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Summary
Summary
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.
A terrible epidemic has struck the country and the sound of children's speech has become lethal. Radio transmissions from strange sources indicate that people are going into hiding. All Sam and Claire need to do is look around the neighborhood: In the park, parents wither beneath the powerful screams of their children. At night, suburban side streets become routes of shameful escape for fathers trying to get outside the radius of affliction.
With Claire nearing collapse, it seems their only means of survival is to flee from their daughter, Esther, who laughs at her parents' sickness, unaware that in just a few years she, too, will be susceptible to the language toxicity. But Sam and Claire find it isn't so easy to leave the daughter they still 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 world beyond recognition.
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.
Author Notes
BEN MARCUS is the author of three books of fiction: Notable American Women , The Father Costume , and The Age of Wire and String, and he is the editor of The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories . His stories have appeared in Harper's Magazine, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, McSweeney's, Tin House, and Conjunctions. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, and awards from the Creative Capital Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in New York City and Maine.
www.benmarcus.com
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Language kills in Marcus's audacious new work of fiction, a richly allusive look at a world transformed by a new form of illness. Outside Rochester, N.Y., Sam and Claire are a normal Jewish couple with a sullen teenage daughter, Esther. But Esther and other Jewish children begin to speak a toxic form of language, potentially deadly to adults: with "the Esther toxicity... in high flower," Sam watches in horror as the disease spreads to children of other religions, quarantine zones are imposed, and Claire sickens to the point of death. Heeding the advice of enigmatic prophet LeBov, Sam manufactures his own homemade defenses against his daughter's speech. But he and Claire are soon forced to abandon Esther in order to save themselves. The novel's first part plays like The Twilight Zone as a normal community becomes exposed to this mysterious infection. The second part reads like a Kafkaesque nightmare as Sam, separated from Claire, winds up in an isolated research facility, where he is put to work creating a new language that will be immune from the virus. The third part finds Sam living in the woods near his home, where he becomes a haunted creature out of a Yiddish folk tale. Marcus (Notable American Women) proves equally inspired in sketching Sam's underground religion of "forest Jews" who pray in individual huts and receive sermons via a special gelpack called a listener. Although characterization plays second fiddle to vision here, in LeBov, a silver-tongued, authoritarian, flimflam man, Marcus has retooled a classic American archetype. Biblical in its Old Testament sense of wrath, Marcus's novel twists America's quotidian existence into something recognizable yet wholly alien to our experience. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Teenagers can be described as toxic, no doubt about it. But in Marcus' speculative tale, teens are literally poisoning their parents each time they speak. This ingenious and provoking premise enables the boldly imaginative Marcus (Notable American Women, 2001), recipient of a remarkable array of major literary awards, to explore the paradoxes of family and how the need to communicate can go utterly wrong. As this confounding, heartrending plague spreads from Jewish families to the general population, gravely ill adults flee; teens, who take to terrorizing adults with megaphones, are quarantined; and society breaks down. Claire and Sam, the ailing parents of virulently weaponized Esther, belong to a secret sect of forest Judaism, which involves listening to mysterious transmissions emitted from the earth. Their tiny, sylvan synagogue becomes the focus of an aggressive stranger, who directs a grim work camp hastily assembled to find a cure for this catastrophic affliction at any cost. Marcus conducts a febrile and erudite inquiry into the threat of language, offering incandescent insights into ancient alphabets and mysticism, ostracism and exodus, incarceration with Holocaust echoes, and Kafkaesque behavioral science. Ultimately, the suspenseful, if excessively procedural, apocalyptical plot serves as a vehicle for Marcus' blazing metaphysical inquiry into expression, meaning, self, love, and civilization.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
