Sky Saw

“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.