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A review by aleffert
The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus
4.0
This has a nice science fiction premise: Children acquire a disease where speaking causes an actual illness in adults. It starts from there and gets weirder and freakin' weirder. The disease spreads. The very notion of communication is called into question. Society is deeply fucked.
The whole thing is suffused with an intense visceral anxiety that reflects the toxic language of the book. It's full of bodily fluids and uncomfortable feelings. Reading it wasn't painful or difficult per se, indeed, it was quite a bit more readable than The Age of String and Wire, which I mostly enjoyed despite its opacity, but reading this made me kind of ick.
There are all these juicy themes running around - communication between generations, solitude, the power of symbols and names, but they all kind of hover on the edge of saying anything specific. Which, is totally allowed, but felt just slightly on the wrong side of coherence.
The characters are kind of flat and awful.
I think I liked this. Parts of it were amazing. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to anyone. But if you can deal with a certain amount of Experimental, it has a lot of positive qualities.
The whole thing is suffused with an intense visceral anxiety that reflects the toxic language of the book. It's full of bodily fluids and uncomfortable feelings. Reading it wasn't painful or difficult per se, indeed, it was quite a bit more readable than The Age of String and Wire, which I mostly enjoyed despite its opacity, but reading this made me kind of ick.
There are all these juicy themes running around - communication between generations, solitude, the power of symbols and names, but they all kind of hover on the edge of saying anything specific. Which, is totally allowed, but felt just slightly on the wrong side of coherence.
The characters are kind of flat and awful.
I think I liked this. Parts of it were amazing. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to anyone. But if you can deal with a certain amount of Experimental, it has a lot of positive qualities.