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There Is No Year

3.55 of 5 stars 3.55 · rating details · 400 ratings · 106 reviews

A family of three: father, mother, son.

A house that gives them shelter but shapes their nightmares.

An illness that nearly arrested the past, and looms over the future.

A second family--a copy family. Mirror bodies.

Events on the horizon: a hole, a box, a light, a girl.

Holes in houses. Holes in speaking. Holes in flesh.

Memories that deceive and figures that tempt and lure and...more

Paperback, 402 pages

Published April 5th 2011 by Harper Perennial (first published April 1st 2011)

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Beautiful Book Covers of 2011

340th out of 744 books — 3,775 voters

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

Metamorphosis and Other Stories by Franz Kafka

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Best Surrealist Literature

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Community Reviews

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Aug 16, 2012 Eddie Watkins rated it 4 of 5 stars

For all its disturbing imagery – a mailbox stuffed with an ever-replenishing supply of live caterpillars, closets full of hair, enigmatic black shape-shifting structures that swell to fill yards and subsume houses, repeated instances of mirrors reflecting mirrors causing psychic quagmires, swarming ants invading houses, etc. – I found this book very comforting, even soothing, and even now, a full week or so after finishing it, I look at it and get warm feelings. I typically don’t consider myself...more For all its disturbing imagery – a mailbox stuffed with an ever-replenishing supply of live caterpillars, closets full of hair, enigmatic black shape-shifting structures that swell to fill yards and subsume houses, repeated instances of mirrors reflecting mirrors causing psychic quagmires, swarming ants invading houses, etc. – I found this book very comforting, even soothing, and even now, a full week or so after finishing it, I look at it and get warm feelings. I typically don’t consider myself perverse – scratch that – what am I thinking? I often suspect I am the embodiment of the Imp of the Perverse, but still this warm feeling puzzles me…. I mean, this is essentially a book about a haunted house, but haunted in a way that sinks deeper than general horror fair, without deploying the typical horror tropes. It is a book about the failure of a suburban family unit, about pervasive illness, about profound emotional disconnect, about loss of identity, about nearly everything that is subtly or not so subtly noxious in cookie cutter contemporary life. It is not just the content that disturbs, but the writing style (a kind of free-floating nearly disembodied transcription of insomniac anxieties in a nearly monochromatic tone) as well as the design of the book itself (page color continuously progressing from white through shades of grey and back again, punctuated by dark nearly abstract photographs of interiors and views from windows), the varying shades mirroring one's consciousness as it's caught up in reveries shifting from wakefulness to semi-sleep to dream and round and round again. It all adds up to a late night hypnagogic nightmare. Yet still I found it comforting! I just don’t get it… While reading it my mind kept returning to color field paintings, where washes of overlapping colors fill large canvases with color, often with no real center, so the eye is left free to wander among the ambiguities. Butler’s prose has this quality, which is perhaps a key to my response in that while reading my mind experienced a ‘hovering’ sensation, becoming almost passive, allowing the imagery to freely float in and out of my grey matter. Perhaps this hovering sensation over-rode the disturbing nature of the text itself; or perhaps it allowed my mind an uncanny access into Butler’s world, which is extremely personal and resonates intimacy on every page. Like a vampire whispering in my ear? If so did Blake Butler seduce me, against my safe-guarding will? Perhaps. But isn’t literature about giving one’s self to another’s self? In this case, Yes. I mean, Yes, I am perverse, and, Yes, that is the point of literature.(less)

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Jun 17, 2011 Nate D rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: rooms full of hair

Recommended to Nate D by: the ants were in the son

Shelves: surrealism, post-modernism, html-giant, horror

Unrealizing the American Family(/)Home.

The house the house the house house house househouseouseouhoushous oususehouse house and the family family f a m i l y

I don't know where to start so I won't. A selection of nonstarts.

-It seems like this might be some kind of literary sensation already. I don't really follow what things are actual literary sensations, but I get the impression that they're, uh, maybe Don Delillo and Gary Shteyngart or something. This is more exciting because it's coming up,...more Unrealizing the American Family(/)Home.

