Ashley Crawford

I suspect there may be a method to Blake Butler’s mountains of madness. When, early in Butler’s career, Ben Marcus commented that “Blake Butler, mastermind and visionary, has sneaked up and drugged the American novel” there was no way Marcus could have predicted the extent of the resulting hallucination. And, given we live in the day and age of conspiracy, I believe Butler has a plan to infiltrate every genre of the American novel with his hideously outlandish word-drugs. First came his version of apocalyptic dystopia (all the rage after McCarthy’s 2006 The Road), Scorch Atlas (2009). That was followed by the surreal horror-house of There Is No Year (2011) with its clear nod to David Lynch and Lost Highway (1997) and then family dissolution and nameless imprisonment with nasty dabs of Kafka, Orwell and Foucault via Sky Saw (2012). Three Hundred Million (2014) was Butler’s ‘crime’ novel which read like James Ellroy on really, really bad lysergic acid. Butler followed that up with the bizarre psychological thriller Alice Knott (2020) and now we have his take on Science Fiction, Aannex. Thus, we have apocalyptic dystopia, horror-house surrealism, crime, psychological thriller and Sci Fi and his website threatens something called UXA.GOV (novel) 2024 which, judging by the title is possibly some high-tech government conspiracy type thing. So, Marcus was right, Butler is drugging every genre of the American novel – and that is reason to celebrate. But, to Aannex. If this is Sci Fi it is not the science fiction of my childhood. It’s not even the Sci Fi of Philip K Dick or J.G. Ballard at their weirdest, and that could get pretty weird. It may have moments of commonality with Semiotext(e) SF, the science fiction anthology released in 1989 and edited by Rudy Rucker, Peter Lamborn Wilson and Robert Anton Wilson and including short stories by Ballard, William S. Burroughs, William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and others but I suspect they may have rejected Butler as being too out there. Aannex doesn’t just drug the genre, it decimates it. In many ways Aannex is Deleuze’s Desiring Machine meeting Foucault’s Guillotine all covered with Burroughs’ diseased ejaculate. In other ways it is Gravity’s Rainbow meeting Dhalgren and deciding to kick Asimov out of the house, if not the universe. But its true precursor is undoubtably, in terms of structure, innovation and experimentation is James Joyce’s 1939 wonder Finnegans Wake which aptly pre-empted the emergent apparatus of television which he dubbed “the bairdboard bombardment screen” and, like Butler, tended to create his own verbiage, the “faroscope,” “teleframe” and “teilweisioned.” But at times Butler simply goes into strange forms of glossolalia, almost but not quite, gobbledygook, which other contemporary American authors such as Joshua Cohen, Jack O’Connell, Ben Marcus and Jeff Vandermeer have all dabbled in and quickly fled. But at the end of the day, I suspect Butler is bizarrely channelling a wet dream of Roger Eugene Ailes, the American television executive and media consultant who was chairman and CEO of Fox News, for what could be more Sci Fi than that?