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300,000,000
An unforgettable novel of an American suburb devastated by a fiendish madman—the most ambitious and important work yet by “the 21st century answer to William Burroughs” (Publishers Weekly).
Blake Butler’s fiction has dazzled readers with its dystopian dreamscapes and swaggering command of language. Now, in his most topical and visceral novel yet, he ushers us into the consciousness of two men in the shadow of a bloodbath: Gretch Gravey, a cryptic psychopath with a small army of burnout followers, and E. N. Flood, the troubled police detective tasked with unpacking and understanding his mind.
A mingled simulacrum of Charles Manson, David Koresh, and Thomas Harris’s Buffalo Bill, Gravey is a sinister yet alluring God figure who enlists young metalhead followers to kidnap neighboring women and bring them to his house—where he murders them and buries their bodies in a basement crypt. Through parallel narratives, Three Hundred Million lures readers into the cloven mind of Gravey—and Darrel, his sinister alter ego—even as Flood’s secret journal chronicles his own descent into his own, eerily similar psychosis.
A portrait of American violence that conjures the shadows of Ariel Castro, David Koresh, and Adam Lanza, Three Hundred Million is a brutal and mesmerizing masterwork, a portrait of contemporary America that is difficult to turn away from, or to forget.
Blake Butler’s fiction has dazzled readers with its dystopian dreamscapes and swaggering command of language. Now, in his most topical and visceral novel yet, he ushers us into the consciousness of two men in the shadow of a bloodbath: Gretch Gravey, a cryptic psychopath with a small army of burnout followers, and E. N. Flood, the troubled police detective tasked with unpacking and understanding his mind.
A mingled simulacrum of Charles Manson, David Koresh, and Thomas Harris’s Buffalo Bill, Gravey is a sinister yet alluring God figure who enlists young metalhead followers to kidnap neighboring women and bring them to his house—where he murders them and buries their bodies in a basement crypt. Through parallel narratives, Three Hundred Million lures readers into the cloven mind of Gravey—and Darrel, his sinister alter ego—even as Flood’s secret journal chronicles his own descent into his own, eerily similar psychosis.
A portrait of American violence that conjures the shadows of Ariel Castro, David Koresh, and Adam Lanza, Three Hundred Million is a brutal and mesmerizing masterwork, a portrait of contemporary America that is difficult to turn away from, or to forget.
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First published October 14, 2014
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About the author
Blake Butler
72 books447 followersBlake 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.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 90 reviews
March 30, 2015
DNF at 2%.
Taken from the synopsis: Now, in his most topical and visceral novel yet, he ushers us into the consciousness of two men in the shadow of a bloodbath: Gretch Gravey, a cryptic psychopath with a small army of burnout followers, and E. N. Flood, the troubled police detective tasked with unpacking and understanding his mind. Sounds good, right?!
This book...the whopping two percent that I made it through...made my head hurt. I highlighted like crazy. I will only share one example of what I couldn't stand, and I won't need to say a single word more...
Once inside the house again I remembered to try not to listen to the sound of the machines so long as all those others so I would be smarter when I got older and less hurt inside for certain whiles about the way things went on without me in the daily organism, though as that went on too I began to feel too I wasn't changing and anyway the effect of our inbred-from-Adam-and-Eve origins were beginning more and more to make effect in all of us.
I swear I copied that word for word, punctuation and all (or lack thereof). Now you see why I just couldn't take any more of it...
Taken from the synopsis: Now, in his most topical and visceral novel yet, he ushers us into the consciousness of two men in the shadow of a bloodbath: Gretch Gravey, a cryptic psychopath with a small army of burnout followers, and E. N. Flood, the troubled police detective tasked with unpacking and understanding his mind. Sounds good, right?!
This book...the whopping two percent that I made it through...made my head hurt. I highlighted like crazy. I will only share one example of what I couldn't stand, and I won't need to say a single word more...
Once inside the house again I remembered to try not to listen to the sound of the machines so long as all those others so I would be smarter when I got older and less hurt inside for certain whiles about the way things went on without me in the daily organism, though as that went on too I began to feel too I wasn't changing and anyway the effect of our inbred-from-Adam-and-Eve origins were beginning more and more to make effect in all of us.
I swear I copied that word for word, punctuation and all (or lack thereof). Now you see why I just couldn't take any more of it...
April 11, 2018
The premise is brutally simple: a Mansonoid cult/serial-killer type determines his life's purpose and path to the creation of a better world: he must kill every single person in America. Noting the 5-part structure before reading, particularly a "Part about the Killing", I recognized in this some kind of a response to Bolaño's 2666, and sure enough, that novel provides the epigraph to this. I questioned whether Butler's barrage of mutilated word-sculptures could measure up to the tricky expectations of aligning with such a work, but it quickly became clear that this was quite different. Both works share a fixation with obliteration -- of life, of meaning -- but whereas Bolaño's monumental Part about the Killing was a naming of the dead, an imbuing of each loss with an individual story, Butler's goals are more abstracted, concerned with mass archetypal movements over individual lives. As the dead here mount in unfathomable numbers and the narrative collapses into the catacombs of an endless American collective unconscious, death-black and erasing all boundaries, the story itself descends into formless eternity. It's a little like the vast bardo-state of Radiant Terminus, but in some ways inverted: offering little promise or expectation of solace in any arc or character, while at points revealing at least a capacity for catharsis that may or may not materialize.
