Blake's writing is often original, chilling, and dark, and several of the stories are surprisingly good. However, I feel as if each story was a collective consciousness, a singular voice, rather than a series of characters as seem intended. The whole thing, despite its relative brevity, dragged on telling me over and over again "the end of the world is gonna be full of mud and shit and pain with no light or hope in sight." ( )

I picked this up at the end of 2019. I have just finished reading it. Blake Butler's Scorch Atlas is devastating. I had the (fortune?) fortune, yes! to have read this alongside Robert G. Penner's forthcoming Strange Labour and to have read it after reading Jeff Vandermeer's Borne, Strangebird, and Dead Astronauts and Andrew Krivak's The bear. If there was ever a pairing of just out there weird devastating goodness it is Scorch Atlas and the aforementioned novels. The stories are highly experimental in form and prose and yet deeply, to this reader, affecting. It is urgent, bleak, writing.

Blake Butler is weird. Deeply wonderfully devastatingly and bewilderingly - weird. The series of stories that makes up Scorch Atlas is, and I think nobody will agree with this - most of all the writer, Ray Bradbury's the Martian Chronicles by way of climate change themes while tapping into the same mycological fiction drugs as Vandermeer while tapping into the madness of Ballard. It's a headlong dive into the bleak and bizarre by way of family and climate change and also all sorts of things fall from the sky and there is a child growing absurdly large in the attic.

Its a weird one. Once you start reading you will not be able to look away. You will want to look away. You will not be able to do it. ( )

Sometime in the late 1990s our CFO gave me tickets for Rigoletto. I asked M if she wanted to go, she paused and shrugged. It was no surprise that she dyed her hair bright orange and inserted a rather tribal ring through septum. I wore a Radiohead t-shirt. We arrived conveying absolute indifference, then somewhere along the way despite the patrician trappings, I found myself enraptured.

This did not happen when reading Scorch Atlas.

This "novel" in stories consists of tendrils of dread and putrefaction, a pillaging of the thesaurus for synonyms of decay. Quick, the children have went cannibal. It won't stop raining and my uncle won't put his pants back on. Before anyone becomes pissy and talks of literary cubism, I'd direct them to Coover's masterful The Babysitter. That's how such is accomplished.

There is one remarkable turn in the book and it is a curator description of a series of snapshots, suffering myriad effects of water damage. One can see Hemingway's baby shoes in that resilient page. ( )

As I think of this book in retrospect, my opinion of it has softened some. I did not like it at all at first; I felt the stories had no character development, that there was not a lot internal logic to any of the them, and that everything was told in an exaggerated 'gross-out' style. The fact is, this is world actively in the throes of the apocalypse, a realm coated with pus, mud, and grease, it's inhabitants deformed, dead, dying, and bloated with decay. It was, indeed, 152 pages of unbroken doom and gloom. However, I have come to realize; that is exactly what it means to be. Each event being the apotheosis of tragedy, until the next comes along trying to top the last in terms of unrelieved pain and despair. What else is the apocalypse going to be? ( )

Not so much a novel as a mood piece.
The book is a series of short pieces which all follow similar themes (think: rot, bloating, pustulence).
If the author had been in one of my creative writing seminars in college, and this work was what he presented in class, I would have thought it very promising. However, I would not have thought it was ready for a publisher. It has a very unedited feel. The author likes to use words in unusual ways. Sometimes, it works, and gives a poetic touch to the prose. At other times (frequently), I found myself jarred out of the flow, asking "Does he know the definition of the word?" or, "That's not actually an adjective, you know?"
At the end, I was left feeling somewhat unsatisfied - I didn't really feel like the work went anywhere, or had anything definite to say. There're some issues running through it - problems with family relationships and pregnancy are the big ones - but I suspect that the gross-out factor was the book's raison d'etre, rather than being a tool used in service to a concept.

The visual presentation was nice, however. I liked that all the pages were different, and that the design of the pages matches the content.

I'd recommend this to fans of David Lynch's 'Eraserhead.' ( )