In Ben Marcus's novel, the sound of children's speech has become lethal. IN a career spanning nearly 20 years, Ben Marcus has written just four spare volumes: a story collection, two novels and a chapbook. Formally inventive, dark and dryly comic, this work has earned him critical praise and a small army of devoted fans. His prose is heavily metaphorical yet coolly ironic; it traffics in the language of scholarship, myth and history, and until now has forsaken the conventional trappings of narrative. Indeed, the pieces in "The Age of Wire and String" (1995) function more like prose poems than stories; their emotional impact is derived from their distinctive diction and syntax. The opener, "Argument," might serve as a map of Marcus's early career, with its stated goal of "cataloging a culture" through "an array of documents settling within the chief concerns of the society, of any society, of the world and its internal areas." The book's archness is both bracing and absurd; it attempts to reinvent story by repurposing, gleefully, the jargon ordinarily used to analyze it. "Notable American Women" (2002) is an allegorical black comedy featuring a cult of silence, creepy sexuality and literary doppelgängers of the author and his family. It is like an exploded diagram of itself, spilling out from between its covers and into the real world - even its epigraphs and cover blurbs feature quotations from its own characters. The story "The Father Costume" (2002), published as a chapbook with illustrations by Matthew Ritchie, is an extended exploration of metaphor, where words float on water or can be sewn out of thread, and time has physical substance. Since then Marcus has written short stories and essays, most notably a spirited defense of experimental fiction published in Harper's - but "The Flame Alphabet," his first new book in a decade, has the feel of an event. And though it is recognizably by the same author, it is also something of a surprise. It has a plot, and a protagonist, and at times it even threatens to become a thriller. In an alternate-reality America, adults are ailing. They're weak and feverish; their tongues seize up and their faces wither. The infectious vector, it turns out, is the speech of children. This sickness manifests first in Jews, who, in this anti-Semitic world, must worship secretly, in forested prayer huts, where quasi-organic electronic devices receive sermons through holes in the earth. It is inside one of these huts that Sam, the protagonist, and his wife, Claire, have conceived Esther, their now-teenage daughter and the agent of their present suffering. As society crumbles in a slow-motion Kristallnacht of pseudoscience and exile, Sam encounters the insidious red-haired Murphy, bearer of strange medicines and enemy of free speech. "An ultra-restricted language," he says, "operating according to a new grammar, might finally be our way out of this." He cites the Tower of Babel: "Sometimes it serves a larger interest to keep people from communicating." Meanwhile, diagnostic pamphlets appear, thick with biblical allusion, written by a researcher named LeBov. Through these enigmatic motifs, Marcus explores the notion of blame and its relationship to writing, Judaism and parenthood. For a while, mystery propels the story: What's the source of this illness? Why does it afflict only Jews? Who are Murphy and LeBov? Halfway through, though, the story falters. One person turns out to be another person, who turns out to be a third. The religious allegory fragments and stumbles; happenings seem random, opportunistic. Sam is captured and imprisoned in a language retraining camp, where he is forced to devise non-toxic forms of communication: "Did the language itself matter? . . . Did an ancient one need to be revived, or were we bound to invent a new one, avoiding the perils of every language that has heretofore existed, I wondered." He has sex with strangers, quotes philosophers and artists, and finds further plots coiled within the one that has already ensnared him. Eventually he hits upon a plan to recreate Hebrew writing: "It is said that the 22 Hebrew letters, if laid flat and joined properly . . . would describe the cardiovascular plan of the human body. And not only that. That was child's play." This discovery, along with a serum derived from quarantined children, effects an escape, and an effort to reunite the family. "The Flame Alphabet," like Marcus's earlier works, is laden with metaphor; everything might mean something, but nothing is certain. It reads like a dream, complete with all the associative richness that comparison might suggest. Unfortunately, Marcus's borrowings from conventional narrative create an expectation of structural coherence that the book then declines to deliver. IN his more formally adventurous work, Marcus's sentences are thrilling; here, they sometimes feel excessive. Events are pointlessly recapitulated, or over-described. When we first meet Murphy, for instance, he is vomiting. Marcus shows us the scene again and again: "He was retching," "Now he was ill," "A pale cylinder of liquid birthed from his mouth," "He was decorous in his expulsion." And the characters serve, too often, merely as vessels for ideas, Claire a repository for guilt, Esther an embodiment of anger. Murphy's villainy, too, is fixed; his role, established early on, never changes. Instead of development, we see only a subtle rearranging of static elements. Marcus is a writer of prodigious talent, but "The Flame Alphabet" doesn't fulfill its own promise as a hybrid of the traditional and experimental. At one point, Sam recalls the prayer hut: "Claire and I always got excited that we might hear a story instead of a sermon." Readers with the same hope for this book may find it vexing; it's a strange and impressive work, but in the end, it's mostly sermon. J. Robert Lennon's books include the story collection "Pieces for the Left Hand" and the novel "Castle." His new novel, "Familiar," will be published this fall.
