Take Five with Ben Marcus, Author, ‘The Flame Alphabet’

Ben Marcus is the contributor for this week’s Take Five, a regular series where we ask authors and editors to share five facts about their latest books. Marcus is the author of The Flame Alphabet.

In The Flame Alphabet, the most maniacally gifted writer of our generation delivers a work of heartbreak and horror, a novel about how far we will go, and the sorrows we will endure, in order to protect our families.

The Flame Alphabet invites the question: What is left of civilization when we lose the ability to communicate with those we love? Both morally engaged and wickedly entertaining, a gripping page-turner as strange as it is moving, this intellectual horror story ensures Ben Marcus’s position in the first rank of American novelists.

Ben Marcus:

1. I wrote The Flame Alphabet in four locations: New York, NY; Peterborough, NH; Marfa, TX; and Brooklin, ME.

2. I wore these to block sound:

Sometimes, underneath them, I wore these as well:

Even when used together, they do not block the sound of a crying baby.

3.  I deleted over six hundred pages of material, including this passage:

The people sat across from each other, two to a couch.  They looked sick.  Maybe they had been doused with boilingwater. Boiling something.  A terrible redness beset their skin, and their heads and hands were scored by wounds.

They took no notice of me.

One of them was covered by a hood.  It had been lacquered by some kind of spray, perhaps, so that the hood gave off a glossy shine.  A little hose trickled from the side of the hood and disappeared under this person’s collar.

The hooded person sat in a formal posture, fidgeting every so often to scratch at itself.

Something, in very close quarters, had been left to fry.  If not right where I stood, then nearby, within venting distance.

On the table sat sheaths of newsprint that they shuffled around, peered at with frowning disapproval, scratched at with their pencils.  I recognized the crisp, slanted type face, those long column blocks neighbored by graphs.  And of course I saw the name of the thing, written out in a child’s hand.

It seemed I’d walked into an editorial meeting for The Proofs.

I coughed to announce myself.

“Take a seat,” someone said, without looking up.  “Hurry up, take a seat, you’re blocking the door.”

There were no seats.  They’d overcrowded the two couches already and there was space only for me to hover where I was, unless I wanted to move closer to one of them, which felt like trespassing on the scene of an accident.  If I sat next to any of them I’d get their blood on me.

I couldn’t precisely walk away at this point.  I resolved to stand and watch them, try to make it seem natural.

I said, “That’s all right, I’m fine.”

“He’s fine,” said the elegant one sitting next to the hooded person.  He was delicate-featured, not yet an old man, but his face was exhausted, and it wouldn’t be long before he took his last turn.

I do not usually experience pity, or, I’ll admit, any reaction, in response to someone’s appearance, but with him it was different.  He had the pale, pretty haircut of a little boy, even though he’d long ago outgrown it, and I could almost see what he must have looked like as a youth, before he’d been repeatedly destroyed and rebuilt as he got older.  A pen rode behind this delicate man’s ear, which I only mention because the ear itself was caked in dried blood.

“Who let the Jew in here?” asked a voice from beneath the hood.

Nobody answered.  They were artfully not looking at me.

“I was invited by Murphy,” I offered.  “I’m staying down the hall, in the room across from the bathroom.”  I had no room number.

“Is ‘invited’ really the operative term?” asked Delicate, as if to himself.  He seemed worried by the question.

“Minimize!” scolded the exceptionally scorched man I’ll call Mario.   He was pug-like, with a nasty black beard clouding his face.  For some reason I thought of the extra coarse hair that grows rapidly after death, sprouting from the corpse until the rot sets in.  It grows from places that never featured hair before.  High on the cheeks, out of the eyes.

Mario sat next to Delicate but took up most of the couch with his swarthy frame.  It was hard to tell which of them was bloodier.

“You might have avoided ‘operative,’” he confided to Delicate.  “That’s just a bullshit word.”

“They’re all bullshit, aren’t they, I fear,” whispered Delicate, rubbing his forehead.  There was something vaguely British to his accent.

“Here we go.”  The man who’d been quiet so far, sitting next to Hood, rolled his eyes, but sportingly.  He had a craven eagerness about him, an obvious desire to be liked.  In some definitive, damning way, he struck me as Kevin.

I waited to see if someone would elaborate, but they were quiet.

“If ‘invited’ isn’t the word then how would you choose to phrase it?” I asked.

“Not only is ‘invited’ not the word, but neither is ‘Murphy.’  I thought he’d retired that one.”  This was Mario speaking.

“I meant LeBov.  LeBov invited me.”

He yawned.  Something gleamed inside his mouth, a writhing black thing.

“Well, you said that Murphy invited you, and that’s a very different thing.  That’s not something you just take back.  If Murphy invited you, then I highly doubt,”—he widened his eyes at me, held me in his stare—“I highly doubt, that LeBov would have also invited you.”

“Impossible,” said Delicate, shaking his head.

“Those two really do not see eye to eye,” agreed Kevin.

4. The above is from a seventy-page section, also deleted.  Other than the narrator, none of these characters appear in the finished book.

5. While writing the opening pages, I was reading About a Mountain, by John D’Agata; The Horned Man, by James Lasdun; and Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell.