Scorch Atlas

by Blake Butler

In this striking novel-in-stories, a series of strange apocalypses have hit America. Entire neighborhoods drown in mud, glass rains from the sky, birds speak gibberish, and parents of young children disappear. Millions starve while others grow coats of mold. But a few are able to survive and find a light in the aftermath, illuminating what we’ve become. In "The Disappeared", a father is arrested for missing free throws, leaving his son to search alone for his lost mother. A boy swells to fill his parents’ ransacked attic in "The Ruined Child". Rendered in a variety of narrative forms, from a psychedelic fable to a skewed insurance claim questionnaire, Blake Butler’s full-length fiction debut paints a gorgeously grotesque version of America, bringing to mind both Kelly Link and William H. Gass, yet imbued with Butler's own vision of the apocalyptic and bizarre.

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories, Horror, Science Fiction, Post Apocalyptic, Literature, Apocalyptic

188 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2009

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

[Janie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Awakened by the impatient summons of a dark wall, a fish in the window nods in acceptance of deluge. Brothers names are forgotten in lieu of disease and famine. Is your soft head working in tandem with the rot? The birds are fallen corpses in the din of houses erupting. I fly over mother direction and reach up. There is no ceiling, only numinous antonyms.

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overhead the sky was melting, the cracked cream color rubbing off in cogs of brine. The fields far ahead of me in endless pudding, studded here and there with what had been: homes and houses, hair and heirlooms, habits, hallways, hauntings, hope. (p.124)

I think I'm starting to get what Blake Butler is up to here. And up to in general. And it's fantastic. The first, immediate draw to his work, for me, was purely visceral: his utter derangement of language into a singular blasted poetry of decay, coupled with his completely feverish visions of personal apocalypse, wild with unpredictable motion and grippingly told.

But that's not all.

In Scorch Atlas, the context seems to be that the world is being obliterated by a series of thirteen plagues (teeth! static!) that make those of biblical renown seem altogether quaint. But this isn't about how nations or social structures or science deals with upheaval and disaster. No, that would be far too rational a take on a universe that seems given over entirely to irrationality. The plagues frame the stories of this book, but are immediately backgrounded by extremely personal investigations of loss. (It's not the same at all, but consider how Anna Kavan's Ice all but ignores its global disaster in favor of a single obsessive search). And so, the core of each of these stories lies not in end-of-the-world adventures, but in a completely real and believable pain. Isolation, the loss of children, the disintegration of family.

So many doors forever. There were never enough. Each door had several locks. One lock was combination. Another required keys. Another was a simple side latch. Another was strictly ornamental. Another you could open by whispering the right thing to it at the right time, which is the type of lock most humans have. (p.56)

If Butler had lent these human tragedies just a few surreal or horrific details each, as more moderate writers might, they'd probably come off as obvious symbols of the characters' sorrow and torment. Instead, he overwhelms the senses with a mad deluge of cataclysmic imagery, wheeling soot-stained birds and disease-swollen bodies and drained oceans molding over -- so hard and fast that the reader is left little choice but to take them at face value or drown in the interpretation. And so: we're simply told what happens. And so: we deal with it. And then: in these feverish worlds, we cling together, reader and characters, seeking some stable point of comprehensible ground, some point of earth on which to moor our hopes and fears and confusion. But then: there's nothing solid to be seen, anywhere.

And so: these stories seer their images directly onto the occipital lobe. And then: they stay there, smoldering.

Incidentally, I think Blake Butler might be the best writer I can think of who seems easiest described as a horror writer. Not that his writing is in any way typical of the genre. Not that it could truly be said to belong to any genre. Perhaps it's just what I want the genre to be, wise and lyrical through shuddering black folds of wonder.