It's a hard book to assess: this is some kind of atrocious triumph, fearlessly crashing through its own constructed boundaries over and over into indiscernible inner/outer landscapes pocked with moments of beauty, but often so lost within its own denial of guideposts as to become an arduous, seemingly unending journey. There's a kind of build-up: early sections have more recognizable action, especially in the commentary provided by a series of external narrators running alongside the main text (an excellent formal choice, here) but by part three these have been completely absorbed into or infected by the irrationality of the main thread, and are finally gone entirely by part four -- which somehow is nonetheless the finest stretch of the novel, dipping and turning through virtuosic sub-sections, each a surprise. By part five, though, we've reached pure formless miasma, a literature of exhaustion, from which no change or unexpected renewal can be expected, ever again. From there, what can follow?
It's a hard book to assess: this is some kind of atrocious triumph, fearlessly crashing through its own constructed boundaries over and over into indiscernible inner/outer landscapes pocked with moments of beauty, but often so lost within its own denial of guideposts as to become an arduous, seemingly unending journey. There's a kind of build-up: early sections have more recognizable action, especially in the commentary provided by a series of external narrators running alongside the main text (an excellent formal choice, here) but by part three these have been completely absorbed into or infected by the irrationality of the main thread, and are finally gone entirely by part four -- which somehow is nonetheless the finest stretch of the novel, dipping and turning through virtuosic sub-sections, each a surprise. By part five, though, we've reached pure formless miasma, a literature of exhaustion, from which no change or unexpected renewal can be expected, ever again. From there, what can follow?
December 29, 2014
Since gleefully discovered the automatic writings of the surrealists in middle school, I have spent the years following reading all manner of unconventional, experimental, avant-garde, visionary, and post-modern literature, and few books have proved to be as challenging as this one. The first hundred or so pages are an endurance test of the first order, so far removed from traditional literary (and even grammatical) conventions as to appear as nigh unreadable word salad, and I say that as someone who admires Butler's work. Of course, this is doubtless the intention; expressing the limits of language by saying that which cannot be said - in this case, the perspective of a character who is either completely insane, or operating on multiple planes of reality, or does not actually exist, or all of the above. If you combined the ontological abstraction of Beckett with the nonlinear 'cutup' editing of Burroughs and the ceaseless, monomaniacal repetition of Thomas Bernhard - then amplified that by 100% over 400 pages, you'd have a close approximation of the tone of the novel. While overall it is not a book that one 'enjoys' in the conventional sense, despite my frustrations I found some amazing writing here, particularly in the chapter chronicling a character's trek through an uncanny afterlife/reality simulacrum/'tape recording' that needs to be read to be fully appreciated. I was reminded of the concept of human instrumentality from the Evangelion series, in particular the Third Impact sequence from The End of Evangelion, wherein the bodies of humanity dissolve and their consciousnesses merge into collective entity, as well as the final scene of Fulci's The Beyond, where the survivors find themselves eternally anchored in a drear, devastated limbo, and Butler's writing felt like an attempt to convey and explore a similar metaphysical territory in prose. Also, as much or more than Bolano's 2066, the influence of David Lynch hangs heavy over the novel, specifically Twin Peaks, with the demonic figure of murderous possessor BOB and that otherworldly locale the Black Lodge running deep within the DNA of Butler's book, something I greatly appreciated. In the end, this is alternately both a chore and a revelation to read; charges of incomprehension and pretension have been leveled at it by many readers, and are not necessarily incorrect, but despite this I still found it well worth reading. For anyone new to Butler, I would recommend seeking out his masterful debut novel There Is No Year first, because if that is not to one's liking, then this will be completely unendurable.
February 2, 2016
300,000,000 is the first literary event in the post-David Foster Wallace era. Whatever you might expect of that novel , it's most-likely not what you think it is. It's bound to become the anthem-novel of a generation of disowned young intellectuals who afe angry at America. Blake Butler wrote a transcendent, ground-breaking and apocalyptic book inspired by Vladimir Nabokov, Georges Bataille, Sigmund Freud, James Ellroy and, of course, David Foster Wallace. 300,000,000 is magnificent like only the end of the world can be.
October 31, 2014
At first I only read a page or two of 300,000,000, a story about murdering everyone in the United States, during a lull in my day or while waiting for my kids to fall asleep so I could sneak out of their room before I fell asleep with them. I was uncommitted. The horrific scenes of cult mass murder was even more visceral than the visceral writing as I started to doze between my young innocent children. I kept reading. The commentary helped to anchor me to the newness of Blake Butler’s prose (the novel is broken into five books, the first of which is a log or testimony or dialogue of the killer, notated by the detective on the case and others). He writes in a style that demands attention and delivers unique thrills. Only a few pages into the 400-plus tome it was too late. I wasn’t hooked as much as sucked into the experience of the reading the book. The torrent of Butler’s words carried me like a twisted page-turner, not exactly effortlessly, but worth the work, as the narrative expanded to mythic, even biblical proportions, and then dove into a singular and intimate exploration of one man who could have been every man or no man, but man oh man.
