2.0 

The Flame Alphabet

By Ben Marcus
The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

In The Flame Alphabet, the most maniacally gifted writer of our generation delivers a novel about how far we will go in order to protect our loved ones.
 
The sound of children's speech has become lethal. In the park, adults wither beneath the powerful screams of their offspring. For young parents Sam and Claire, it seems their only means of survival is to flee from their daughter, Esther. But they find it isn't so easy to leave someone you love, even as they waste away from her malevolent speech. On the eve of their departure, Claire mysteriously disappears, and Sam, determined to find a cure for this new toxic language, presses on alone into a foreign world to try to save his family.

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The Flame Alphabet Reviews

2.0
“This felt overwritten and confused about what it wanted to be.”
Red Angry Face“It’s not very often that I don’t finish a book, especially one I’ve wanted to read for 12 years based on the concept alone. It’s very slow paced and the characters aren’t very likable or even unlikable. They’re just there. I read somewhere that the author wrote this based on his fears as a first time parent and you don’t get that in the beginning at all. There’s a lot of misplaced focus on religion which feels out of place in what should be a dystopian future. I’m also very frustrated with the descriptors, something I normally love. I’m sorry, I don’t care about the texture of the listening device and that’s not an important detail. Very dissatisfied.”
“I was interested in the premise of the Flame Alphabet, but ultimately I found it boring and unreadable. Sold as a thriller, I can only imagine the thrill comes near the end. It was incredibly slow and it seemed more effort was put into unnecessarily flowery prose and a conviction to never use the same word for language/words/speech twice.”

About Ben Marcus

Ben Marcus is the author of three books of fiction: The Age of Wire and String, Notable American Women, and The Flame Alphabet, and he is the editor of The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories. His stories have appeared in Harper’s, The New Yorker, Granta, Electric Literature, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, Tin House, and Conjunctions. He has received the Berlin Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in fiction, three Pushcart Prizes, and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in New York with his wife and children.

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