Available on 17 January, 2012

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Readings:
KGB, Philadelphia, Book Court, McNally Jackson, Austin, Denver, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles – UCLA Hammer, Los Angeles – Skylight, Chicago, Iowa, Syracuse, Ithaca… Complete List of Events

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Early reviews:
Publisher’s Weekly, Vanity Fair, Bookforum, HTML Giant, Booklist (see below), Library Journal, HTML Giant 2, Kirkus

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Excerpts:
Harper’s, Bomb

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Audio:
Poets & Writers

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Facebook

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Pre-order:
Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iBookstore, IndieBound, McNally Jackson, Powell’s

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Interviews:

Harper’s, The New Yorker, Knopf, We Are Champion, HTML Giant, The Man Game

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Early comments:

“Language kills in Marcus’s audacious new work of fiction, a richly allusive look at a world transformed by a new form of illness . . . Biblical in its Old Testament sense of wrath, Marcus’s novel twists America’s quotidian existence into something recognizable yet wholly alien to our experience.”
—Publishers Weekly (Starred review and Pick of the week)

“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 ourworld—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

“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

“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

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BOOKLIST (Starred Review)
Issue: December 15, 2011

The Flame Alphabet

Teenagers can be described as toxic, no doubt about it. But in Marcus’ speculative tale, teens are literally poisoning their parents each time they speak. This ingenious and provoking premise enables the boldly imaginative Marcus (Notable American Women, 2001), recipient of a remarkable array of major literary awards, to explore the paradoxes of family and how the need to communicate can go utterly wrong. As this confounding, heartrending plague spreads from Jewish families to the general population, gravely ill adults flee; teens, who take to terrorizing adults with megaphones, are quarantined; and society breaks down. Claire and Sam, the ailing parents of virulently weaponized Esther, belong to a secret sect of “forest Judaism,” which involves listening to mysterious transmissions emitted from the earth. Their tiny, sylvan synagogue becomes the focus of an aggressive stranger, who directs a grim work camp hastily assembled to find a cure for this catastrophic affliction at any cost. Marcus conducts a febrile and erudite inquiry into “the threat of language,” offering incandescent insights into ancient alphabets and mysticism, ostracism and exodus, incarceration with Holocaust echoes, and Kafkaesque behavioral science. Ultimately, the suspenseful, if excessively procedural, apocalyptical plot serves as a vehicle for Marcus’ blazing metaphysical inquiry into expression, meaning, self, love, and civilization.

— Donna Seaman

Episode 9 was about time passing in my father’s city, the old place. The screen was on your lap so I got close.  This was another place, and a time too. The problem of PST and EST. Of new old cities. Your persistent Southern drawl. Only here could you wear a pink shirt and sell cupcakes. Only now could I wake in a big house, see the red bridge, and feel sore.

The dealers on their corners had the whispers. OC, they said. OC, they said. And Glow.

Vermin, buds from Mendocino, pills that sent me to the sun. I left a colder climate for this place. We ate pie though! We talked about sea light and I tucked my legs under. The man on the sidewalk had his head in the gutter and his seizures were gentle like waves. Then came fog, lapping.

You watched the screen; I watched you. We were everyday viewers by then. In Episode 18 the plane moved fast and then dinosaurs were there.

You met me at SFO. We’d met at JFK, SEA, BDL and OAK. This was like that but more. More than anything, we wanted our bodies to care. We’d become skilled at dialing numbers. We excelled at counting hours, always plus or minus three.

Your friend inked skin on 20^th and Florida. Once we slept on her floor and you reached for me in a hard way. Once you pushed your thumbs into my ribs and bit. You were gone in the morning but the bridge was there. Did you know I was born near this town?

We ran through the big place. The octopus was not in its tank but in the dome the air was hot and things were thick and thriving. In the glass dome, we ran like hamsters. We leaned back in chairs that made us lean back. It got dark and planets moved. We learned that eight are the minutes it takes sunlight. I left a brighter city for your face.

You’d take whatever to feel the good thing. You said I could fly too. Maybe roaches roamed the walls or they didn’t. Episode 17 was about war. We watched until late in the day when fog gave up and sun shot through your blinds, then we marched up hills into the red ball falling. People hung from trolleys, which moved faster than us. You said sometimes I dream about Nazis. I said stranger men have touched me. We were mean things then, drinking wine in the small room, and I felt like a child. You said sorry. I said this will all be fiction anyway.

So I went back to the airport, which was easy enough.

