Void Corporation

by Blake Butler

Following up the 2023 publication of Blake Butler's smash hit memoir Molly, Archway Editions is proud to bring you Void Corporation, the revised and definitive paperback of his masterful 2020 novel Alice Knott, now with a new foreword from the author. The perfect introduction to Butler's hypnotic and wildly inventive fictional world for his many new fans.

Genres: Fiction

304 pages, Paperback

Published December 17, 2024

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

[Cleo · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have no idea what large sections of this “means” but it did feel like the book equivalent of feeling an ice cube melt in your hand

[Curtis · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book that inspired the hit TV show that never had a name and never aired in a set schedule and always ran a marathon of every past episode before airing new episodes and had a series finale that was three weeks long! And when you google the show, nobody on the internet remembers having seen it before, or if they have, they remember it differently than you, like maybe it was a cartoon rather than live action, or a game show, or a reality TV show, or a hentai, or a story that unfolded in the corner of an Animorphs book when you flipped the pages to watch the kid turn into an animal. Or maybe Blake Butler was your childhood friend and would whisper descriptions of the episodes to you on the elementary school playground from the shadows under the slide. Groundbreaking stuff. Or at least that's what I think I used to say about it.

[Nick Iiames · Rating 2 out of 5]

editing this down to 2 stars because i now realize the despair this book caused me after moving on to a book that i actively enjoy reading lmao.

2.5 out of 5 stars.

my view on this book is at odds with itself. at once, i enjoyed the underlying story and many aspects of, what i think is, its purpose, but the narrative style just became so exhausting at times. there are wide swaths of this book i feel like i blacked out and drudged through out of boredom and then there are parts so interesting and disturbing they completely captured my attention. i’ll be glad to read a more straightforward book after this one, at least.

[Michael Marchand · Rating 3 out of 5]

In my opinion, the execution of this novel is delivered with an artificially cold facade . He doesn’t have the regular post modern irony holding him back , or rather, as a barrier between the intent and execution , it’s this worry that he might write something emotionally or spiritually profound in the “wrong” way. Honestly, an ironic distance from the various ways he articulates his ideas would have been more interesting. It’s as if he was scared of poetics in this novel. Thankfully Molly seems to be a step towards dropping this pretension.

[Riley Gibson · Rating 1 out of 5]

oh BROTHER where do i begin. i am so relieved to be done with this book. i considered abandoning it so many times but curiosity kept me going, the premise is so intriguing. 90% of this book feels like a vivid description of your brain melting and your memories being set on fire (and i have to respect blake butler for coming up with 1 million different ways to describe this) and the other 10% of this book actually gives you a vague idea of what's happening. i fully understand maybe that's the point - it's supposed to feel confusing and mind numbing due to what the protagonist is going through.

the sheer amount of unnecessary words...i'm exhausted. there was def potential here, goated book cover too. what a shame

[Ezra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Metaphysical liminality. Amazing last chapter. Good prose

[Downward · Rating 4 out of 5]

here is my review of Alice Knott from when that book came out years ago, which this book is a republished / re-edited version of, with a different, more aesthetically fitting press: i get the sense that butler is maybe the best writer of his generation but his work feels mostly opaque to me. there are sentences here where butler is standing on his head, doing impossibly athletic and acrobatic things with words and threading a kind of psychological needle that makes the read (or me at least) feel deeply uncomfortable with this view of the world, where the destruction of art functions metaphorically as the breakdown of society; the immolation of one important piece of art leads to people all over the world destroying art and themselves. we've lost context for the art beyond destruction and we've lost context for life beyond destruction and we're fully inside Alice's head, walking the labyrinth of her memory while the world collapses around her and she's to blame. but I might be getting this all wrong because reading this was like looking at something beautiful through water, abstracted and shimmering, which is kind of cool in its own right.

and here's my thoughts on it now with greater context for butler and what he's doing: when you read a series of an author's work in a row, their obsessions emerge and themes take form beyond what the text is actually saying so that your experience with the author in some ways overshadows individual texts. and so while all the above from the previous review - the Alice Knott review - stands up, I think, as an experience it lacks the context of butler's obsession with language as a memetic chain, virusing up our brains into repetitive action. it uses the breakdown of society as represented through one woman (or the breakdown of one woman as represented through society) as broader commentary on our vulnerability to thought infiltration and panic. it's a truly post structuralist text, questioning the validity of everything but the market value but also the opposite, questioning the market value as representative of anything at all. it's kicking the legs out from under those things and asking what we have left. or something like that? im not really sure.

[Corey Nyhus · Rating 2 out of 5]

Started off very promising to me with its intrigueingly cold tone. Its interest in how art is consumed by the wealthy, by the public, and by the traumatized. The moments of genuine imagery in this book really worked for me. The 99 year old manicured president talking about how much he loved this kitschy giraffe illustration was a highlight. The interiority of Alice--her ruminations of her attachment trauma--are at first well realized, sensitive, subtle. Then the text spirals into a fuming slog of bitter redundant cynicism that ultimately says absolutely nothing beyond "when you're hurt, time and faces sure feel fuzzy. And maybe art sucks but maybe it's important but maybe we all are too unartistic to understand true art and we'd rather just beat off in public and hit stuff with a hammer." A smear of intrusive thoughts that don't really answer one another. Atrocity Exhibition without any of the color or profound transgressions. Instead, dull depictions of violence against paintings, sculptures, monuments, are rehashed to no end. The cold and isolated life of Alice remain cold and isolated, and rather than be interrogated further, are instead unspooled--"turned to mush" or "goo," as the author will say over and over again and again. Very specific diction is overused ad nauseum.

Have you wanted the majority of a novel to be white walls and blurry faces and plays of light? Then you will love everything that didn't click with me here. I'm left to believe Void Corporation is a character study about no one, masquerading as cynical observations on how we'd rather pig out and kill ourselves than be gentle or make anything of artistic merit. By the end, even if it was intended as a satire, I just didn't find any of the bitterness towards our species to be anything other than contrived.

[Alex Meves · Rating 2 out of 5]

Pretty bad. But it also feels like when you cook bland food where if you just add a little salt all of those flavors come out and could be amplified. There's something there, but it's hard to see with all the bullshit in the way.

[August Bourré · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m annoyed by how much I enjoyed this.

[Ian Alexander · Rating 1 out of 5]

Should have been a painting. I appreciate his ambition but the story is buried so deep and fractured in this you just pull up scorched slop.