March 13, 2017
I've seen this book compared with 2666 and House of Leaves but it actually reminds me more of William Burroughs' Cities of the Red Night and David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress. Burroughs for the assault on conventional language and the construction of imagery through words that don't necessarily offer a visual image. Markson for the solipsism. Solipsism might be an odd thing to claim for a novel that is ostensibly about two characters, a death cult leader with the aim to kill all 300,000,000 people in America through a contagion of killing passed on like a virus, and the detective charged with heading up the case once the cult leader is in prison. The two merge into one, with the detective existing in an unspecified realm part afterlife, part madness (from the immensity of the insanity he is trailing) and part an Alice Through the Looking Glass type of existence within the video tape records made by the cult leader of his murderous activity, which are curiously blank and the viewer sees and projects whatever he will into the blankness. (This part of the novel actually put me in mind of Scarlett Thomas' The End of Mr. Y) It's in this realm that the detective seems to be searching for his dead wife and has tinges of a romantic sensibility among all the horror.
So what does it all mean? Hard to say. Reading this is a bit like being hit over the head with a baseball bat repeatedly. Nevertheless there are also some stand-out passages of writing which verge on the lyrical. But there are also plenty of chunks where you just glaze over at the impenetrable nature of the words. A tour de force for reader and author alike. It is an extreme work, therefore hard to recommend unconditionally. But I got plenty out of the read.
So what does it all mean? Hard to say. Reading this is a bit like being hit over the head with a baseball bat repeatedly. Nevertheless there are also some stand-out passages of writing which verge on the lyrical. But there are also plenty of chunks where you just glaze over at the impenetrable nature of the words. A tour de force for reader and author alike. It is an extreme work, therefore hard to recommend unconditionally. But I got plenty out of the read.
August 27, 2016
This is Blake Butler at his best. Pieces of his previous works are all present and woven into a huge, sprawling, grotesque, subconscious, narcotic novel. A possessed madman (Gretch Gravey) vows to kill everyone in America, and the story begins as the police (most notably detective E.N. Flood) arrest him.
2666 is a clear influence. The epigraph comes from Bolano's book. Both books are divided into five parts with very similar titles 2666's "The Part About the Crimes" has become "The Part About the Killing", while the parts about Archimboldi and Amalfitano have become the parts about Gravey and Flood. But 300,000,000 reflects Bolano's structure through a seriously warped mirror.
Both books concern themselves with a seemingly endless string of murders; but where 2666 is supposedly told from the perspective of a detached, floating narrator of the future, Butler takes the opposite tack and mires the reader in the perspective of those that perpetrate the atrocities. That almost makes the reader complicit in the events. If we would stop reading, Gravey's reign of terror would come to end. This is driven home later on in the book.
At the same time the style makes the story a personal one, and although Butler's prose is as dense as anything he's written, it's in service of a world that sticks with you and a strong narrative that feels satisfying at its conclusion.
A book that gave me a lot to think about. Four stars for now, but I reserve the right to upgrade that in the future.
2666 is a clear influence. The epigraph comes from Bolano's book. Both books are divided into five parts with very similar titles 2666's "The Part About the Crimes" has become "The Part About the Killing", while the parts about Archimboldi and Amalfitano have become the parts about Gravey and Flood. But 300,000,000 reflects Bolano's structure through a seriously warped mirror.
Both books concern themselves with a seemingly endless string of murders; but where 2666 is supposedly told from the perspective of a detached, floating narrator of the future, Butler takes the opposite tack and mires the reader in the perspective of those that perpetrate the atrocities. That almost makes the reader complicit in the events. If we would stop reading, Gravey's reign of terror would come to end. This is driven home later on in the book.
At the same time the style makes the story a personal one, and although Butler's prose is as dense as anything he's written, it's in service of a world that sticks with you and a strong narrative that feels satisfying at its conclusion.
A book that gave me a lot to think about. Four stars for now, but I reserve the right to upgrade that in the future.
August 25, 2019
From this BookRiot.com list.
Rarely do I do this, but I am putting this out there right now: This is not a book for everyone.
Stylistically it's like... um. 2666, House of Leaves, and Infinite Jest and (dare I say it...?) Twin Peaks somehow copulated and created this Blake Butler baby. It takes some patience to read, but more patience required for the subject matter which is about murder. And that's actually putting it politely.
Gretch Gravey has been arrested for murder and throughout his testimony, a police detective, Flood, annotates his own thoughts. As the story progresses, other annotations pop up, other voices, so while the main story is unfolding in front of us, we have all these other voices telling their perspective or experiences and it's all... well, who really is the reliable narrator here? WHO'S TO SAY.
This is not an easy book to discuss. The descriptions of... things... especially early on in Gravey's version are difficult to read much in the same way reading all the murders in 2666 is difficult to read. Most homage can be paid to Bolano's behemoth, which Butler makes no mystery of. He even quotes Bolano in the start - "Every hundred feet the world changes." (2666) The question of the numbers in both titles is the least of the similarities.
But I didn't love this book the same way. Because I have already read 2666 I sort of had an idea of what Butler was going for and the magic was lost on me. They are not so similar stories that you will be able to know what is going on in Butler's book, though, so take some solace in that fact. If you're up for reading this. Because... again. I don't recommend it to just anyone.
I tagged some text throughout this read that I imagine at the time I thought were clues, but now that I look back at them, I have no idea why I really tagged them. Shrug.
I see Butler has a book of hybrid nonfiction (which is my jam these days, guys), Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia, that I must now get my sticky paws on. IT'S HOMEWORK, ALRIGHT?
Rarely do I do this, but I am putting this out there right now: This is not a book for everyone.
