Synopses & Reviews
In
The Flame Alphabet, the most maniacally gifted writer of our generation delivers a work of heartbreak and horror, a novel about how far we will go, and the sorrows we will endure, in order to protect our families.
A terrible epidemic has struck the country and the sound of children's speech has become lethal. Radio transmissions from strange sources indicate that people are going into hiding. All Sam and Claire need to do is look around the neighborhood: In the park, parents wither beneath the powerful screams of their children. At night, suburban side streets become routes of shameful escape for fathers trying to get outside the radius of affliction.
With Claire nearing collapse, it seems their only means of survival is to flee from their daughter, Esther, who laughs at her parents' sickness, unaware that in just a few years she, too, will be susceptible to the language toxicity. But Sam and Claire find it isn't so easy to leave the daughter they still love, even as they waste away from her malevolent speech. On the eve of their departure, Claire mysteriously disappears, and Sam, determined to find a cure for this new toxic language, presses on alone into a world beyond recognition.
The Flame Alphabet invites the question: What is left of civilization when we lose the ability to communicate with those we love? Both morally engaged and wickedly entertaining, a gripping page-turner as strange as it is moving, this intellectual horror story ensures Ben Marcus's position in the first rank of American novelists.
Review
"Echoes of Ballard’s insanely sane narrators, echoes of Kafka’s terrible gift for metaphor, echoes of David Lynch, William Burroughs, Robert Walser, Bruno Schulz and Mary Shelley: a world of echoes and re-echoes — I mean our world — out of which the sanely insane genius of Ben Marcus somehow manages to wrest something new and unheard of. And yet as I read The Flame Alphabet, late into the night, feverishly turning the pages, I felt myself, increasingly, in the presence of the classic." Michael Chabon
Review
"The Flame Alphabet drags the contemporary novel — kicking, screaming, and foaming at the mouth — back towards the track it should be following. Ben Marcus makes language as toxic as it is seductive — a virus that comes from much closer to home than we suspected." Tom McCarthy
Review
"Ben Marcus is the rarest kind of writer: a necessary one. It's become impossible to imagine the literary world — the world itself — without his daring, mind-bending and heartbreaking writing." Jonathan Safran Foer
Synopsis
From one of the most innovative and important writers of his generation: a brilliant, mesmerizingly dark new novel in which the speech of children is killing their parents.
At first it's just Jews then everyone. People are leaving their families to survive. Sam's wife, Claire, is already stricken and near death. In a year or two, as she grows into adulthood, their daughter, Esther, too, will become a victim. Sam and Claire decide to leave Esther on her own, hoping a "cure" will miraculously appear. Sam's car is waved off the road at a government-run laboratory where horrific tests are being conducted to create non-lethal speech. Throngs bang on the doors to be subject volunteers; they're all carried out half-dead. When Sam realizes what's going on, he makes a desperate escape, vowing that if he dies it will be with his family, the only refuge of sanity and love.
Ben Marcus's nightmarish vision is both completely alien and frighteningly familiar.
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About the Author
Ben Marcus is the author of three books of fiction:
Notable American Women,
The Father Costume, and
The Age of Wire and String, and he is the editor of
The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories. His stories have appeared in
Harper’s Magazine, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, Tin House, and
Conjunctions. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, and awards from the Creative Capital Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in New York City and Maine.
www.benmarcus.com