Customer Reviews

Scorch Atlas

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

A short form series of stories about the apocalypse you haven't been warned about.

This is pure bizarro apocalyptic fiction at it's best. There are no central characters in these stories, just Mom and Dad, my sister and my brother, the neighbors...

In the world of "Scorch Atlas", you may find that -

Felons are forced to wear plastic jumpsuits with bubble heads to prevent their breath from spreading their corrupt ideas

Dry flakes of charcoal as big as men's heads slather from some great overhead fire

Fathers may shoot free throws to prove their manhood

Butler's writing is good and isn't so far out there that only the enlightened ones can understand it. These aren't stories about the future, their tales about an alternate world where the following things rain down from the sky -

Ash
Gravel
Glass
Caterpillars
Static
Teeth (animal and human)
Ink
Manure
Flesh (gristle, cartilage, tissue, tendon, vein and bone)
Glitter
Manure
Light

If you've read "Scorch Atlas" and enjoy the bizzaro fiction genre, check out some other great books -
Morning Is Dead, Angel Dust Apocalypse and Sideshow PI: The Devil's Garden!

Enjoy~

Blake Butler is such an amazing writer. This books is a series of short stories about the end of the world. I think this kind of writting is getting popular because it is inspired on global warming. This book is different because it talks about the end of man kind always from a personal point of view. Butler has a very extent vocabulary and I constantly needed to check out dictionaries to understand some of the words. It is one of the darkest books you will ever find.

I read this book in one sitting, and time must have moved forward like it always did. If the world ended during the time I was reading it, then I would have been the last to know.

I bought my copy from Weightless Books because I live in a third-world country where buying from Amazon is a luxury. I read it onscreen, and I'm sure the paper version would have been far more traumatizing.

Scorch Atlas is stark, decadent, and beautiful. I inhaled the dank things in this tiny unnamed world, and they do not easily wash off. Blake Butler is reluctant to name his dysfunctional characters. Perhaps, he knows we already have an idea who they are. He writes: "...so many buildings everywhere gone tilted, smothered..." -- and I believe him.

Blake Butler hails from another planet, a planet where fiction isn't just stale, old junk. Butler and writers like him are reviving my hope for fiction. Every line in Scorched Atlas is intensely rich and fluid, it washes against your skin and leaves you dusty. He takes real risks. And despite the complexity and linguistic richness of his sentences, there is still an accessibility that is hard to find in most "experimental" fiction and poetry, and there is an undeniable emotional core to his work, a real heart pumping dust and oil across the pages.

Every work I've read by Butler is unique in and of itself and never disappointing. This one is particularly exceptional. Watch out folks there's a new boss in town.

Where do you start when you talk about the words within these pages? You can read the description above, but nothing will do this book justice until you immerse yourself in the words. SCORCH ATLAS is a group of interlocking stories that comprise a novel, and one of the many things that makes this collection so great--and one that I think can not often be said about short fiction collections--is that it does indeed work as a novel-in-stories, and yet you can read the first story, then the last story, then the middle story, and always find links between them. Whether you read this is a collection or you read the single stories in any order, there will always be something new to discover.

One may find the words "bleak" and "dark" to describe SCORCH ATLAS, and though that's easy, you can certainly find truth in that. But there's so much more to this book that unfolds with repeated readings. Most of the narrators are a part of a certain family--a mother, a daughter, a son. And though these families are different, along with their situations, there's an underlying familial bond in each that adds an element of radiance amidst the darkness. The characters seem destitute in the more narrative stories with initial reads, yet there's a deeply underlying tenderness that comes through with more readings: things that seem to subconsciously fuse together as the novel takes on new meaning as a whole, with the culmination of every story until the end.

The stories are, for the most part, voluminously and unapologetically throat-slashing, yet there's such a poetic beauty to the language that balances out such material (I liken this kind of comparison to some of the horrific violence of the original Suspiria, which is centered around the candy-colored cinematography, striking some oddly corporeal balance of opposite goings-on), making many of the bleak and apocalyptic landscapes seem like there's a chance that things could get turned around, could get better--something which you never actually see coming to fruition, but with the possibilities always indefatigably looming.

And this is a book where every sentence matters. Yet the words don't seem interminably chiseled or forced, but necessary: necessary for communication within such landscapes, within such bizarrely intriguing familial relationships that sometimes both avoid and embrace the idea that something may be worth saving in the end. And if all hope seems lost, the attempts at trying to save whatever can be saved will never cease, no matter how each story may end.