Stylistically it's like... um. 2666, House of Leaves, and Infinite Jest and (dare I say it...?) Twin Peaks somehow copulated and created this Blake Butler baby. It takes some patience to read, but more patience required for the subject matter which is about murder. And that's actually putting it politely.
Gretch Gravey has been arrested for murder and throughout his testimony, a police detective, Flood, annotates his own thoughts. As the story progresses, other annotations pop up, other voices, so while the main story is unfolding in front of us, we have all these other voices telling their perspective or experiences and it's all... well, who really is the reliable narrator here? WHO'S TO SAY.
This is not an easy book to discuss. The descriptions of... things... especially early on in Gravey's version are difficult to read much in the same way reading all the murders in 2666 is difficult to read. Most homage can be paid to Bolano's behemoth, which Butler makes no mystery of. He even quotes Bolano in the start - "Every hundred feet the world changes." (2666) The question of the numbers in both titles is the least of the similarities.
But I didn't love this book the same way. Because I have already read 2666 I sort of had an idea of what Butler was going for and the magic was lost on me. They are not so similar stories that you will be able to know what is going on in Butler's book, though, so take some solace in that fact. If you're up for reading this. Because... again. I don't recommend it to just anyone.
I tagged some text throughout this read that I imagine at the time I thought were clues, but now that I look back at them, I have no idea why I really tagged them. Shrug.
Days turn white. The days turn white. They turn white with cream between them. They pale in memory still continuing to beget more. Between cracks in what had just been the present and is now no longer the present there is a small constantly slaving sound of someone breathing in.It's an interesting book, but not one I can claim to like, per se. This is my first experience with anything written by Butler. I'm actually intrigued enough that I want to see what his other work is like. If you want to read a book from the perspective of a madman (for lack of a better word), you might enjoy this.
(p131)
Flood returns to try to wake the woman twice again without result before he leaves the house the way he came. His body passes through the mirror, and then, once clicked locked behind him, he continues back down the passage into different darkness.
(p182)
Today in America we go to war again flat on our backs. We will hear the morning rising in the sound of the screaming mothers becoming dismantled again as the death toll of our people on this one batch become killed at our own hands. As all hands are all of our hands. Today it doesn't matter how many people in America become killed because today is another day in America, and tomorrow today is dead.
(p222)
There is a force who moves among our bodies, coming through your holes into the world and slowly knitting. It will be the ending of us all, in a form beyond simply a body. This is not necessarily a bad thing. You are surrounded by mirrors. You make the world out of your mind. The same is true of those you love. You are not dead and you will never be and you are dead and you are not alive and you're alive and you will never be.
(p261)
I see Butler has a book of hybrid nonfiction (which is my jam these days, guys), Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia, that I must now get my sticky paws on. IT'S HOMEWORK, ALRIGHT?
November 9, 2014
This book was a feat. I don't mean that as a bad thing. Even though I read it through to the end, I know there are so many things to go back and reread. Warren Ellis called it something like "Poetry of the insane". I'm not big in comparing authors to other authors unless all I can think of but it is different and the same as his own work. I have read 3 books by Butler (Scorch Atlas and Ever) and I consider myself a fan. He expresses a dark/nihilistic side about society that enjoy reading sometimes. I know I said I wouldn't compare him to another author but I guess i lied because I know it was written in a prose that reminds me of the Marbled Swarm by Dennis Cooper. I just mean in a sense that it is written with this amazing poetic neurotic prose that truly disorients you to the point where you forget what you just read. I gave it 5 stars because it has one of the creepiest characters I've read in a book before. Also because I know every time I go back and reread it I will learn knew things and appreciate the poetry of it. It's really good even though it's maddening at times.
December 1, 2014
I'm not going to pretend that I know exactly what I read. This book could be about nothing, but it also could be about everything. It's about virtual identities; a personal testament to the simultaneous frustration and constant accepting/revoking of modern, American life. It's cyclical and never ending.
It's a book written from dementia's point of view.
It's a page-turner (honestly).
There's a lot to say about the violence in 300,000,000. A lot to say about the squeamishness. About the difficult prose. Very few people talk about the loneliness though. There's genuine longing within these pages. There, you can find sweetness and empathy too.
It's a book written from dementia's point of view.
It's a page-turner (honestly).
There's a lot to say about the violence in 300,000,000. A lot to say about the squeamishness. About the difficult prose. Very few people talk about the loneliness though. There's genuine longing within these pages. There, you can find sweetness and empathy too.
July 19, 2018
Really took some time to engage with this book, and wow, it was worth it. Nothing could have prepared me for this read. I was perplexed, enthralled, even overwhelmed at times by Butler's prose, and working to parse the text and figure things out was what made it so much fun. Part of me felt like a psycho too for enjoying it so much. Don't get me wrong, there were parts that dragged, but overall I found much pleasure in enduring the onslaught of language, and by the end I no longer felt like the same person I was when I started reading. It was worth it for that alone.
January 24, 2015
I shouldn't have to explain why you should read something with the sentence, "Our architectures had already forgotten us."
November 24, 2014
Starts off strong, bogs down a bit in the middle, then picks up again in the second half.
Read
June 9, 2015Honestly, I don't know how to rate this book.
I liked it a lot, but it was too *vague hand motions* for me to give it a high rating? But I also can't give it a low rating because it's a book that's going to simmer in my brain for a while? And that's a mark of a good book (not like Robert Newcomb-level THIS WAS SHIT AND THAT'S WHY I'VE REMEMBERED IT FOREVER) to me?