Meanwhile, by now, the cities lay covered in chrysalis, silken tents stretch across expressways, over homes. Our front door sealed shut with hive building. The cocoons crushed each time a thing moved. We waited. We blink-eyed through the night. In the end, the great unveiling: ten billion butterflies humming in the sun, fluttering so loud you couldn't think. (pg.58)

[Joshua Nomen-Mutatio · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lot of stuff gets compared to the films of David Lynch. This book is no exception. In an interview I read with Butler right before starting this book, Lynch's film INLAND EMPIRE was raised as a prominent influence on his work. The comparison is apt enough. I'm a huge Lynch fan and got to see him present the film at the Music Box Theater in Chicago back when it was first released. It happened to fall on a day that my friends and I also went to the flying boat-shape known as the Milwaukee Art Museum (it has retractable wings!) to view a huge collection of the works of Lynch-influencing painter Francis Bacon. The day was full of the promise and hype I'd projected upon it. While I enjoyed the film on the whole while viewing it that night, and in a non-drug-free way, and it definitely was full of muscle-clenching suspense and disorientation, but I didn't feel the same way I did after watching his others and upon reflection realized that maybe, just maybe, my hero Mr. Lynch had dropped the ball. I've yet to get around to rewatching it since then, some five years ago now, a fact which doesn't exactly help diminish my assessment. Much like the film, I found this book a bit disappointing, especially after assuming I'd love Butler's work based on my encounters with praise from two of my beloveds, Amelia Gray and Ben Marcus.

The book is well-written, but it just left me feeling a bit numb. See, one of the things that makes Lynch's masterpieces like Blue Velvet, Fire Walk With Me and Mulholland Drive work so well is that they utilize more than just a bunch of scary lighting and ominous music. Some of the most frightening and weird scenes are in broad daylight. This book, rather, just beats the reader over the head with the final, strobing, chaotic, pitch black murder scenes, from open to close. Granted, there's some tension utilized but rarely with the kind of subtly and variety I felt myself craving. There was a quote early on from Butler in that same interview that gave me some sense that he'd be able to meet this more balanced approach to surreal and dark fiction:

I’ve never done drugs besides drinking. I tried a cigarette once and hated it though when I’m drunk I’ll puff on them and blow the smoke. Drugs aren’t for my demeanor; I feel jacked up on eating and walking and laying on the floor. I get the experience of drugs from going to the grocery store or using a cell phone.

I liked that because I figured he'd be bringing some interesting descriptions of banal things to the table. But I simply didn't find that in this book, at least not in the ways I'd hoped I would.

Every last millimeter of Scorch Atlas is filled with dread and darkness and disorder. Frankly, it began to bore me rather quickly, despite the skillfull and imaginative descriptions. It's likely that I was just not in the right mood for this while reading it (or Krok's review influenced to me too strongly) and let me emphatically state that I'm still interested in reading more from Butler, but this particular book just didn't leave me wanting more of the same, because that's essentially what the book did: offer more and more and more of the same--surreal, scary, gross shit described ad nauseum and printed on paper that's designed to look scuffed, burnt up, water-logged, etc. I couldn't help but think of the dumb goth kids in high school as well as those Scary Stories books from my earliest memories of horrific fiction. Now, the writing itself is worlds above and beyond that of bad goth poetry or creepy folk tales as told to children, but having to look at the overdone book design on every page just brought a lot of this stuff to mind once I started to get tired of the unrelenting thematic and descriptive sameness of these short, fragmented pieces that comprise the book.

I'm sorry Blake Butler, I thought I'd love this book but I just quickly stopped caring to read about nightmarish landscapes and bodies slowly falling apart and all while staring at the spooooooooky pages. I have a feeling I'll like some of your more matured/later work better. There is No Year and EVER still look exciting to me. I wish I'd ordered one of those instead.

This is a four-star book and I had a three-star go at it.

[Ben Winch · Rating 1 out of 5]

Faux-gothic airbrushed precocious prose wallpaper. No scene, all summary. Occasional cute contortions of form because he can. The discrepancy between reputation and actuality is startling.

