Three Hundred Million: A Novel

An unforgettable novel of an American suburb devastated by a fiendish madman—the most ambitious and important work yet by “the 21st century answer to William Burroughs” (Publishers Weekly).

Blake Butler’s fiction has dazzled readers with its dystopian dreamscapes and swaggering command of language. Now, in his most topical and visceral novel yet, he ushers us into the consciousness of two men in the shadow of a bloodbath: Gretch Gravey, a cryptic psychopath with a small army of burnout followers, and E. N. Flood, the troubled police detective tasked with unpacking and understanding his mind.

A mingled simulacrum of Charles Manson, David Koresh, and Thomas Harris’s Buffalo Bill, Gravey is a sinister yet alluring God figure who enlists young metal head followers to kidnap neighboring women and bring them to his house—where he murders them and buries their bodies in a basement crypt. Through parallel narratives, Three Hundred Million lures readers into the cloven mind of Gravey—and Darrel, his sinister alter ego—even as Flood’s secret journal chronicles his own descent into his own, eerily similar psychosis.

A portrait of American violence that conjures the shadows of Ariel Castro, David Koresh, and Adam Lanza, Three Hundred Million is a brutal and mesmerizing masterwork, a portrait of contemporary America that is difficult to turn away from, or to forget.

One maniacal killer. One tortured police detective. The end of the American story.

“300,000,000 establishes Blake Butler as our premier literary shaman. It is a bible of sacred insight into our mortal, violent, persistent condition, told through an advanced, near-holographic species of writing. The vicious dance of Gravey and Flood-both hunters, both hunted-draws us into the darkest circles of human motivation. You’ll think about it daily and return to it compulsively; it will leave you with fever dreams of the highest possible resolution.” - Alissa Nutting, author of Tampa

“300,000,000 establishes Blake Butler as our premier literary shaman. . . . [It] draws us into the darkest circles of human motivation. You’ll think about it daily and return to it compulsively; it will leave you with fever dreams of the highest possible resolution.” - Alissa Nutting, author of Tampa

“This book is like a Rorschach blot made of blood. All my darkest visions appeared there. Blake Butler’s work is not for the faint of heart. And I mean that as a high compliment.” - Jenny Offill, author of Dept. of Speculation

“An experimental prose-poem [that] pushes the boundaries of the novel. . . . Calling Blake Butler’s There Is No Year a novel is akin to calling René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images a pipe. . . . Butler seems to be making a statement that the novel, as an art form, needs to start tearing down walls and moving in new directions if it is going to survive.” - Josh Davis, Time Out New York (four stars)

“Dystopian and sinister.” - Nylon Magazine

“All words normally used to craft literary reviews fail. This is an entirely original work that does what the best art should do: challenge the reader. . . . like the best of dreams, There Is No Year also sticks in the brain long after the book is set down.” - The Atlantan

“Butler has been a powerful force in contemporary literature for the past four years, [and] There is No Year provides further proof that his own fiction is about the most breathtaking and exciting that’s out there.” - 3:AM Magazine

“If there’s a more thoroughly brilliant and exciting new writer than Blake Butler, . . . well, there just isn’t.” - Dennis Cooper

“This book is the poetry of insanity. Hugely beautiful and monstrously disturbed. I love it, and Blake Butler’s mad criminal mind.” - Warren Ellis, author of Gun Machine and Crooked Little Vein

“There is no novel like There Is No Year.…Butler’s prose is persistent and perfected....His sense of humanity bleeds through the jagged edges, and by the end you’ve fallen for this nameless, deteriorating family, hoping it will survive.…Unexpectedly riveting, totally original, and frequently funny.” - Tucker Shaw, Denver Post

“[An] innovative masterpiece…a haunting glimpse into a parallel universe.” - Gina Angelotti, Metro

“A smoke signal on the horizon of the American literary landscape. . . . [As] if Gertrude Stein wrote the script for a Kenneth Anger film set inside of a Norman Rockwell painting to be produced for YouTube with a John Cage soundtrack. . . . [Butler’s prose offers] ecstatic pleasures. . . . it bursts and cracks with inventions and constructions.” - Wyatt Williams, Creative Loafing

Praise for There Is No Year: “Deeply honest and emotional, a family drama that by its end brings on feelings as complex and satisfying as those summoned by Faulkner’s simple sentence ‘They endured.’…This novel is a thing of such strange beauty [that it yields] the rewards that only well-made art can provide.” - Joseph Salvatore, New York Times Book Review (Editor's Choice)

“An endlessly surprising, funny, and subversive writer.” - Publishers Weekly

“Butler’s sentences are frequently dizzying and poetic, and gathered in engrossing vignette-like sections.… A challenging, Dalí-esque spin on the horror genre, a postmodern playground …There Is No Year is also often funny and insightful, further proof of Butler’s impressive and innovative talents.” - Jonathan Fullerman, Time Out Chicago