Alice Knott: A Novel

This might be Blake Butler’s best book yet. As you would expect it’s weird, hallucinatory, and disturbing—memories exteriorized. On the level of the sentence it’s pure beauty. Nobody writes like this.

Alice Knott is a great idea of a book that just didn't pay off. I couldn't fall into this book and that is what it would take for this to have really come together. Unfortunately, there were moments that it seemed like it was going to get really interesting and then it would drone on. Overwriting does in another one. Which is too bad, because the underlying story was actually really good. Alice Knott and her life were fascinating when you strip it down.

This terrifying, at times utterly nauseating and scabrous novel begins with a series of murders so grotesque as to be unimaginable. The victims’ skins are torched, burnt to raw carbon, their flesh is slashed, their epidermis is punched and pummelled and bruised to a point beyond recognition. They are urinated on and humiliated in ways unimaginable. And they suffer it all in silence. For They are Art. We can say goodbye to Goya’s masterful Saturn Devouring His Son (a personal favourite) and any number of other masterpieces. In a strange way one seems to watch, rather than read, these atrocities and it is a society of the spectacle even Guy Debord would blanch at. Blake Butler has crossed the line and in doing so created his own horrendous masterpiece. To be sure this is Alice in Wonderland, but it is a wonderland of violence, schizophrenia, delusion and dementia. Although one can sense Butler’s influences – his own struggles with insomnia, the cinematic weirdness of Lynch and Cronenberg, the savagery of Michael Gira’s music, and most especially the psych-fi of J.G. Ballard’s tortured protagonists, the voice is Butler's alone. It must be said that I have been something of a Blake Butler fan since his first book, Scorch Atlas, in 2009. But, with Alice Knott, Butler has surpassed himself. Read at your psychological peril.

hated it. worse than walden. terrible writer. extremely confusing. awful sentence structure. gave me a physical headache. my eyes blurred. absolutely the worst book ive ever read.