Blake Butler isn’t for everyone. His work is at the front of a particular subset of indie lit marked by dark, masculine, unsentimental, unapologetically experimental prose. His latest book, 300,000,000, is a vertiginous decent into a nightmarish America.
[His] influences read like an encyclopedia of depravity: Dennis Cooper’s teen killers, the cryptic blather of “True Detective’s” Reggie Ledoux, Harmony Korine’s unscripted portraits of freaks and weirdos and the remorseless cruelty of Jim Goad’s serial killer zine, Answer Me!
I read the book during one feverish, unseasonably warm week in San Diego. I didn’t have a fever, I wasn’t sick per se, but this book changed me. While I was reading it I felt like Blake’s dark vision was serving as a kind of conduit for all of America’s many sicknesses. I felt polluted and provoked. One thing that concerns me about the book is that I think that it could prove to be exceptionally troubling for individuals with less than optimal brain health, i.e. I believe that for some troubled readers this book could trigger a psychotic break. I can’t imagine what it cost Butler to write prose like this:
And with each failure, the same reversal of electricity came sucking through me, evacuating, leaving marked back in my blood another hope I’d given away in the name of nothing.
You can read the rest of my review in the Los Angeles Times.