The house the house the house house house househouseouseouhoushous oususehouse house and the family family f a m i l y

I don't know where to start so I won't. A selection of nonstarts.

-It seems like this might be some kind of literary sensation already. I don't really follow what things are actual literary sensations, but I get the impression that they're, uh, maybe Don Delillo and Gary Shteyngart or something. This is more exciting because it's coming up, totally unexpectedly out of diy/micropress weirdness that is usually super interesting but also super unnoticed. If people are suddenly taking notice of Blake Butler, maybe this indicates at least the opportunity for a shift in publishing attention towards a whole bunch of talented newer authors. What will happen? It interests.

-The danger of this book, on the other hand, is that it is almost too much. It is an explosion of insane sequences and insane details each of which makes an extreme impression on its own but become numbing when part of a 400 page flood. Almost numbing. The strength of this book is that it stays just this side of numbing, and the inundation ends up hitting, well, home. Deep into the idea of home. But in lesser hands it could of been a directionless spewed subconcious. Take care how you spew your subconcious. (why I am acting like I don't want more authors to spew their subconciouses? I LOVE subconcious spews. Maybe I'm worried that if this gets big, subconcious spew will get overly instyle and become devalued? I don't know what I am worried about, this is definitely too weird to be an actual trend-in-making.

-Is the book actually a spew of subconcious? Maybe, though it has extreme intimations of order. Some of these are: the way the shadings of the pages build up from varying greys towards climaxes(?) of bright white, the eerie displaced photos marking off sections(?), the fact that so much happens that it starts to seem like separate incidents are not really important in themselves BUT THEN are called up later after near-forgetting and they totally were important, the cohesion of language and imagery. There is probably a bunch of subconcious informing this, but that is true of most art I care about, and there a lot more going on, too. I think? I have further unraveling to do.

-I mentioned the page shading aleady, which is totally unique to this book as far as I know. There are enough other formal qualities to this work, that combined with the labyrinthine aspects of the house, and the horror-sensations, comparison with House of Leaves was inevitable. I think this is mostly incidental. House was about constructing a complex puzzle very very carefully, control and order, whereas There Is No Year is all entropy, rawer and looser and more visceral. I know I just said a bunch about the intimations of structure, but those have less to do with what it actually feels like to read a book in which everything, from the objects within, to the characters, to the idea of plot, is broken and breaking further.

-What is this book about? Deconstruction maybe. Or just decay. Aging and deterioration. Family, home, and shelter, definitely. Illness, perhaps. Or is about what it is about: a mother, a father, a son, ants and boxes and hallways.

-Any individual vignette is a pretty great stand-alone unsettlement. Read them aloud to friends. Savor the language. Savor the malaise.

-I liked this book.(less)

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Apr 01, 2011 Terri rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: first-reads

There Is No Year is not at all what you would expect from a typical book. Instead of a straight forward plot, moving along to watch the characters change and grow from the beginning, this book takes you right into a more magical realm of the family life.

This book looks at what would seem like a typical family, but with a twist. Throughout the book, you don't feel like you're reading about the father, mother, or son--instead you are falling into an experience. The experience will obviously vary...more

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Oct 25, 2012 Jennie rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2012-october

This book was on my Nook, and when I started it, I had no idea what it was. It wasn't until a few chapters in that I realized that this was the weirdish horror novel I had gotten a while ago.

I also read this book while taking the bus home from work -- after working an eight hour shift and getting off at 7am. So yes, not optimal reading conditions.

I am really not a fan of post-modernist literature. Actually, I despite it with a passion, and the last piece of post-modernist literature I unfortunat...more This book was on my Nook, and when I started it, I had no idea what it was. It wasn't until a few chapters in that I realized that this was the weirdish horror novel I had gotten a while ago.

I also read this book while taking the bus home from work -- after working an eight hour shift and getting off at 7am. So yes, not optimal reading conditions.