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 4 out of 5]

In a series of more or less self-contained sections, nature runs amok, colliding full-on with the utter inability of humans to deal with the subsequent profusion of insects, water, lack of water, mud, dust, and the resultant deleterious effects of said profusion delivered upon them. The characters lose a lot—family members are distorted and disfigured before their eyes, usually to the point of eventual death. A mother is held hostage and tortured by her feral sons, who paradoxically still depend on her for sustenance, even as they seem intent on her final destruction. A couple is menaced by wild dogs while trapped in their house, their child inexplicably ballooning in size as it dispenses prophetic messages to the father. These are merely two examples of the inexorable torrent of horrifying narrative spread across these pages in a linguistic frenzy.

I thought the title apt at first because of how the book reads like an atlas depicting a series of harsh environmental catastrophes resulting in a ruined Earth and a ravaged population, i.e., a 'scorch atlas'. But it's not precisely an atlas, for there are no maps or illustrations found within it. Then I thought about the Titan Atlas and his sentence to hold the sky upon his shoulders. And I considered the idea of a 'scorched' Atlas trying to still maintain his stance despite the agony of his burns, as the sky rains havoc down upon the planet. But the title uses the form 'scorch' which could imply a command to burn Atlas instead (perhaps for doing a poor job or simply as an act of callous violence?). Whether or not Butler intended any specific meaning or connotation, it is a title very much evocative of the text itself, to the point that I feel comfortable stating both that I read Scorch Atlas and that I read a 'scorch atlas'.

[knig · Rating 4 out of 5]

Butler speaks, and Perraultian vipers slither out, squirmudgeoning onto ink-blotted grey pastiche paper and tranvesting into diamonds: toads and diamonds, toads and diamonds: how I love Perrault.inanisms.

Blake has language, but no meaning. Words oscillate with a vested light and charge the plane of paper until they combust. Apocalyptic prophet, Butler reams his world with doom embedded imagery lacking spatio-temporal placement but suffused with emotion: alienation, destruction, fragmentation. I get this guy. He’s consumed by feeling, powered by sensation, but blind to any Vision (in the grand sense. Hallucinations there are many). Plot lines succumb under pressure, any kind of outlines really, and language comes into its own: glass pelting down, floods, gravel: staccato of finite chunks, fizzling off into Spent. Of mind, emotion, endurance.

I know this guy. I’ve seen this before: eloquent swansong of bleak going into oblique. Oblivion. Every other book I pick up belongs to a depressed existenz. There are tones I recognise now which bely the bassuo continuo of a mind locked in a Munchian scream.

I’m going to check him out: what demons inhabit wherewithal?

Insomniac: 129 hours of wakefulness at a stretch. Perhaps this explains the granularity of the structure: short pieces fused into a whole. Who can concentrate for more when your nerve endings are electrified from so much uninterrupted Being.

Me, I count sheep when I’m like that. Some pop pills. Others clean top to bottom. Butler masturbates. Hours on end, whole evenings, an eternity. At least thats what he told the bookslut:

http://www.bookslut.com/features/2011...

[Jonfaith · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sometime in the late 1990s our CFO gave me tickets for Rigoletto. I asked M if she wanted to go, she paused and shrugged. It was no surprise that she dyed her hair bright orange and inserted a rather tribal ring through septum. I wore a Radiohead t-shirt. We arrived conveying absolute indifference, then somewhere along the way despite the patrician trappings, I found myself enraptured.

This did not happen when reading Scorch Atlas.

This "novel" in stories consists of tendrils of dread and putrefaction, a pillaging of the thesaurus for synonyms of decay. Quick, the children have went cannibal. It won't stop raining and my uncle won't put his pants back on. Before anyone becomes pissy and talks of literary cubism, I'd direct them to Coover's masterful The Babysitter. That's how such is accomplished.

There is one remarkable turn in the book and it is a curator description of a series of snapshots, suffering myriad effects of water damage. One can see Hemingway's baby shoes in that resilient page.

[Maciek · Rating 2 out of 5]

I enjoy dystopias and fiction set during and after the apocalypse; I like to see the world being creatively remade, a new one entering into the place left empty by the old. There's just something intensely appealing in the concept of having a largely empty earth, left alone to the few survivors who take upon themselves to establish some kind of order and society, struggling to survive and overcome the hardships. Although many works have dealt with this concept, the fact that it gives the author an almost completely blank canvas leaves enough room for many more.