Mostly I was put off for the last 1/3 by the constant stream-of-consciousness cultist bleating (which started off compelling and then became a giant puddle of slush) and stayed grounded thanks to the notations and the basic narrative: crime story turned horror story turned apocalyptic story.
SHeesh.
I liked it a lot, but it was too *vague hand motions* for me to give it a high rating? But I also can't give it a low rating because it's a book that's going to simmer in my brain for a while? And that's a mark of a good book (not like Robert Newcomb-level THIS WAS SHIT AND THAT'S WHY I'VE REMEMBERED IT FOREVER) to me?
Mostly I was put off for the last 1/3 by the constant stream-of-consciousness cultist bleating (which started off compelling and then became a giant puddle of slush) and stayed grounded thanks to the notations and the basic narrative: crime story turned horror story turned apocalyptic story.
SHeesh.
December 3, 2014
"Inside the black I could still see the land of the world surrounding empty, though here behind the land I saw the long veil of human history knitting in the light we'd left behind, a scrolling ream of memory-dimension beyond both time and space where all our lives fed through the same lens, the sunning voice burning even the glass out into air, and from the air then the burning image beyond all color, code, or era."
January 1, 2025
my main critique of the 1000+ page hypnogogic novel where each and every person in america is violently killed is that i think it probably would have been better as a 500+ page hypnogogic novel where each and every person in america is violently killed
January 20, 2015
Right off the bat: Three Hundred Million is the most full, most fully realized and the most consistently engaging novel that Blake Butler has written in his career to date.
For those who have read Butler’s work before, Three Hundred Million is very much written in his instantly recognizable style. The writing is often opaque, emotionless, as if written by some mad, cosmic force and not for human consumption. In many ways his style has remained totally rock solid, while everything around it has matured and grown.
For those who have not read Butler’s work it should be noted that he writes like no one else, living or dead. Comparisons to Burroughs (William H.) are common but I would personally place his style closer to those of Dylan Thomas, the Revelation of John and Beckett. Abstract, biblical and unrelentingly dark, he revels in unexplained phenomena and impossible feeling. His work is full of cryptic signs and warps of reality that end as soon as they start. Butler’s work runs mostly on the section and sentence levels. That is, most of the time there is little to no obvious plot and little to no overarching idea or message, though Three Hundred Million is something of an exception. Each section tends to function within itself and much of the motion occurs within each sentence. Butler generally unleashes a constant stream of darker and darker images, more and more gory scenes that are connected, most of the time, by abstract or tenuous connections: a glowing symbol, the rising tide of liquid within a room, a compulsion to murder or commit suicide. The writing is so clinical, so sterile that it flies in the face of classic horror. There is no suspense, no lurking monster (expect perhaps humanity itself, reality itself). Butler never seems interested in eliciting emotion, fear or otherwise. The events depicted, even the most brutal and heinous, never elicit disgust, never elicit fear or pain. They are simply stated, almost reported. It’s a strange thing to come up against, where events and depictions that should cause the most revolt, the most innate aversion are simply drawn over with the eyes. Statistics of hundreds of thousands of dead, brutal murders of families at the hands of their own members. No motive ever stated, no motive considered. No lack of motive. Simply an act. One might be tempted to accuse him of violence for the sake of violence, pain for the sake of pain but I think this is too easy.
Apparently written as an homage to 2666 where Bolano’s work is all plot but light in terms of linguistic acrobatics Butler’s work is nearly all poetry. Rather than an homage the two works function more as two halves of a whole, two complementary pieces that derive from the same place and fill in the absent parts of the other.This writing comes off somewhat like an extended exercise in Chomsky’s famous linguistic sentence “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” where all of the rules of grammar are adhered to, but the connections between the individual words tend toward abstraction. Butler’s writing is an exploration in the writing of possibility, except instead of wallowing in the myriad possible he is only interested in writing the impossible, not in extending out the bounds of how we can connect words but in stepping outside of those bounds, in how the rules of language can be bent to breaking.
With Three Hundred Million Butler has finally built up a structure and one strong enough to support the infinite weight of his writing. There is just enough reality to act as a foil for the insanity. There is just a bit of light and hope present that that light and hope can be crushed under the constant stream of madness and pain. It is one thing to plop down a labyrinthine madness, it is another to take your labyrinthine madness and set it to life.
This work steps away from Butler’s previous works in that it touches on elements that are firmly grounded in reality: America and what it means to be an American, love and relationships, Teen angst, sexuality, the knee jerk vilification of outsiders. God. There are no easily parsed ‘stances’ or ‘opinions’, just observations. On the one hand Butler’s broad writing leaves open huge vistas for critical interpretation. The events of the novel could be read as a critique of consumerism or contemporary culture or as a rendering of the depths of adolescence, psychosis or the human condition (this insanely vague and endlessly repeated phrase that tends to get more wrong than it could ever get right). But the work is smarter than that, it is harder than that, it is more nuanced and subtle and thoughtful than that. Butler takes these things that we are intimately familiar with, common objects and inventions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, marriage, the home and, much like a Noise artist will take the sound of a guitar (a sound so familiar to any American that it generally just falls into the background) and run it through a string of processing devices, amplifiers and feedback so as to turn it into something so viciously twisted, so blindingly new, that we feel an instinctual revulsion, a blinding confusion. The same feeling that might come upon someone stepping into their home to find the each wall and piece of furniture remained, but had been rearranged by some unknown agent into a totally different configuration. Butler runs America and marriage and God through his miswired linguistic system and fractures them beyond repair, rearranges these things into misshapen galaxies that are only recognizable by the nametags hanging around their shattered necks. By taking us outside of our zone of comfort, by rearranging and deforming these ubiquitous symbols he allows us to to build them back up within ourselves to something new, to reform them into something different and ultimately more true.
