Blake Butler’s Scorch Atlas is, at first glance, a collection of linked stories. Whatever expectations that format sets up in your mind, this book is not what you think it will be. It is not a compilation of discrete stories sharing, perhaps, a common character or place. It is not a novel-in-stories (whatever that is, besides a marketing tool, but bear with me here).

Scorch Atlas is an artifact from a potential, horrific future. It shows slivers of lives of people not after an apocalypse, but during. These are not survivors’ stories. We are not reading these people’s stories after they’ve already come through the other side. They’re in it, right down in it. The ash and the water and the mud, the strange diseases that cause their skin to mold and bubble, that causes babies to grow rinds and pelts… Butler sinks us down there with them: ordinary people with ordinary lives, unable to make any more sense out of what has become of their world than we can. There is no “how” in this book, no “why.” There is only the sure fact that the world has gone to hell, with no end in sight.

Butler’s prose is precise and muscular. The imagery is unrelenting. The suffering of the characters is unrelenting. What makes it hurt more is also what makes it so very good: all the horror is grounded in love and longing. Each main character tries to hold on to what they can of the way things were before, and what they’re grasping for are other people, or their memories of other people. Of family. Central to many of these stories is the love of mother for child, the love of child for mother. It’s gorgeous, and heartbreaking.

I must admit, it hurt me at times to read this book. It took me longer than I thought it would to read, because it hurt. I’ve been accused in the past of being a bad reader because I am an emotional reader. So be it. I am an emotional reader. I want to have a strong emotional response to whatever I’m reading. If I can only feel it in my brain, I have little use for it.

No danger of that with Scorch Atlas. My god…this book.

I also have to say, Scorch Atlas is one of the most beautifully, thoughtfully designed books I’ve ever held in my hands. Publishers are worried about the whole e-book thing? Well, then we need more books like this. Books as objects of art, with designs that not just honor the content but actually add to the reading experience.

You can order it here. An interview with Blake Butler will follow soon.