Blake Butler – författare

"Butler is an original force who is fearless with form. . . . [an] inventive and deeply promising young author." —Time Out New York

"[Butler''s] sentences. . . twist and evolve, and there''s a perverse joy that comes from watching just how his paragraphs are shaped, of tracing their contractions and rhythms." —Flavorpill

With echoes of Justin Taylor, Tony O’Neill, and Dennis Cooper, breakout novelist Blake Butler delivers a wildly inventive, impressionistic novel of family, sickness, and the wrenching birth of art. Evocative of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves and the films of David Lynch, There Is No Year offers a fractured, dystopian parable about the struggle and survival of art, identity, and family. As the Toronto Globe and Mail says, “if the distortion and feedback of Butler''s intense riffing is too loud, you may very well be too boring.”

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 metal head 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.

"If there''s a more thoroughly brilliant and exciting new writer than Blake Butler . . . well, there just isn''t."—Dennis Cooper

"Blake Butler, mastermind and visionary, has sneaked up and drugged the American novel."—Ben Marcus

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

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

Someday I plan to die.

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

Blake Butler is the author of Ever, Scorch Atlas, There Is No Year, and Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia. He is the editor of the literary blog HTMLGIANT.