Scorch Atlas

Scorch Atlas by Blake Butler
Featherproof Books, 2009, 188 pages, $14.95

Scorch Atlas is a novel composed of linked stories with the power to influence dreams. This reviewer, at least, found his sleep disturbed by Blake Butler’s visions of decay, blasted landscapes, and skies that rain blood, dust, insects, and other oddities. The book depicts a world irrevocably changed due to unexplained natural disasters, resulting in the breakdown of nature, language, human relationships, and even time. In the story “Bath or Mud or Reclamation…” a cow “stood blinking under an overpass, its enormous head cocked to watch me come. In its mottled side skin, I saw a face splotched. I saw someone opening their mouth. Inside the mouth, I heard my brothers screaming.” One is treated to renderings of “whole buildings made to dander,” “schools of jellyfish beat to vaseline,” and an ink rain: “long squirts of liquid in stretched blue pyramids descending on the yard.”

The work is more than an accumulation of images-it disturbs and intrigues by what it leaves out. Consider: “One boy in our neighborhood had his eye out. You should have seen what grew back in.” Or the opening line from “Static”: “The earth had learned to scratch its back.” The astounding prose of Scorch Atlas works to defamiliarize, and mirrors the decay of language within its world. In “Want For Wish For Nowhere,” a monstrous child acquires an anomalous language; in “Bloom Atlas” the cat learns an “awful” one. In “Bath or Mud or Reclamation…” the narrator forgets family members’ names, as well as his own, and gradually loses the concept of family, telling himself, “I kept saying it aloud: Brothers-those guys with eyes the same as mine.” From the shocking, visceral, and often bleak subject matter of the novel emerges an effect of wonder, just as a “great unveiling” of caterpillars yields “ten billion butterflies humming in the sun, fluttering so loud you couldn’t think.”

-reviewed by Brooks Sterritt