I am really not a fan of post-modernist literature. Actually, I despite it with a passion, and the last piece of post-modernist literature I unfortunately read was Douglas Copland's Coma Girl and I ended up throwing it halfway across the room into a wall.

It really depends on my mood, but different writing styles besides your basic paragraphs can really annoy me as well.

Also, apparently I'm not a huge fan of speculative fiction. And I know that I am quite wary of horror.

Do you see where I'm going with this?

I finished the book. But I was left just as confused as I was when I started it. There was nothing really horrifying about the book. I just found it really strange. And no, I didn't like the book. It didn't send me into a rage (seriously, what was up with Coma Girl, that was like the most pointless book I've ever read...post-modernism is why I dropped out of my lit-based American Studies program*). I'm sure for the right reader, this book is excellent. But unfortunately, I am not that reader. This isn't a YA paranormal romance with vampires/werewolves/whatever that makes me scream about the way it's upholding the rape culture and romanticizing abusive partners. No, this book was simply a book that I should never have picked up because it's not a genre I like, it's not a style I like, and it really requires more thought than reading when you're half-asleep.

If you like post-modernism, different kinds of writing styles, or want a new face in the horror genre (that is a different kind of creepy), I recommend this book to you.

If you don't want any of that...stay away. You'll probably just end up confused.

*well, not the only reason. But my professors ADORED post-modernist lit and I despise it and unfortunately the program that advertised both literary AND cultural AND historical aspects of the US turned out to be an extremely post-modernist literature based program. So yeah. Not the only reason, but a big one. (less)

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Apr 27, 2012 Zach rated it 5 of 5 stars

Some of the blurbs on the back of the book say that it's almost a reinvention of the novel, but I don't think that's quite right. Instead, it feels as if Butler has brought back the epic poem, but steeped in modern poetic sensibilities and replaced the heroic with the existential. It's a bizarre dismantling of modern life, in which the deconstruction of suburbia is mimicked by the deconstruction of the language. Butler will sometimes flip a sentence on its head and what emerges is a wholly new y...more

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Feb 23, 2012 Aaron Marks rated it 4 of 5 stars

this book reminds me of puzzles in the way girl w/ curious hair did, and reminds me of 'house of leaves' in tone, and reminds me of a kafka short story in its characters and plot. it reminded me of 'unpublished blog posts of a mexican express....' in that much of it was very well-constructed poetry.

it was difficult to get through this book because it's 400 pages of characters with no proper names and a loose story line.

most of the times the characters are completely alone or only tangentially in...more

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Nov 19, 2011 Brandon rated it 1 of 5 stars

Completely horrible and unreadable. This book ranks among the worst I've ever cracked open and that list includes some pretty bad books. You get the sense, reading it, that Butler imagines himself a young Dennis Cooper, but the problem is he possesses none of Cooper's originality or humor, or let's face it, talent. Instead he comes across as the worst kind of poseur wannabe. I read a ton of books coming out of the indie publishing world, and these books generally fall into two categories: 1) Wri...more

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May 14, 2011 Ben Loory rated it 5 of 5 stars

there was a period many years ago where i had a manic episode and didn't sleep for a week. during that time i became paranoid and depressed and delusional and confused and eventually started hallucinating and, well, it didn't end very well (though on the other hand, i'm still here)... during that time i had a very clear vision of the world as a pointless and joyless playing out of patterns-- inhuman and horrible though often blackly comic-- all of which inevitably eventually spiraled and fizzed...more

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Apr 19, 2011 Maria rated it 3 of 5 stars

What I Can Tell You:

This was the craziest book ever and I mean that in the nicest way. It was a total, creepy, odd, trippy, journey into the kind of psychological, scary imagery I love in my horror movies. It was like reading a nightmare come to life. There is nothing like this out there.

The complexity of Blake's writing is why I call myself the Amateur Book Reviewer. It would take a semester of sitting with Blake to understand the nuances and details of this story.