Blake Butler's Scorch Atlas is just 152 pages long, and is marketed as a striking "novel in stories" but ultimately ends up being neither. It's a collection of 13 pieces of text, which employ an ample amount of vocabulary describing decay, rot, devastation, death and physical degradation of surroundings and people. Page to page, sentence by sentence, Scorch Atlas is a catalogue of weakening and subsequent crumbling down of pretty much everything.

There's a sense of emptiness and futility hanging over this book, which is understandable for a work dealing with the end of the world, but there's also a larger problem - the emptiness and futility are all to be found under the endless layers of dust, grime and rot. There are no stories to be found here, and it seemed to me that as a whole it did not have anything to say. Each story seemed to be just a prelude to the real thing - which never happened. The author is not without some skill, but in this effort he seemed to have caught up in creating bizarre and disturbing images instead of trying to actually do something with them.

On the other hand - the paper copy of the book is made as to make it look old and weathered, resembling a volume which survived an apocalypse. Customers could even have their copy destroyed personally by the author - why would anyone want to buy a destroyed book, I have no idea. What I do know is this - when more effort and attention is given to packaging rather than content, something fishy is going on.

[Zach · Rating 2 out of 5]

Less a collection of short stories than a litany of vignettes and lists (that's right, a litany of lists) of things crumbling, rotting, molding, falling from the sky, drowning, vomiting, dripping, disintegrating, breaking down, melting, bubbling, decaying, putrefying, stinking, degenerating, deteriorating, and dissolving. This physical decrepitude (of humans, animals, buildings, Earth, everything) is mirrored in all of these stories by familial breakdowns between parents and sons (there's a kind-of daughter in one story, but the father is the protagonist in that one) or siblings, which is a nice technique, but when it's the only technique present in every single story...

The language, furthermore, veers wildly between lofty and poetic and oddly pedestrian. This might be a conscious choice, but if it is, I hate it.

With a lot of editing and condensing and combining, these 13 mediocre-or-worse stories could have been condensed down to like 2-3 really great ones ("The Ruined Child" being, I think, the closest to a great work here as is). There was a lot of potential under the grime and shit and mess of this book, but Butler got too caught up in... well, the grime and shit and mess of this book, and never polished anything enough to really deliver on that potential.

[Benoit Lelièvre · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have been vocal about my admiration for Blake Butler's work before, but wow. Is reading that guy a trip or what? His writing is an otherworldly experience in itself. How could I describe Scorch Atlas and give you an accurate portrait of what it feels like? It's a series of portraits of families affected by an unnamed natural disaster and an inexplicable plague that seems to have followed. There are few characters named. They are referred to by their role in their respective families: mother, father, daughter, son, etc. So, maybe the same family is featured in different stories, but there's no way to know and I believe that's by design.

Scorch Atlas is a book about the frailty of reality. You spend all your life constructing this fragile existence for yourself and what is left of it once something you cannot control strikes? That is what Scorch Atlas is about. it's unnerving, it's alien and it's beautiful in a reckless way.

[Spencer · Rating 4 out of 5]

An array of cataclysms are collected together here to form a surreal and bleak tapestry of despair and destruction. Blake Butler’s prose is finely crafted in such an effective way to give decay a strange beauty and haunting poignancy. I’ve not read any of Blake’s other work but I’m definitely interested now as I found this to be very impressive.

[Darius · Rating 1 out of 5]

It's hard to say anything positive about this book. There's something very awkward about Butler's prose, something strained and forced that makes it very difficult to read. It's simply not very good writing. I can appreciate that he's trying to do something experimental, but even the best experimental writers--Barthelme, Barth, Coover, Gass--had an ear for the musicality of language. They reinvented the notion of what a story could be, but did so in a way that was clear, lyrical, and even beautiful at times. In contrast, Butler's prose is so dense and awkward that the reader has to stop every few sentences to take a break from it. On the whole, a very unpleasant reading experience.

[Ellis ♥ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Recensione apparsa su Leggere distopico!

