currently in a world created entirely from words! Don't forget!") is again reminiscent of Lynch (and Jodorowsky for that matter) and acts as a rebuttal to his critics which complain that Butler's works don't make any sense, or aren't coherent. We become so used to narratives that map easily onto our world and many writers create works that easily do this even when there is nothing that requires them to. Butler's refusal to step in line, his decision to push his literature to its very limits, is unsettling to many and here he is laying it out to you "These are just words and I can do whatever the fuck I like"

Sky Saw does have a narrative which acts to give the scenes or images a grounding within the novel. There are three characters here, a father, mother and son. The Father has left, or is taken from the mother and seems to be imprisoned. The mother gives birth to the child near the beginning of the novel and we watch him grow very quickly. They seem to live in a fairly standard dystopian world (the character's names 'Person 1180' for example reminded me of Lucas's first (and in my opinion best) film THX-1138) with individuals walled off from each other, even distant from themselves. I found it useful to not worry about the plot too much, one could try to put it together on subsequent readings, but as I mentioned earlier the real meat of the thing is basking in Butler's images. I found the beginning and middle of the book strong though it seemed to taper off at the end, as if Butler got tired of the novel.

Journeys are a recurring element of the novel and, while I won't read into them too deeply there was one part of this that struck me very deeply. Toward the end of the novel the father returns to his house after wandering for years and finds that everything has changed. The house, his face, have become different. Not only this but the father is living in the same house as the mother and son but is described as not being able to interact with them, as if they exist in a different house all together. While I don't want to be too presumptuous this sounds remarkably close to Butler's descriptions (elsewhere, and quite excellent reading might I add) of his experience with his own father's dementia. I found reading this (fairly brief) section in this light to be an enlightening and heartbreaking account of what dementia might feel like to the person inflicted with it and, if this was Butler's goal then I consider the execution of this passage to be on of the more deft and heartfelt in my entire experience with literature. If this was not Butler's intention...well then I'll pretend I'm a post-structuralist for a day and follow my reading regardless.

I'm not going to go out on a limb and call this a great novel, but it certainly is very good at many points. I think the trick to reading Butler is not to worry too much about putting everything together, and rather than attempting to bend the novel to fit your mindset or preconceptions just relax your mind and let the book shape the way you think for a little while. In a certain way Butler writes in a simulacrum of English: it looks and sounds and pretends to be English but in reality is a language entirely his own which one must learn first before attempting to parse one of his novels. If you find it boring or frustrating or maddening just put it down for a little while and pick it up later: Butler has crafted something quite interesting here and it is worth reading and enjoying.

[Sarah Cavar · Rating 2 out of 5]

Having read and loved the experimental and often cerebral, creeping horror of Scorch Atlas, I was surprised and disappointed by how much I disliked this book — here, the moments of clear, alienated and yet sharply felt pain and abjection that came across so well in Scorch Atlas were rare, and accompanied instead by bizarre, repetitive gross-out scenes whose purpose remained a mystery. The strongest portions in this book were those that ventured into traditional-ish verse, but these were not particularly frequent — instead, imagery of grotesque pregnancy, shit, cum, and pus wandered through the book without apparent purpose, offering shock where there could have been plot, character, or, at the very least, interesting or insightful creative-aesthetic choices.

[Brendan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Butler’s prose is dizzying, a surreal descent into the darker corners of the mind. I thoroughly enjoyed this and will read it again.

[James · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think I would say that this is the weakest of Blake Butler's books. It seemed very unfocused and uninspired to me, and lacking in the structure/purpose one can find in his longer books. It really is one of those books where the description on the back cover is more interesting than the text itself: I got the impression it was going to be a sort of Burroughsian bad acid trip sci-fi dystopia sort of thing, but it wasn't like that at all (if only!). Instead, once again we have a weird haunted house with mirrors that do weird things to people who look into them (just like in "There Is No Year," and this isn't the last time Butler explored this trope as he did it again in "300,000,000," though to better effect). Once again we have a "narrative" revolving around three people: a mother, a father, and a child (again, just like in "There Is No Year"). At least this time Blake gave them names (of a sort), but I find it's hard to exert a great deal of care for characters with names like "Person 1180." Indeed, all the "characters" (if they can even be called that) are essentially bloodless abstractions. I don't feel like Blake cared all that much about them, so why should I? (This is a problem I have with some of Samuel Beckett's work, incidentally). Every now and then Butler conjures an evocative image or a poetic turn of phrase, but it just doesn't add up to all that much.

Ah well, at least the cover art is pretty cool. And one can get unintentional pleasure from reading the wildly breathless/pretentious/over-the-top/hyperbolic blurbs on the back and inside cover: I think my favorites were "As if Gertrude Stein wrote the script for a Kenneth Anger film set inside of a Norman Rockwell painting to be produced for YouTube with a John Cage soundtrack" and "Think David Lynch. In the waking dreamscape where Butler's thoughts spin out of control, he could be De Quincy's opium-eater wandering through a Dali painting by way of a poem by Antonin Artaud."

[Dustin Reade · Rating 3 out of 5]

Language-wise, this is a great book. But the endless depression and heavy tone really wears on you after a while. The language, also, leaves you questioning what the hell is going on at times. The whole thing reads like a dream, with a lot of interesting ideas that, unfortunately, don't really seem to matter much. THings happen, people are barely involved, then another thing happens. It is a laundry list of horrible occurences involving three people that are barely alive to begin with wandering around as if in a daze, half-aware of the horrible things happening around them. were it not for the descriptions and poetics, this book wouldnt have held my attention for more than thirty pages or so.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

SKY SAW is a sprawling and grotesque work punctuated by vividly surreal moments of beauty and strange angular sentences, all working in concert to produce destruction, existential mayhem, and acute reader psychosis in a way that transcends and stifles even the harshest inner 'what the fuck.'

This is to say that SKY SAW is Blake Butler doing what Blake Butler does; it probably isn't going to win over his detractors any more than it will turn current fans away. I might recommend SCORCH ATLAS or THERE IS NO YEAR over SKY SAW to those seeking a more accessible entry point, but in no way should it be considered a lesser volume in his body of work.

[Chris Line · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not sure if I read this book. Butler's text is very difficult to swallow. A large portion of this novel is essentially meaningless (in a conventional sense), and much of it is entirely incomprehensible. Butler's prose is certainly distinctive, but it is relentlessly barbaric and brutal to process. I felt that this visceral and textural style of writing was much better suited to the short story collection Scorch Atlas, where narrative structure was less of an issue. This book lost me in several places, and ultimately I'm not certain how I feel about it. The reason for my high rating is the fact that I consumed it in three sittings, completely engrossed each time.

[Brooks · Rating 1 out of 5]

It was grotesque without being disturbing, and visual without having impact. I loved There is No Year and Scorch Atlas, but struggled mightily with this one. There were occasional language tricks that I noticed, and lots and lots of imagery, but I was glad to finish this and set it down.

[B.R. Yeager · Rating 4 out of 5]

A terribly accurate depiction of inhabiting bodily masses and limited self-awareness. The nightmare of navigating other forms and perceptions depicted in ragged alien syntax. A creation myth for the next thousand years when we've all become ants and worms.

[Harvey · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have an often punishing “finish it even if I’m not vibing with it” policy. I am 100% breathing that rule because I think this book is trash.

It’s just violent & gross & I’m not doing it.

[Productive Procrastinator]

Please note that this is just a quais-journal entry on Butler's short fiction and NOT A REVIEW FOR THIS BOOK. Anyway, I ended up writing a longish post on a Reddit thread about Butler's fiction that I'll just post below for posterity (chose this book of his since it seems to be a short story cycle):

A bit late to the very modest party here, but I’ve been reading some of his short stories online (trying to skim across his career, so I've been looking at the published stories he has listed on his site) to see what his prose is like (often hearing it praised) and to see whether I’d be willing to dedicate time to his longer projects.