The story centers around a fam...more

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Sep 23, 2011 Christina rated it 2 of 5 stars

Right from the start, this book attempts to defy the laws of literature and create a new genre untouched by anyone before it. And that is where I lost my interest. It's one thing to use creativity to push the boundaries of conventional literature; it's a completely different thing to toy with your readers just for the sake of toying with them. I completely understand and support an author's right to creative license when writing his or her novel, but I don't understand why you would write a nove...more

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Aug 30, 2010 Erica added it

I'm just going to cut and paste what I said about this book when I emailed cal, the editor.

I love how it's like a postmodern haunted house story--I keep thinking how it would make such an awesome, trippy horror movie. It's like Amityville horror on acid. But I think someone who isn't as obsessed with horror movies maybe wouldn't see that, and I like that about it too--it's such a blank canvas in some ways. My freshman year in college I took this special seminar on "downtown culture" at the fale...more

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Aug 06, 2011 Kristopher Kelly rated it 2 of 5 stars

I have mixed feelings about this book. It causes enough existential dread in me for me to like it, but overall it seems like a bit of a stunt, and the imagery is a bit uneven, often cliche. Butler never met a set of parallel mirrors he didn't like (the girl at the fast food place is wearing a shirt with a picture of the man in the car at the fast food place getting food from a girl wearing a picture of a man in the car and yadda yadda yadda ... what are we? in third grade?), and neither he nor h...more

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Apr 19, 2011 M. rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction, own, 2011

I need to fully review this, sometime, I mean I should really just do it now, because I think this book is really special. I think it does a lot of things that I really want literature to be doing and I'm very glad it exists and oh my god I like Blake's work more and more and more. It is really exciting to me that I actually enjoy each of his books more than the one before it. I haven't yet, actually, because it's getting reviewed everywhere and I hate throwing myself into the piling up. Though,...more

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Sep 30, 2011 Chrissy rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: experimental

This is a very hard book to think critically about, so I've chosen 3 stars: I both loved and hated it, wanted to both keep reading it into the night and forget that I had ever laid eyes on it. "An experience," are two very fitting words I can use to describe it. Pretension and honesty wrapped up in a curious package that seems to so well accomplish what it means to, though you wonder if what it means to accomplish is at all meaningful. And whether that matters, in the context of this approach to...more This is a very hard book to think critically about, so I've chosen 3 stars: I both loved and hated it, wanted to both keep reading it into the night and forget that I had ever laid eyes on it. "An experience," are two very fitting words I can use to describe it. Pretension and honesty wrapped up in a curious package that seems to so well accomplish what it means to, though you wonder if what it means to accomplish is at all meaningful. And whether that matters, in the context of this approach to literature.

Other fitting words I could use to describe the experience are these:
Reading this book is like having a friend tell you about a really creepy, vivid, fucked up fever dream that sways drunkenly from one scene of horror to the next, illogically, the dreamer now awake and logical and detached from the dream so that the words relay a shifting and immutable terror in a voice devoid of the terror that it should hold. These scenes are planted like seeds in your mind in their own vivid imagery, if you're like me and you see and smell and taste and touch everything you're told (or everything you read) in great sensory detail. And there they remain trapped forever and left to grow, though you probably don't want them there, to be recalled at random in a passing conversation, a glance, a scene in your periphery, or worse, inside your own dreams. Only unlike the dreamer relaying the dream, you are awake and these ideas come to live in your waking memory and you can't quite stunt your emotional response to them the way the dreamer could. You're stuck with these thoughts, these nightmares from other minds, inside your own head, forever. They haunt you. You love everything about them. You hate everything about them.

Reading this book is pretty much exactly that experience, except now the dreamer is an author accomplished at evoking the most feverish of fever dreams.

Each short chapter is like a small and fantastically written ultra-modern poem that doesn't necessarily transition or connect to the chapter-poems around it. Butler makes use of unique text arrangement (quite in the style of House of Leaves, a novel that I have to think was an IMMENSE influence on him), blurry black and white photographs, and changes in the pages' colour, from black to white and everything in between, to draw the reader in and jar them. These tiny fragments, the chapter-poems and images and formatting and colours, can be bunched together into a few central ideas: nihilism, the psychological landscape of the home, time and memory and the failures of both, illness, the banality of modern life (re: existential bullshit), horror, the frantic feeling of being trapped inside a family or a relationship or a house or a dream or a body, and so on and so on...