In this place, you closed when I opened. In this time, sun came out at dusk. I said we are not thick or thriving. Maybe I tried to hold you but your hand was on the trunk. We’ve stood like this at Arrivals. We’ve stood like this at Departures. How much do we hate Baggage Claim?

Back toward my father’s city where light is light until it’s night. A screen is in the seat. I watch a clock, a score, ten men and an orange ball. The plane races the sun, which will always win by three. Sometimes I think you chose me, though I’m sure that I exploit you. Stowed items shift in transit, say the ladies in their gray. So look for me when sun passes over the blue dome. I’ll look for you there too.

Amanda Shapiro lives in Durham, North Carolina. “Twilight Zones” is part of a recently completed collection of short stories called The Distance That You Love. She has an MFA from Columbia University, and her work has been published in Porchlight.

Erin Cosgrove is making the book trailer for The Flame Alphabet.  It should be finished in the next few weeks.  For now, here’s another still:

The Flame Alphabet will be published by Knopf in January of 2012.

After work and into late evening, Megan walks. She wears thick, navy colored sweatpants with the white letters T.O.U.G.H. stretched and cracked running the left thigh. Gray sneakers laced tight. Like the sweatpants, her son bought the shirt she wears – a lumpy orange colored thing possessing a centered sun with googly eyes, a giant smiling mouth, and two stick-legs pushed into white shoes. This is Megan’s exercise outfit regardless of the weather. When she’s done, covered in a heavy under-layer sweat, she undresses, neatly folds the sweatpants and shirt, and places them in a stack with the sneakers on top in the closet for the next day. Clothing is washed on Sunday mornings. Laundry day.

Megan lives three miles outside downtown Ellsworth in the suburbs, which is a term she enjoys. She pronounces the word Sub-urb. Her house is located on Babbling Brook Lane. The home is small and white with a healthy front lawn and a mailbox corkscrewed in flowers a woman once took a photograph of.

Megan power-walks with arms pumping. Her legs move slow, she raises the knees high and brings the feet down hard. Her odd outside walk is a result of walking in place, from the video she played each morning during the winter months. When cars pass, two out of three drivers subconsciously slow down, their foot easing off the gas. They stare at her exaggerated exhales, her knees to bright orange covered breasts, the arms upper-cutting a barrage of opponents. Megan is short, squat, heavyset, the motions so serious drivers can’t help but laugh and save the night for guilt. She’s a sight demanding attention and she is totally unaware.

Megan walks an area called The Bend – a U shaped road extending over a cliff, going further into the farm than all other city points. When the road starts to curve and she can turn to her left and behold the little brown shacks of the farm, Megan knows she has completed half her walk.

A turquoise blob oozes upward from the horizon before splintering into thin creases that arch like tentacles above. This type of sky happens several times a year. Megan’s favorite. She admires the colors and wipes the sweat from her forehead with a forearm. The air is thick with heat that is unwilling to break even in late evening.

Tall grasses lean away from a guardrail, wanting to hide from the sun.

Megan walks in place at the peak of The Bend. She looks at the farm, at the black swirl of crystal mine, a few green trucks sixty years old rumbling through the dusty streets.

Homes, the trucks, children playing tag in a patch of dirt, wheelbarrows on their side in front yards, metal fences, stone curbs, and the mine itself, all glazed over with the color from the sky, a weird metallic blue.

She sees a child covered in black-dust wearing red shorts running like a dog.

Megan forgot her water bottle at home even though she made sure to wear the nylon belt with the holster. Her throat has been gathering gunk ever since she turned off her street. Whatever is climbing up her throat needs to go someplace, so Megan spits over the guardrail and in the direction of the dog-child. Nearby, a grown man playing with a radio controlled car raises an eyebrow, smirks.

She walks in place, heart-rate peaked, thread of spit on her chin she doesn’t notice through the sweat, knees pumping high.

The dog-child stands and barks.

The distance down the cliff is substantial, but Megan thinks maybe, possibly, the dog-child thought she spit at her. She waves at the dog-child and mouths the words sorry about that. The dog-child howls on two feet. Megan breaks from her stationary marching-band motion, waves again, and finishes the rest of her walk in a near jog, the sides of her stomach spiked with pain, her hair a brown mop of dried frizz.

When Megan is inside her home she undresses.

In the shower she catches her breath.

In bed she can’t sleep but is safe.