Blake Butler consegna al lettore un’antologia di racconti apparentemente indipendenti, ma interconnessi da un forte senso del perturbante e una solitudine di fondo, ma anche dall’associazione di alcune immagini che si ripetono come, ad esempio, bambini dall’aria non proprio innocente e un considerevole numero di spore.
Per ognuna di queste storie riserva delle sorprese soprattutto nella forma, anzi proprio lì sta l’originalità del libro.

Una scrittura fortemente sensoriale che si veste di prosa poetica, riporta storie molto crude, grottesche e tremendamente realistiche, a tratti, stomachevoli, tuttavia non noterete mai un coinvolgimento da parte dell’autore. C’è un approccio disincantato e distaccato, nel narrare di certi orrori… che quasi restano avvolti da una patina “asettica”.
L’edizione cartacea, per la quale ringrazio Pidgin Edizioni per la copia omaggio, presenta una peculiarità davvero speciale; “Atlante delle ceneri” è il titolo e le pagine, pertanto, presentano i bordi anneriti -quasi fossero state bruciacchiate – e il colore interno è sui toni del grigio, inoltre, in base al titolo del suddetto racconto la filigrana della pagina è perfettamente in tema.
Un viaggio lucido e, al contempo, surreale … Ci si trova giocoforza avviluppati da un’atmosfera di devastazione, con virate fortemente weird. Penso che l’autore abbia colto a piene mani da uno scrittore che stimo molto: Thomas Ligotti.

Una prosa bruciante e camaleontica, talvolta frammentata – data la diversa lunghezza delle composizioni - dimostrando un’affinità non scontata con lo strumento narrativo rappresentato dal racconto breve.
Una realtà riconoscibile solo scostando il velo deformante di un’ostilità crescente verso un mondo allucinato: città senza tempo e senza nome, giorni vuoti, una piccola folla di personaggi infelici che vagano su una terra morente, ormai privi di ogni speranza. Un mondo dove – di tua spontanea volontà - non vorresti mai metter piede.
Girata l’ultima pagina resta addosso al lettore una sensazione strana, sporca, come se gli fosse rimasto addosso qualcosa che non gli appartiene.

[Curtis · Rating 4 out of 5]

The drippy, slimy, puss and bile lathered middle ground between Michael Cisco and Matthew Bartlett that I've been looking for.

[birdbassador · Rating 5 out of 5]

i mean kind equivalent of making somebody stick their hands in a bowl of peeled grapes and say "this is frankenstein eyeballs!" but, i mean, i wanted a series of increasingly gross apocalypses and that is surely what i got, so hard to complain that much.

[Ruby Tombstone Lives! · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is quite possibly the darkest novel I have ever, or will ever, read. Yup. It's THAT dark. What makes it so incredibly dark is the complete absence of light. Seriously. There is nothing light-hearted or hopeful. The apocalypse has happened, death is inevitable, and all there is left to do is wait. All is festering, foul, futile, bogged down in a slow, tortuous process of degradation, madness and utter despair. Sigh. It really is DARK.


Scorch Atlas is a series of short stories and snippets chronicling the end of the world through some catastrophic disaster or another which is never in any way explained. Houses and cities are bombarded by earth, water, electricity, ash, glass, ink, human skin cells, even glitter, all while the inabitants ever so slowly starve, go insane and die. You would be surprised what people will eat when they're starving and insane. I won't be surprised..... ever again.

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I'll admit, it was the striking book design that prompted me to hunt down a hardcopy. Every page is the very image of decay in one way or another, each page different, and themed for the story written on it. As it turns out, the writing is also beautiful, if self-indulgent. Read this book, but do it with a bottle of Prozac handy. And hide the shotgun.

