A review by sasha_fletcher
Scorch Atlas by Blake Butler

5.0

generally it is safe to say i stay away from the grotesque. from the things that seem to consume blake butler and say gary lutz. they tell me "In modern English, grotesque has come to be used as a general adjective for the strange, fantastic, ugly, incongruous, unpleasant, or bizarre." blake butler i don't feel safe when i read your writing all of the time. but like with lutz, and sometimes more so because of how tightly wound lutz's words are, but what it is is that i am dragged, sentence by sentence, inch by inch, into your worlds and every moment inside of them bristles with this strange magic i don't feel in any way comfortable around, and because of these words, the ones you picked from your head and put on the page, all i can do is awe at it. at this strange and bristling and wonderful terror.