But mostly what you're left with at the end is someone else's nightmare in your mind.
It is simultaneously the worst and the best thing.(less)

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Apr 29, 2011 Jasmine rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: american

Oh my goodness, oh my goodness. I started this book a long time ago, actually the same day I started the girl who couldn't come, on the same subway to the same airport, I started this first, then switched cause I got sleepy. Then when David left I picked up escape and some books greg recommended and I'm just getting back to these now.

I don't really know how to talk about this book so instead I think I'm going to pretend to understand readers advisory instead of actually reviewing this.

If you l...more

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Apr 27, 2011 Michelle added it

When Erica from Harper Perennial mentioned that There Is No Year is a challenging book, she was not exaggerating. Mr. Butler's latest novel is virtually indescribable in its plot but powerful in the emotions it evokes. Part poetry, part artistic rendering, it is a novel like no other.

There Is No Year follows, in a very meandering and disturbing fashion, the lives of an unnamed family after they move into their house of dreams. Each family member is haunted by his or her own memories and thoughts...more When Erica from Harper Perennial mentioned that There Is No Year is a challenging book, she was not exaggerating. Mr. Butler's latest novel is virtually indescribable in its plot but powerful in the emotions it evokes. Part poetry, part artistic rendering, it is a novel like no other.

There Is No Year follows, in a very meandering and disturbing fashion, the lives of an unnamed family after they move into their house of dreams. Each family member is haunted by his or her own memories and thoughts. The entire story is told in a dream-like fashion, where nightmares become reality in some way. Rooms mysteriously appear and disappear. Roads lead to nowhere and everywhere. What was once familiar is now strange. The passage of time is arbitrary and uneven. Through it all, the sense of foreboding is unmistakable and ever-present.

Just when the story delves into the most fantastical descriptions, Mr. Butler brings up a scene which diverts the reader's attention back to the normal. Life is not as strange as the father, mother and son would have the reader expect. They still go to work, clean the house, go grocery shopping, go to school, etc. They lead normal lives. Yet, everything they "see", "hear" and experience is anything but normal. Is it mental illness? Are they just dreams? Is it just their mind's interpretation of their experiences? Isn't life dream-like? The answer is up to the individual reader.

There Is No Year is as much a work of art as it is a novel. Told in sparse chapters, the reader needs to pay as much attention to the individual placement of each word as to the words themselves. Interspersed throughout are images devoted to the play of shadow and light, and the pages themselves cover the spectrum of black to various shades of gray and even white. It is simply visually stunning.

The entire novel is meant to be devoured by all the senses. The textures and colors of the pages, the words, and the images are all meant to help enhance the dream-like quality of the story. Yet, it is not a novel that one can simply pick up and read cover to cover. There Is No Year requires careful reading and even more careful thought before the message reveals itself to the reader. Once it does, though, it is well worth the time and effort it takes to get through the novel. (less)

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Aug 25, 2011 Aral rated it 4 of 5 stars

while i was reading this the nails in heat rose out of our carpet, one stuck my heel; we got bed bugs; in the middle of the night i thought twitter got hacked, but every webpage started printing certain text in hieroglyphics, when i copied it, it pasted in english.

with the book open in my hands it felt like my mouth could never get comfortable

"populations sweltered. the text in all the books in all bookstore increased in size by millimeters. you could not take a bath. the magicians were disappea...more

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May 02, 2011 Torea Frey rated it 4 of 5 stars

You know, I think I missed the point of this. It's experimental and creepy and someone who blurbed it said it was "merciless," I think. But I spent the entire four hundred pages just swimming in the sounds of the sentences -- at the level of language alone, story/allegory/physical form aside, it is one of the most pleasurable books I've read in quite some time.