Megan lies under the covers on her back, arms flat against her sides. She’ll have nightmares of the dog-child as a miniature dog-child running the length of her body. The miniature dog-child will mouth-dig chunks from her flesh and spit the gnarled squares into the sky, her favorite colored sky, above her thighs. Waiting inside the nightmare is a second nightmare about work. It’s the nightmare with Megan sitting at her computer in the office and the entire ceiling is a bed of white light. She’s alone in the office. The computer screen is black, and in the center, at a far distance, is a seven-year-old Megan, the body glowing red, waving at her.

Shane Jones lives in upstate New York. His first novel, Light Boxes, was originally published by Publishing Genius Press and reprinted by Penguin in 2010. Light Boxes has been translated in seven languages and was named an NPR best book of the year. In 2012 Penguin will release a new novel, Daniel Fights A Hurricane. Shane is also the author of the novella The Failure Six.

Cover design by Peter Mendelsund.

The Flame Alphabet will be published by Knopf in January 2012.

Here is an excerpt.

There are some details about the book in the following interviews:

The New Yorker, We Are Champion, HTML Giant, The Man Game

Pre-order The Flame Alphabet:

Amazon, Barnes & Noble, McNally Jackson, Tattered Cover, Indie Bound

A film still from the trailer for The Flame Alphabet, which is being made by Erin Cosgrove.

Joe Jar-E the Half-Meme came over late one night to go down to the river, where the Sex Caesar had docked his pontoon boat filled with all those sex sacs. He had a fresh sign hanging out front reading MANSEX: 50 UNITS, NANOSEX: 200 units.

Never the scrip for the NanoSex, always only the ManSex, with the same old sex sacs I’d had before. But Joe Jar-E had something different in mind, and he said to me, “Hey, you heard about this nano way to fuck? It’s like you fuck but inside so they just open up and you get inside and you fuck inside, all loaded up inside.”

“My scrip’s a little low,” I said, “It so near the trimming and all…”

But Joe Jar-E insisted. “This one’s on me,” he said, and I didn’t exactly ask questions.

We got there and said we wanted the “nano way”, and Sex Caesar led us into the shack on top the pontoon where he kept the sex sacs, flesh grafts pulsating while oily brackish mucous leaked out.

Sex Caesar held the grafts open, and as we climbed in he chanted, “That’s right, get on in, and huddle up, just like a baby.”

Much later, after I climbed out, I heard voices on the dock, a man saying, “Il lanca egalement plusieurs, fingering in stationary sex sacs. Forget the past, I always say.”

“Pensa que le poids sur son bras…” responded a woman sitting next to him. “Anyway, I touched us down, the other side of the Line, that’s the area we operated in back then, least likely place for the Specialty to look.”

Some other feed flesh jumped off a nearby bridge into water below, caused a loud splash. The man looked around, suddenly alert, spotted us in the shadows. He jumped from his seat and yelled, “We see you, ain’t no use hiding over there.”

We crept closer, still obscure in the shadows.

“Okay, Let’s see them flesh crystals, kid.”

Joe Jar-E, notorious for the failure to produce such crystals when required, said, “Sorry, sir, I left them with my mother-flesh.”

“Mother-flesh,” the man repeated, and spit, and then as an aside to his companion, “What kind of a backwater have we Floated ourselves into…”

The woman at the table leaned toward us, “Don’t mind Blud-Bod, he’s just rattled from the Float. We know you’re not Flesh Regulators.”

“Don’t be too sure yet, Vagi-Con,” Blud-Bod said.

“Naw,” she said. “Sex Caesar don’t let flesh like that into his place. These guys are simple feed-flesh.”

Blud-Bod sat back down, and turning to us, said, “Okay. Uh, sorry about that. Flesh Regulator patrols is tough around here. You two should sit down with us, if you want.”

We climbed between the wooden rails. Our appearance in the light set Blud-Bod going, “Now, there’s a nubile network of odds and ends if I’ve ever seen one.” His eyes roved across the folds and ripples of my overgrown trim-flesh, positively dripping off me. “Come closer to ol’ Blud-Bod,” he said. “I’d like a good sense of that flesh real up and close.”

“You oughtn’t speak in such manner, Blud-Bod, you know our internal rules…” Vagi-Con said, trailing off.

But Blud-Bod, not to be stopped, pulled up his shirt and pulled out a vastly overdeveloped homologic skin-sponge, replete with clustered basal ganglia grafted directly onto his belly. The skin-sponge, beating like a second—and external—heart, was wrapped loosely in foamy plastic, allowing discharge to seep through and create runny pools on the tabletop.