Anyway, I can’t speak for his longer works, but I’d give his short fiction a miss. There’s some pretty striking imagery on occasion, and he does have a wonderful feel for verb choice as well as the occasional outré usage of a noun, but overall, all of the ones I’ve read feel unfinished. I don’t think I found one without a typo (some had multiple major typos like tense changes during sentences and even mixing up the names of two characters in one story). Aside from errors like that, which I think, especially for short stories/flash fiction are unforgivable, I didn’t find the sometimes difficult prose to be rewarding or refined enough with how much it was asking of the reader (eg there were a few tautological sentences or reuses of a word I noted that diminished the strength of a nearby line), and, after completing all of them and trying to sit with them for a long time, I felt the obfuscation or difficulty was simply to distract from the either lack of depth or new ideas underneath (either new ideas generally or even by Butler’s own standards, as the imagery/ideas, such as an isolated home to reveal the abstractions of the domestic sphere, are repeated as nauseam). There was one piece of flash fiction in Wigleaf that had such a ludicrously convoluted title that actually concealed a rather simple idea when broken down and which didn’t clarify but only further confused the content of the accompanying narrative. It reminded me of DFW’s worst stories (where, unlike a lot of gems by Beckett, we crawl through the mud without any transcendence at the end or formal majesty during the journey).

Also, none of them (with the exception of the very haunting “Death Update”) made me feel transformed viscerally or cerebrally. A lot of them felt more concerned with being shocking or strange rather than lastingly provocative, and so many of them are sort of amorphous abstractions with little to grab onto by way of character or relatable states of being or experience (Beckett, who seems to be a definite influence, or even David Lynch are artists who produced very surreal, dreamlike work, but there’s a real sense of investment in humanity and anchoring the imagery in the dream of a single person or collective). Too many of the diegetic frameworks in the stories I read were unclear. All of this to me points to either authorial self-satisfaction and/or laziness. In fact, a lot of it was ironically depressing to read because, unlike a master such as Plath (who transfigured her depression and mental illness into highly refined and profound art), it does read like depression or insecurity (wanting to be seen rather than to produce great art) has consumed almost all of the stories I read.

Anyway, apologies for the long reply but I’ve been quite bemused by his acclaim on the internet after these initial encounters, which have scared me off his longer works since I can’t imagine how patchy or rickety a novel would be from such a careless writer (some Goodreads reviews of Molly note a vast number of typos, at least in the first copies). I simply don’t have enough trust in him as a reader, especially with the experimental nature of the texts (as all the typos make abstruse works sometimes impossible to interpret or spend time with). I can see what he’s trying to accomplish, and he has immense talent on an innate level, but, to me at least, it’s clear there’s a lack of care and ultimate vision and most importantly heart beneath the dust, mould, and mud.

In short, too abstract, too removed, too disparate, no comprehensive diegesis or entry point through their very rough membranes. Cold, but not in a good way. Depressing, but without any transcendence or enlightenment (just a half-heartedly dug pit with plenty of raining dirt).

[Michael Tichy · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's basically a surreal poem that reads like an insane stream of consciousness rant but you know it’s not that because the writing is tight and deliberate. I have no idea what it was about other than the slightest sense it is dealing with our relationship with technology/media It's the kind of thing where my attitude is buy the ticket take the ride and expect nothing more than full immersion into a totally alien reality and am happy it delivered exactly that. I loved this book but if you’re expecting a straightforward story with predictable structure you should run away and push this out of your mind, which of course is impossible so now you’re already on the hook and you’ll never stop thinking of what might have been so you might as well just read it. It’s only 247 pages. You can handle that, can’t you?

[Colin Clay · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book started very promisingly. But even before the second half, it lost it's unique charge and became sort of a mess to me. Don't get me wrong, it's one of the most original books I've ever read, just because it's so extremely bizarre (Lynchian, yeah) and the language is really atypical, but after a while, some segments felt pointless and boring long. I loved "The Magnetic Fields" by Breton & Soupault, I liked "Les Chants de Maldoror" by Lautréamont and "Aurora" by Michel Leiris, these are the original surreal works of literature and that's how it should be done properly. But I guess that Blake Butler is going his own way. I have to read some of his other books.