An additional, errant thought: Everyone I try to explain it to brings up "House of Leaves" by Mark Z. Danielewski, and it did pop into my...more

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Apr 20, 2011 Jael rated it 3 of 5 stars

This is the first time I can truly say a book has left me corn-fused! I read the pitch e-mail for There is No Year by Blake Butler and was intrigued. There is no clear plot. The characters have no names. The chapters are short, some even have just a few words. The color of the pages range from light to dark. In my opinion, the story isn't linear. It feels like a jumble of thoughts/vignettes cobbled together in a book, but not in a bad way.

We have a mother, a father, a son, and...their copies. Ye...more This is the first time I can truly say a book has left me corn-fused! I read the pitch e-mail for There is No Year by Blake Butler and was intrigued. There is no clear plot. The characters have no names. The chapters are short, some even have just a few words. The color of the pages range from light to dark. In my opinion, the story isn't linear. It feels like a jumble of thoughts/vignettes cobbled together in a book, but not in a bad way.

We have a mother, a father, a son, and...their copies. Yes identical copies of themselves. The copy family doesn't speak, and eventually they are done away with in interesting ways. There is a room full of hair, holes in the walls that lead to other places, an obsession with ants and heads. An obsession with death, including a list of real-life people who died. Was there a reason for this? There are moments of normality when the family watches television. But then there are moments that are just weird. Eating hair, walking around the house naked, walking through puckers in the wall? Who does that?

Sometimes I thought I was witnessing an alternate reality. Some dystopian society.

"The eye had many sides. Each time the father blinked inside his own sight with the other's -- quick black -- when he looked again the eye would seize. The eye would spin among its sides and scrunch like aged skin, then come to settle centered on another side. Each new side held a new pupil to look into, and it looking back as well, again."

Are they watching some versions of themselves going through life? I wasn't sure right up until the end, and I'm still not sure. Did I miss the clues? Do the pages going from light to dark mean anything? Do the lighter pages mean life is brightening up for this family? Maybe there wasn't anything to miss. As I said, this book left me corn-fused!! This book was outside of comfort zone. Not every book has to have a clear beginning, middle, and end, which is why it's good for me to read books like this. It can get pretty boring if you limit yourself to certain genres and formats, and believe me this book is anything but boring.

My interest was held throughout because I wanted to know what was going on. There are moments that will make you go, "huh?" I liken this book to the Matrix flicks and Inception. Those were movies that I need to see two or three times before I truly understood what was going on. This is a book I'm going to have read again.

Rating: Give it a try

Note: I received a copy of the book from the publisher (Harper Perennial) in exchange for an honest review.
(less)

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Dec 27, 2012 Abbie rated it 1 of 5 stars

Not a fan.

Listen, it's a good book the imagery is very... intense... - the kind that would unnerve but intrigue me in a movie.

But here? It's dull, and it makes me unhappy.

I like books that are about people. I like books that have stories - confusing and odd, maybe, but stories. This book starts off with a story. And maybe, in a more abstract sense, the kind I would appreciate if I was "smarter" maybe, I would appreciate the strange, image-focused story it finishes with. But... as I am me, and...more

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Aug 21, 2012 Derek rated it 5 of 5 stars

i responded to it (as a copy brother) here:
http://www.5cense.com/11/no-blake.htm

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Sep 01, 2011 Kait rated it 3 of 5 stars

I'm just going to be honest about this one. It was about 600 pages too long, I felt. The first couple "chapters" appealed to me, and I was into the noir/horror aspect of the prose. But then it just went on and on, and there was nothing to tie it all together. After I got used to Butler's voice, it started to grate on my nerves. I was describing it to a co-worker and he said "sounds gimmicky" - yeah. Good word.

But, as I said, I did enjoy the beginning. I was looking for a book similar to In Wate...more

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Jul 16, 2011 Thad rated it 4 of 5 stars

"...the windows sloshed with sun."

"...a wet erupting from the son's mouth, then the mother's, twin rivers glinting of a light."