In another's hands, this book could be a complete mess: full of reductive glibness, full of the forced apocalyptic and bizarre--to get a rise out of the reader, or strictly to shock. But there's so much more in these stories, more to be discovered upon subsequent readings, and more to be discovered by the many readers it will have.

One of the wise and thematic and structural moves within this book that needs to also be mentioned is spacing out the piece entitled, "The Many Forms of Rain ____ Sent Upon Us." This was originally written as an entire piece, but each form of rain ("Blood," "Gravel," and "Water" being a few), looking like an extremely tightly constructed prose poem, is spaced expertly between the longer stories. This works on two different levels: it allows the reader a brief respite from the longer pieces, but one can also trace thematically why each form of rain is placed where it is specifically, each one making the links between the stories more engaging.

And even if this book were not the most attractive, the words would be the deciding factor.

However, this is legitimately one of the most gorgeously designed books I've ever had the pleasure of holding in my hands. The book is meant to represent its title--it looks bruised, battered, beaten, burned. The pages look crinkled and water-damaged, and the outside of each page is charred in black. There has been much discussion about what will happen to actual books in the future because of technology. I won't go into any of those arguments, but if there's ever a reason to always have a book in your hand, this is one of those reasons.

Finally, there is certainly a reason that the last form of rain is placed where it is before the brilliant last piece in the book, "Bloom Atlas." This is rain as "Light."

The light is so bright, like every word in this book, that it's literally blinding. The end of "Light" is what will happen to you when you read SCORCH ATLAS: "The house came open. The yard was not there. The street was not there. There was light. The light rained down. It came down on us. It came in all through and through."

Scorch Atlas is a jar. It's a jar in which a writhing snake is successfully captured. It's a jar which is then filled with blood. The snake learns to breathe it. The snake breathes blood. The snake dreams. The snake turns to blood. The blood then learns how to move through the glass of the jar. The blood gets onto your hands. Then into them. You become Scorch Atlas. You dream. You move forward. You hope, live, die, live.

As a work of searing allegory, Scorch Atlas is what we were, what we are, and what we'll always be: propelled and clinging and curious.

Blake Butler has coughed the red spatter and honesty of tuberculosis onto the page and now dares us to read it. Do.

Fantastic novel of interconnected short stories about people trying to survive the apocalypse. Crisp prose and haunting emotion makes this book stand out among most other apocalyptic novels.

SCORCH ATLAS, more than most of Butler's, really has the Brian Evenson dystopia going on. In a completely complimentary. Essentially, take Evenson's DARK PROPERTY and mix it with Cormac McCarthy's THE ROAD, and sprinkle some lush description, and you get SCORCH ATLAS.

Best line (out of so many great ones): "...she hummed in glitches, cuts of hymn he'd never heard..." (pg. 86)

I bought two copies of Scorch Atlas by Blake Butler.

It was an accident, yes, but I am keeping both of them.

Scorch Atlas imagines that certain sentences have not yet been written, and writes them. As far as I can tell, Scorch Atlas does not believe in boundaries in any strict sense.

We should be thankful that Blake Butler is writing fiction, and not using his talent in other ways, like by working for an advertising firm or being a really good lawyer. In Blake Butler, we have a huge and urgent new voice.

I like fiction that doesn't wear its ethical concerns on its sleeve(s), but is full with them. I like fiction that deals with human relationships in an inventive way, yet remains powerful. I like fiction that's built on gorgeous sentences. I like fiction that is what I would call "an aesthetic experience." Scorch Atlas does all this stuff. It's fractured, gaping, a seizure of overlapped stories, and what shines through is incredibly potent, beautiful, important, and something you want to keep with you. You want to carry it in your backpack or whatever wherever you go.

I would buy this book again. Okay?

Post Apocalypse fiction is all the rage right now, what with The Road hitting so big and all. Blake Butler's Scorch Atlas isn't a copy of the flood of end of the world fiction out there. It is something new. The book is billed as a novel, but that isn't quite right. In truth it is a lyrical collection of loosely interwoven stories and vignettes about (different) destroyed worlds.

The book is more about language and image than character or plot. It excels beautifully at shocking and amazing with nearly every sentence. This is one of the best books to hit this year (and this has been a good year for difficult small press books).

A word on the design:

SA is one of the best designed books I've ever seen. It looks destroyed, like a remnant from a dead world. The book itself is an art object.