This is not Butler’s greatest novel. If the leaps in maturity, completeness and grace between Nothing and Skysaw and then from there to Three Hundred Million are any indication in where he is headed I feel safe in saying that he has not written that novel yet. Here, in Three Hundred Million he has created a very interesting and very unusual work and one very worth the time and effort of any person who is seriously interested in literature from any era.
For those who have read Butler’s work before, Three Hundred Million is very much written in his instantly recognizable style. The writing is often opaque, emotionless, as if written by some mad, cosmic force and not for human consumption. In many ways his style has remained totally rock solid, while everything around it has matured and grown.
For those who have not read Butler’s work it should be noted that he writes like no one else, living or dead. Comparisons to Burroughs (William H.) are common but I would personally place his style closer to those of Dylan Thomas, the Revelation of John and Beckett. Abstract, biblical and unrelentingly dark, he revels in unexplained phenomena and impossible feeling. His work is full of cryptic signs and warps of reality that end as soon as they start. Butler’s work runs mostly on the section and sentence levels. That is, most of the time there is little to no obvious plot and little to no overarching idea or message, though Three Hundred Million is something of an exception. Each section tends to function within itself and much of the motion occurs within each sentence. Butler generally unleashes a constant stream of darker and darker images, more and more gory scenes that are connected, most of the time, by abstract or tenuous connections: a glowing symbol, the rising tide of liquid within a room, a compulsion to murder or commit suicide. The writing is so clinical, so sterile that it flies in the face of classic horror. There is no suspense, no lurking monster (expect perhaps humanity itself, reality itself). Butler never seems interested in eliciting emotion, fear or otherwise. The events depicted, even the most brutal and heinous, never elicit disgust, never elicit fear or pain. They are simply stated, almost reported. It’s a strange thing to come up against, where events and depictions that should cause the most revolt, the most innate aversion are simply drawn over with the eyes. Statistics of hundreds of thousands of dead, brutal murders of families at the hands of their own members. No motive ever stated, no motive considered. No lack of motive. Simply an act. One might be tempted to accuse him of violence for the sake of violence, pain for the sake of pain but I think this is too easy.
Apparently written as an homage to 2666 where Bolano’s work is all plot but light in terms of linguistic acrobatics Butler’s work is nearly all poetry. Rather than an homage the two works function more as two halves of a whole, two complementary pieces that derive from the same place and fill in the absent parts of the other.This writing comes off somewhat like an extended exercise in Chomsky’s famous linguistic sentence “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” where all of the rules of grammar are adhered to, but the connections between the individual words tend toward abstraction. Butler’s writing is an exploration in the writing of possibility, except instead of wallowing in the myriad possible he is only interested in writing the impossible, not in extending out the bounds of how we can connect words but in stepping outside of those bounds, in how the rules of language can be bent to breaking.
With Three Hundred Million Butler has finally built up a structure and one strong enough to support the infinite weight of his writing. There is just enough reality to act as a foil for the insanity. There is just a bit of light and hope present that that light and hope can be crushed under the constant stream of madness and pain. It is one thing to plop down a labyrinthine madness, it is another to take your labyrinthine madness and set it to life.
This work steps away from Butler’s previous works in that it touches on elements that are firmly grounded in reality: America and what it means to be an American, love and relationships, Teen angst, sexuality, the knee jerk vilification of outsiders. God. There are no easily parsed ‘stances’ or ‘opinions’, just observations. On the one hand Butler’s broad writing leaves open huge vistas for critical interpretation. The events of the novel could be read as a critique of consumerism or contemporary culture or as a rendering of the depths of adolescence, psychosis or the human condition (this insanely vague and endlessly repeated phrase that tends to get more wrong than it could ever get right). But the work is smarter than that, it is harder than that, it is more nuanced and subtle and thoughtful than that. Butler takes these things that we are intimately familiar with, common objects and inventions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, marriage, the home and, much like a Noise artist will take the sound of a guitar (a sound so familiar to any American that it generally just falls into the background) and run it through a string of processing devices, amplifiers and feedback so as to turn it into something so viciously twisted, so blindingly new, that we feel an instinctual revulsion, a blinding confusion. The same feeling that might come upon someone stepping into their home to find the each wall and piece of furniture remained, but had been rearranged by some unknown agent into a totally different configuration. Butler runs America and marriage and God through his miswired linguistic system and fractures them beyond repair, rearranges these things into misshapen galaxies that are only recognizable by the nametags hanging around their shattered necks. By taking us outside of our zone of comfort, by rearranging and deforming these ubiquitous symbols he allows us to to build them back up within ourselves to something new, to reform them into something different and ultimately more true.
This is not Butler’s greatest novel. If the leaps in maturity, completeness and grace between Nothing and Skysaw and then from there to Three Hundred Million are any indication in where he is headed I feel safe in saying that he has not written that novel yet. Here, in Three Hundred Million he has created a very interesting and very unusual work and one very worth the time and effort of any person who is seriously interested in literature from any era.