[Krok Zero · Rating 3 out of 5]

Elegiac snapshots of the apocalypse. The first of these grim lullabies is a mind-boggling masterpiece called "The Disappeared" that should be compulsory reading for pretty much everyone. The rest of the book, alas, gets a bit samey and flat, like an album with a perfect opening track followed by a batch of songs just good enough to keep you from deleting the MP3s but not nearly good enough to get the melody of the first song out of your head. Keep an eye on this guy, though -- he's got a novel due out next year, and if it even partially fulfills the promise of "The Disappeared," then we've got a major fucking writer on our hands. Gotta give it up to the local boys at Featherproof Books for the beautiful packaging here, a book made to look like a found object amid the rubble of the ruins of society. Also I will note that this is the 70th book I have read so far in 2010, which has gotta be a record for me...and the year ain't over yet.

[Shawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

When the mutant baby looked into its father's eyes and said, "my anus is a portal," I knew at last I found that great bizarre horror that leans towards Ginsberg and Eliot instead of ho-hum Lovecraft. Sure, it can sometimes come off as pretentious, turning all nouns into verbs, but there is a knowing macabre humor in this grotesque parade. Plus as a bonus I heard a lot of this in my head narrated by Brad Neely characters.

[Sarah Cavar · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a rare example of a well-realized collection that also functions as a novel! Scorch Atlas is the culmination of a series of disparate and inter-/cross-genre works by Butler, all oriented around a series of apocalyptic events that stretch hitherto-human bodyminds to their limits. Bodies explode, skies rain blood-teeth, families feed in and on each other, an houses cave to seas of mud. Nothing is as it seems, and grammar itself crumbles in the face of cosmic disaster.

The balance between poem, list, short story, and flash/prose-poem brilliantly represent the jumbled panic evoked by the events within the text, which feels almost like an anthology of possible terrors not rooted to a time or place in the present and future, but dancing between dimensions, only graspable in the tiny bites we see in this novel/collection.

This genre of body horror and speculative fiction is conducive to the precise ways my brain works, and is exactly grotesque enough to make me shiver and beg for more. Even if dystopian fiction isn't usually your cup of tea, try this one out, it's bold and unique and worthwhile just as a probe into the weird things language can do to reality.

[Perry · Rating 3 out of 5]

Contains a pleasing amount of muck and slime.

[Lee · Rating 1 out of 5]

It's amazing that a book this poorly written could actually get published . . .

These stories read like a bad imitation of Samuel Becket. Artsy, self-indulgent, pretentious, and just really, really bad. The kind of stuff I used to read and make fun of in my undergraduate writing workshops.

Wish I could give this one less than one star.

[Sarah Bishop · Rating 2 out of 5]

This morbid novella is horrible, foul, and gross. I would like to burn it.

[C. Varn · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fugue for scorched earth

This is a wild book--expressionistic, surreal, apocalyptic. This feels like a fugue piece on social collapse somewhere between narrative and prose poetry. Fascinating if disorienting.

[Lori · Rating 3 out of 5]

from publisher


Scorch Atlas is not your typical post apocalyptic book. Yes, it deals with catastrophic events that render the world nearly uninhabitable. And yes, it chronicles the morbid lives of the people who have survived and the things they must go through to continue living. It is in the way author Blake Butler tells these stories that makes it atypical of its genre.

This is a collection of a short stories of worlds where entire towns are soaked and squishy with flood waters, where people are covered in an ever-growing coat of mold, where children kidnap and abuse their parents because the static from the television set instructs them to, where a father is haunted by the swelling ghost of his drowned child, and where one man helplessly witnesses his entire family being swallowed up in a mudslide.

Shorter short stories appear, as a sort of commercial break to the main events, detailing a multitude of plaques that have been visited upon the damaged and dying orb - skies that rain ice, gravel, glass, fecal matter, blood and gristle, ink...

A dark and hopeless read, Butler puts his characters through endless hells and creates a world that is devoid of time, place, and God. They are suspended in a soggy, festering globe infested by insects and disease, surrounded by rancid water, and forced to ingest splinters, fabric, and their own hair and nails to avoid starvation.

I think it is the mark of a good writer when, while reading his tales of doom and destruction, I find myself peering out of the window the ensure all is still well within my own little world.

