Sky Saw
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
"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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
For the apocalyptically minded Butler, language isn't employed simply to tell a story, but to register decay and the prose of his latest novel is so meticulous, claustrophobic, and virtuosic that it's almost painful to read. But it's a pain that his fans, for whom Butler is the 21st-century answer to William S. Burroughs, have come to crave. In a nightmarish landscape of filthy, flickering rooms, unrelenting cameras, and writhing bodies under a hallucinatory sky, a supposedly omnipotent "Cone" holds sway over a mass of drones. Person 1180 gives birth to a large number of horrifying children she indoctrinates with a book of disappearing words, while sinister men sneak into her house at night. Her onetime husband, Person 811, awakens far from home and tries to find his way back through memory and rancid techno-biological detritus, while being pursued by a headless doppelg nger. But the details of Blake's dystopia are more often suggested than stated and words are as likely to turn into birds, skin to rupture, the air to become liquid poison. Tidy paragraphs disassemble and all but ooze across the page, as Butler (Nothing) replicates the sensory experience of his mutating panorama at the sentence level. For readers willing to annihilate their boundaries, this is the ideal entry point.