May 25, 2016
while reading unreading I came by not coming, virgin sperm teeming inside my seventh self. Moist lips spat stream of consciousness at such velocity as to become unconscious murmuring, gibberish prayers to hipster madman god called Frank, unifying all flesh in nothingness. Imagery like my face in a shattered mirror showing me the same porno seven times from slightly adjusted angles, watching bodies plowed and harvested ad nauseum, touching myself in worship to the Book. All events unfold surreally in consistent (persistent?) voice adulating self, and we go down on we, non-masturbatory, we swear.
prime antagonist and alltagonist all-one non-cliché is Southern Gothic icon madman, all facets of overdone at once, praying to hipster madman god called Frank, becoming Frank, making Frank overarching metaphor, reality Frank, surreal Frank, all-becoming Frank. Protagonist? falls prey to similar thinking as if Johnny Truant in House of Leaves but shittier, becomes harrowed by Southern Gothic Icon Frank. Discovers truth in the madness, melds flesh becoming all-one, all flesh becoming the end, end of all white on the tapes, the tapes watching us watch us watch you, all at once. The tapes show everything that could’ve been and never was. Watch us do it, now.
cumming mixed metaphors, the Book groans chopped up memoir in our ears, stitching together flesh of many fleshes, leaving us dry. many things, like drugs and teeming virgin sperm, are better taken in small doses.
METAPHORICAL NAME: I swear a literal review at some point took place in what you just read. An interpretation follows—the book is not at all what the synopsis or back-cover suggests, except when considered from a very distant perspective. Instead, it seems to deliver something almost religious, but only the kind of religion that would be birthed from the commingling of neo-nihilism and hipster-zen. There are flashes of extreme literary brilliance in a sea of meaningless words, dichotomy purely for the sake of dichotomy, and juxtaposition just as likely to be insipid as inspired. Butler shows us some very interesting and divergent ways to use language, but doesn’t seem to use it to tell a story, per se. I should’ve learned, by now, that bizzaro-fiction is my least favorite thing, but somehow I keep buying it. I forced myself to read every single page. I must’ve set a record for the number of times I rolled my eyes while reading a book, and it’s a good thing too, because I think that was often the only thing keeping them open. There are entire pages you can skip and still remain abreast of the literal and metaphorical goings-on. Many authors would choose to cut those pages. Butler isn’t one of those authors.
LESS METAPHORICAL NAME: [EXCERPT REMOVED]
PUNKASS CHILD NAME: “We were all just getting high on acid and my friend, who’s doing like this PhD program in philosophy, just started word-vomit at my other friend who’s doing this MFA program in literature or creative writing or comparative lit or something like that and they just barfed back and forth to each other like modems and wires and telephones and eternal advertisements jamming products down my throat forever in violation. I recorded the whole conversation and just wrote it down. Pretty sick stuff.”
if that review made any sense to you, you’ve likely already read the book.
if 450 pages of similar tone (far better executed, but still) sounds attractive to you, purchase this novel.
otherwise, avoid it.
prime antagonist and alltagonist all-one non-cliché is Southern Gothic icon madman, all facets of overdone at once, praying to hipster madman god called Frank, becoming Frank, making Frank overarching metaphor, reality Frank, surreal Frank, all-becoming Frank. Protagonist? falls prey to similar thinking as if Johnny Truant in House of Leaves but shittier, becomes harrowed by Southern Gothic Icon Frank. Discovers truth in the madness, melds flesh becoming all-one, all flesh becoming the end, end of all white on the tapes, the tapes watching us watch us watch you, all at once. The tapes show everything that could’ve been and never was. Watch us do it, now.
cumming mixed metaphors, the Book groans chopped up memoir in our ears, stitching together flesh of many fleshes, leaving us dry. many things, like drugs and teeming virgin sperm, are better taken in small doses.
METAPHORICAL NAME: I swear a literal review at some point took place in what you just read. An interpretation follows—the book is not at all what the synopsis or back-cover suggests, except when considered from a very distant perspective. Instead, it seems to deliver something almost religious, but only the kind of religion that would be birthed from the commingling of neo-nihilism and hipster-zen. There are flashes of extreme literary brilliance in a sea of meaningless words, dichotomy purely for the sake of dichotomy, and juxtaposition just as likely to be insipid as inspired. Butler shows us some very interesting and divergent ways to use language, but doesn’t seem to use it to tell a story, per se. I should’ve learned, by now, that bizzaro-fiction is my least favorite thing, but somehow I keep buying it. I forced myself to read every single page. I must’ve set a record for the number of times I rolled my eyes while reading a book, and it’s a good thing too, because I think that was often the only thing keeping them open. There are entire pages you can skip and still remain abreast of the literal and metaphorical goings-on. Many authors would choose to cut those pages. Butler isn’t one of those authors.
LESS METAPHORICAL NAME: [EXCERPT REMOVED]
PUNKASS CHILD NAME: “We were all just getting high on acid and my friend, who’s doing like this PhD program in philosophy, just started word-vomit at my other friend who’s doing this MFA program in literature or creative writing or comparative lit or something like that and they just barfed back and forth to each other like modems and wires and telephones and eternal advertisements jamming products down my throat forever in violation. I recorded the whole conversation and just wrote it down. Pretty sick stuff.”
if that review made any sense to you, you’ve likely already read the book.
if 450 pages of similar tone (far better executed, but still) sounds attractive to you, purchase this novel.
otherwise, avoid it.