"Ahead, the horizon of no dimension--limbless and suspended, several states away."

"In the bathroom the father saw his many selves reach up to turn the lights off, and the father saw the dark."

"Its orb slid from the sky in staggered increments, leaving a slight residue behind in slur, and where it began. The face of the sun itself was ragged and discolored, swimming--a hu...more

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Nov 25, 2012 Tami Lynn Andrew rated it 3 of 5 stars

This book reads like an author who is trying to be David Lynch. Keyword TRYING. There is a mysterious box in a mysterious closet in a mysterious house, dimensions in dreams in darkness, unexplained phenomena.. but it just fails to impress. The story doesn't actually go anywhere, the characters are very predictable, and the format is weird simply for weirds sake.
The book wasn't boring, and it was a very quick read, but honestly it just felt like an attempt to take all the "creative" and "weird" q...more

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Dec 20, 2011 Luis Correa rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: novel

In the middle of yet another box opening up with hairy insects pouring out and calling the nameless characters, I thought about how I would receive the book were it just called a poem, but then I thought, besides the surreal imagery and the occasionally interesting formatting there's very little that compelled me. Call me a traditionalist, but if I'm not going to get some plot, I at least want some solid character, and if that's all out of the question, at least give me some interesting language...more

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Jul 18, 2011 The Nike Nabokov added it

did you like eraserhead?
this guy LOVED eraserhead.

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Feb 04, 2013 Andrew Tolve rated it 3 of 5 stars

Probably the weirdest book I've ever read. And yet, to call Blake Butler weird is to trivialize what I believe to be an interesting, original writer. Many things about this book blew me away, chief among them the way Butler explodes language. Like literally calls it out, strips it down, denudes it, breaks it, rages at it for its insufficiency, then builds it back up in fascinating, continually unexpected, and wholly original ways. Here's an example:

"The copy child and mother went on still there...more

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Nov 20, 2012 Rob rated it 4 of 5 stars

I don't really know what to write about this book except that it was a lot of fun to read. The content of the book was remarkable but also the context. I guess it's 'speculative fiction' or a 'new order'. I've read that the book is a reinvention of the novel. Maybe not, but it certainly is a new way to decorate the tree. The print layout, changing paper color, and artwork was so interesting that I found myself going back to see if I could understand the significance. I wasn't able, but don't let...more

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Jun 22, 2012 Hannah rated it 2 of 5 stars

While I love Butler's style of writing and the theme with how scary every day existence can be, I feel the book fell flat at the end. I love how simple of a writing style Butler has. It somehow made the images in my mind while reading it much creepier. Instead of describing how scary something was in depth, he just stated a fact. "the copy family's mouths were lined with mold". Scary stuff right off the bat! I really really wanted to love this book but at some point it just didn't make sense any...more

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Sep 08, 2012 Ryan Bradford rated it 4 of 5 stars

As with Scorch Atlas, this gets a little repetitive, but there's definitely a maturity in this. Scorch's preoccupation with rot and viscera is noticeably missing, and in fact, quite the opposite.

There Is No Year preoccupies itself with the transitory, ethereal existence of a father, son and mother who move into a new house. Everything is dreamlike.

What I really like about it is the way Butler finds haunting within everyday minutiae--from driving to work, to checking the mail to spending the ni...more

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About Blake Butler

Blake Butler is the author of EVER, Scorch Atlas, and two books forthcoming in 2011 and 2012 from Harper Perennial. He edits 'the internet literature magazine blog of the future' HTML Giant. His other writing have appeared in The Believer, Unsaid, Fence, Dzanc's Best of the Web 2009. He lives in Atlanta.

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Quotes from There Is No Year

“DAYS ARE WEEKS AND WEEKS ARE DAYS INSIDE YOU” — 3 people liked it

“There were seven men, but just one language. They also moved as one and ate one meal a day and slept in the same bed and knew the same women with whom they'd made the same child. They worked for the same firm as the father. They were the future.” — 1 person liked it

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There Is No Year

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