I’d not quite realized that Blud-Bod was this way, and felt myself unable to remove my eyes from the slick, quivering skin-sponge.

Noticing my interest, Blud-Bod raised his eyebrows. “Now. Why don’t you give my skin-sponge a real run-down, feed-flesh?”

I didn’t have half a chance though.

“I said, kill it, Blud-Bod!” Vagi-Con interrupted loudly, sharply.

“Oh, okay,” Blud-Bod laughed and shrugged, “For now.”

Regaining her composure, Vagi-Con leaned toward us, “You two ever hear of a guy goes by Black Nosferatu? A true-flesh trader?”

“Naw,” said Joe Jar-E. “Ain’t nobody like that here, this about as crazy as things get and that’s only every few months when the Sex Caesar comes ‘round.”

They looked disappointed at that. Vagi-Con forced a smile, said, “But we know he’s here, he might just be real secret or something.”

“Not the Black Nosferatu I know”, said Blud-Bod, “He’s a fiend for flesh, can’t help himself. He lacks a certain flair for subtlety. If he’s here they’d know.”

Vagi-Con shook her head sadly. “I think our Float got real fucked up. I don’t think we’re exactly where we think we are.”

Then under my tank top, an itch inside the fold of some undulating layer of flesh, I felt it fall out and unroll itself. Vagi-Con noticed it, too: “I guess your trim-dates are near, right?”

“Yep,” I replied, “Any day…I hope.”

“You kids are real sweet,” said Vagi-Con, “You should come on with us.”

Blud-Bod nodded at Vagi-Con, added, “There’s a few transgressor modules, some concubine RNA’s I can tap out. That’s what you’ll want to do, not have to worry about this trimming anymore. At least not too much…”

I looked at Joe Jar-E. What business did he have with a band of Flesh Scanners? Half-Meme of Half-Memes if I ever saw one, he couldn’t Float, forget about even passing a solid flesh scan.

Joe Jar-E touched my shoulder, nodded, and I knew what he meant, so I said, “Okay. I’ll Float with you.”

Vagi-Con narrowed her eyes, “…and him?”

Joe Jar-E shook his head.

“He ain’t ready yet,” I said.

“Let’s get on out of here, then,” said Blud-Bod.

From a wet-skin case he removed a hard organ, thin strips of intestines wound around a small portable generator, every inch the meat-engine.

“Okay Vagi-Con,” he said, assuming suddenly a most clinical visage. “Let me borrow your void-organ.”

She pulled up her shirt. Blud-Bod plugged the flesh scanner directly past the soft mucous membrane lining of the dilated orifice on her stomach. Vagi-Con lurched backward. Blud-Bod labored to keep the scanner plugged into the void-organ, as it was soon slick with putrid black jelly-fluid.

After a moment, he pulled the scanner out of Vagi-Con’s void-organ.

“We got a reading,” he said.

“What is it?”

“Says negative. No Black Nosferatu here.”

“I knew it,” said Vagi-Con. She turned to Blud-Bod. “Well, you want another go at those sex sacs?”

“There’ll be time for that later,” he said, and winked in my direction.

Vagi-Con turned toward the road, and took a few steps before realizing we hadn’t followed her.

“Moto-Skiff’s tucked in a swamp just up a ways,” she said. “We can walk on over and Float up the coastline from there.”

She began again, and Blud-Bod ran after her.

“Walk a little with me, huh?” I said to Joe Jar-E.

We walked at a steady length behind them without speaking. Electrical towers rose above the swamp trees. The sun diverged with its reflection on the river and dank fertile swamps, and after awhile Joe Jar-E tugged on my sleeve.

“I reckon I got to get on back home,” he said.

“Figured that,” I said.

He held out his hand, revealed his small pile of scuffed and clouded flesh crystals.

“You had your flesh crystals all along?” I said.

“You know I can’t never remember nothing,” he shrugged, “Besides, can’t just show ‘em off to just anybody, right?”

He turned his hand over, dropped the flesh crystals into my palm.

“You don’t want them?”

“I’ll get more, ain’t hardly a need for ‘em around here. Just something of a reminder for you.”

Then he left, and I went nearly the opposite way.

I kept those flesh crystals in my pocket, I kept them by my side, on my person, as near inside me as possible because I found life Floating with the Flesh Scanners an exercise in mutability, and the flesh crystals a dim yet sure source of constancy. And somehow to get away from the swamp wasn’t enough. No, in fact, you had to hold a piece of it with you.

Aaron Winslow is a writer, archivist, editor, and student living in New York.