January 3, 2016
Dang Blakey. Great treatise on 18th century attitudes towards flora and fauna. Look forward to never reading again.
November 2, 2014
Couldn't finish it, it's just not my kind of book. I need the words and sentences of my novels to amount to something, to come together and move the story forward. But for the first 113 pages I found my mind wondering to random things as my eyes glossed over the meaningless jumble of words that dominated most of the page until I finally reached the tiny section at the end where Flood would essentially explain to me (in proper English) what Gravey had just spent two pages mumbling incoherently about. His garbled madman writing felt like a gimmick that had gone on for 100 pages too long. I had hoped the Flood narrated sections would be better, but he too devolves into circular and cryptic word vomit before you're ten pages in. So I just couldn't force myself through another 400 pages. I'm sure some people will love this book, but it just wasn't for me.
June 14, 2015
Containing probably the most urgently horrifying apocalypse I've read in a book, I haven't had a novel burrow into my brain in a way that made me almost anxiously need to keep reading it like this since I first read House of Leaves way back. That's both a fitting and misleading comparison, as Three Hundred Million starts off by playing with form in a similar way (footnotes that comment on the text, then start to be in dialogue with other footnotes; different layers of "reality" experienced through media—inexplicably often VHS tapes rather than digital modes), but then breaks off into bizarre sections that reach toward vision quest beginning/end-of-existence insanity.
When I finished this book, I felt like someone had given me drugs and then narrated the ending sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
When I finished this book, I felt like someone had given me drugs and then narrated the ending sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
did-not-finish
May 23, 2021Abandoned at 17%. Intrigued by the themes and experimental style, but I can't stomach the descriptions of Gravey's crimes.
April 5, 2025
It's too much and too violent and gory and aimless and cultic and doesn't make any sense so it's nothing like Great America Again AGAIN
May 15, 2022
Blake Butler understands better than any writer besides maybe Gary J. Shipley that real literature is when a book is indistinguishable from a Nuclear Death lyric sheet
March 8, 2015
I like Blake Butler's other work and was looking forward to this. Unfortunately, I wish I'd enjoyed it more than I did. It's certainly his most ambitious work, to date, but I feel it could have been edited down quite a bit. I really was trudging through it towards the end, just wanting it to be over with. There's definitely a great smaller novel within this big one that takes chances in a very House-of-Leaves-meets-2666 way.
February 14, 2017
I didn't mind the first 120 pages or so. That's what dealt with the actual crimes and they were pretty sick and creepy. I thought it was going to be great but it just unraveled. I have never stopped reading a book I started so I painfully finished it. Do you ever hope for an apocalypse............well one would have been welcomed during the reading of this book.
June 2, 2017
Dense, harsh, and harrowing. Not for those who need a plot driven story with winners. Butler only cares about language and blood. The novel took me on a violent, apocalyptic acid trip that I won't recover from. If you appreciate Samuel Beckett but wish his works would give you better nightmares, read this.
December 18, 2014
Darkety dark dark.
September 21, 2021
Personne ne m'oblige à le faire, bien sûr, mais je vous livre l'une des phrases, quasiment au hasard, qu'on trouve dans le livre : "La maison avait vieilli. Les garçons avaient vieilli. J’étais bien. Les miroirs de la pièce nous contenaient, chassaient le jour. J’ai vomi de l’eau, et nous avons bu."
Quoi que vous puissiez attendre de ce roman, ce n'est absolument pas ce que vous pensez qu'il est.
300.000.000 est dense, très dense, aussi bien dans sa lecture que dans la compréhension - et la prononciation même - de chacune de ses phrases. Ouvrez-le, n'importe où, et essayez de lire une phrase à voix haute. Mais il aussi dur et déchirant. Il n'est pas fait pour ceux qui ont besoin d'une histoire axée sur une intrigue qui nous amènerait aux gagnants habituels.
Blake Butler ne se soucie que de la langue, du sang, et du stupre.
Le roman m'a emmené dans une violence apocalyptique dont on ne peut pas se remettre facilement. Le roman qu'aurait pu écrire Samuel Beckett s'il avait rencontré Jason Hrivnak. Le meilleur des cauchemars, et pour longtemps.
Quoi que vous puissiez attendre de ce roman, ce n'est absolument pas ce que vous pensez qu'il est.
300.000.000 est dense, très dense, aussi bien dans sa lecture que dans la compréhension - et la prononciation même - de chacune de ses phrases. Ouvrez-le, n'importe où, et essayez de lire une phrase à voix haute. Mais il aussi dur et déchirant. Il n'est pas fait pour ceux qui ont besoin d'une histoire axée sur une intrigue qui nous amènerait aux gagnants habituels.
Blake Butler ne se soucie que de la langue, du sang, et du stupre.
Le roman m'a emmené dans une violence apocalyptique dont on ne peut pas se remettre facilement. Le roman qu'aurait pu écrire Samuel Beckett s'il avait rencontré Jason Hrivnak. Le meilleur des cauchemars, et pour longtemps.
February 14, 2025
Unflinchingly visceral. Moments of reading this book make me feel like the text itself was sticking a finger in my brain and swirling it around a little. Not for the faint of heart.
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