This is not a book for everyone. Those familiar with post apocalyptic novels will have a greater appreciation for Butler's gorgeously packaged short story collection. While his prose is breathtaking, at times it requires some personal interpretation and mental decoding. The further into the book you read, the less clear and defined the stories seem to become, almost unraveling to a near-incoherent stream of consciousness at the very end. This does not take away from the pleasure (if you can rightly call it that) and experience of reading, but merely adds an additional layer to it all. There is a reason his book has evoked such strong and destructive behavior from past readers.

In addition to his personal website, Butler blogs at HTMLGiant, and has two books that will be releasing April 2011, There is No Year. I want to thank Blake and his publisher Featherproof for making this review copy available for me!
http://thenextbestbookblog.blogspot.c...

[Rauan · Rating 5 out of 5]

it's like biting into a burning apple. A sizzling cherry. Each taste's a piece of fire that whirrs on the tongue and surrounds the brain in a live-dead sack of cold-burning aura.

This book's going on my night stand next to Finnegan's Wake and for the same purpose. To be taken down some afternoons for small doses of brain buzz-disfigurement.

Blake Butler's an original. Big. Teeming. Burning.

(note: I've got a small tolerance. Easily blown apart. Thus, small doses.)

--------

Scorch Atlas is a beautiful book that speaks to on many levels and through many tongue. One tongue says don't write in me. Keep me sacred. Another says desecrate me. Destroy me. Scribble all over me. And this I am doing. The only book I haven't written is in the bible my dad got for his bar mitzvah and which he, in turn, (having never even opened it) passed on to me the day I supposedly became a man. Damnit how I'm itching to write in that gold-leafed beautiful book. Soon. Soon. Soon.)

---------

Scorch Atlas depends on and is made by speed. The speed at which the language and action move is really thrilling. A joy.

But then every now and then it slows. Sketches. Lingers.

And everything narrows down into one moment blooming

[Aaron · Rating 4 out of 5]

Punishing and repetitive, though mercifully short; you don’t read this one so much as live through it. Butler envisions a series of calamities, always unexplained, often quietly funny even as the interchangeable characters fall apart in unsettling ways. Scorch Atlas essentially documents a state of permanent decline. It’s visceral and scummy, in the sense that the text seems to exude something foul—certain words recur with great frequency, words like “runny”, “swollen”, and “rind”. It feels like there’s a hidden unifying thread running through the otherwise disconnected stories—most of which aren’t really narrative so much as evocative, hellish mood pieces locked in the same entropic mode. But if there is a central plot—something about a house underwater, or a house where the water once was (it shifts, more like a thematic riff than a buried plot)—it’s anything but clear, and that isn’t why you read something like this anyway. If you’ve read Butler’s other work you probably know what you’re in for. It’s unpleasant, but we keep crawling back, don’t we?

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a pretty crazy book of semi-connected stories. I'm convinced that Butler has a deep, dangerous, and brilliant mind even if the glut of these stories felt samey in tone. It's his use of language and his descriptive powers that place this book in a similar misfit class as the work of Ben Marcus and Matthew Derby (and sometimes Brian Evenson, who is an obvious influence). I wouldn't recommend this to everyone but if you like relentless mental images of decay and despair, this will be up your dark alley.

[Brent Hayward · Rating 4 out of 5]

Strip away some of the postmodern trappings and you have short story collection with a few prose poems thrown in. This book is a one-trick pony, but it's a hell of a trick. The writing is apocalyptic and strange, a world of ash and the vanished, of old photographs and deserted streets. There is a void, a longing. When the stories work, they are starkly powerful. A family of barely-named children, deserted by their father, their mother dead or dying of impossible diseases. Brian Evenson watches as the gray world disintegrates. Ballard is there too, a ghost in the shadows.

[Ben Arzate · Rating 4 out of 5]

FULL REVIEW HERE

I highly recommend this book. It's a wonderfully written and beautifully designed collection of surreal stories. It has a unique take on the speculation of the end of the world as we know it. While it focuses mostly on personal loss, it still manages to show the scale of death and destruction in such a scenario.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Makes the characters from The Road look like a bunch of pussweeds.