Guardian Review
Whatever else it may be, Ben Marcus's new novel is certainly one of the more determined attempts at coupling high and low literary ambition I've seen lately. Marcus, whose earlier books were austere excursions into what you might call anti-narrative, and who famously dished on Jonathan Franzen in an article defending experimentalism against its supposed detractors, seems to have decided to have it both ways this time: Wittgensteinian curtailments of meaning, alongside cackling villains and suspenseful escapes. Language, the debasement, banality and ultimate toxicity thereof, is his subject. It's a staple topic of avant garde literature, from the Prenzlauer Berg writers of the former East Germany to the Language poets of the American academy. All proceed, more or less, on the basis that verbal communication has been fatally corrupted by political or literary abuse and can be rescued only by a total dismantling and reassembly. Results vary (I've yet to read a Language poem that didn't make me want to dissolve it in acid), but Marcus's own, especially in The Age of Wire and String, have been haunting and inventive. The Flame Alphabet differs from that book in approaching the theme less through the prism of language itself than through the twists and turns of an elaborate plot. It's a sci-fi disaster thriller, basically, driven by the conceit that language has become toxic in a more than purely metaphorical sense. Words have begun literally poisoning people, their ravaging effects sweeping across America like a deadly plague. At first it's just the language of children, specifically Jewish children, that seems to be poisonous. But as time passes it becomes clear that all verbal communication - spoken, written, mimed, signed - is potentially lethal to adults (children remain immune). Meanwhile a fictitious sect of "Forest Jews", who worship in huts built over deep holes with transmission cables coming up out of the earth, are believed - at least by the book's sinister villain, LeBov - to hold the key to the antidote. It's a deeply weird setup, though as it develops, Marcus's serious reasons for each of these improbable elements is revealed, and a measure of the book's success is that it enforces not just a suspension of disbelief, but - for a while - total surrender of the faculty of reason. The brilliant opening section plunges the reader straight into the crisis, with the already sick narrator and his wife (both "Forest Jews") preparing to flee from their teenage daughter and the neighbourhood children whose voices are putting their lives in danger. The gear they pack evokes the crazed urgency of the situation: "I stashed field glasses, sound abatement fabrics, and enough rolled foam to conceal two adults. On top of these I crammed a raw stash of anti-comprehension pills. . . Tucked into the outside pouch. . . a personal noise dosimeter, hacked to measure children's speech. I wanted to be able to hear them coming." For a while, as Sam (the narrator) describes his realisation that their daughter's words have been making them ill, Marcus works the notion as a kind of reductio ad absurdum of the pain all parents feel as their little angels turn into cruel teenagers. The drama of parental obsolescence is sharply articulated, as is the condition of terrorised parental love, and these pages are the most humanly engaging in the book. But as the story progresses, and Sam's flight across a post-apocalyptic America culminates at a research facility where he goes to work on an antidote to the language toxin, so Marcus steadily widens the scope of the allegory to encompass information overload, the idiocy of public discourse and the ubiquity of deathly prose. A nice scene in which Sam gingerly tests the toxicity of texts left in his office will resonate with creative writing teachers or anyone who has to read lousy sentences for a living: "Perhaps my predecessor enjoyed sending obviously fatal scripts to the testing ground. He would watch from his glassed-in perch as the English language quietly picked off test subjects one by one. . ." And then there is the very curious Jewish theme, which unfolds in a somewhat obscure manner, but with enough biblical and historical hints dropped to steer the reader toward the basic matrix of meanings at issue. On the one hand there's some sort of secret weapon idea, relating to Judaic traditions of secret teachings, sacred alphabets and the divine power of the Word. On the other there's the idea of Jewish vulnerability - the ancient scapegoating motif - launched, here, with the initial suspicion that Jews are to blame for the plague. The two aspects converge in a strange parody of the blood libel of ritual child murder, whereby a voice from the "Jew hole" (impossibly awful phrase!) steers the scientists towards their life-saving grail: a serum that can be drawn only from terrified children. It's all mildly intriguing, but as the oddities proliferate - underground rabbis, fluid-filled "Moses Mouth" listening devices - so they begin to seem increasingly gratuitous. About halfway through, the book's esoteric and populist aims begin to pull hard in opposite directions and the enterprise starts to fray. There's a thriller plot to fulfil, but its non-realistic terms don't lend themselves to the strict inner logic that makes thrillers thrilling. How concerned can you feel about a character when it turns out all he has to do to save himself is jump down a "Jew hole" and find a scared kid? Elaborate props and movie-style dialogue pump up the sense of crisis - "What are you, on the team now? Part of the inner circle? Do you think you can really be a LeBov?" - and the sundered family plot, beloved of blockbusters, is milked for teary emotionality. It rises to a satisfying conclusion, but nothing quite comes up to the promise of the first half, which is genuinely exhilarating. James Lasdun's It's Beginning to Hurt is published by Vintage. To order The Flame Alphabet for pounds 13.59 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop - James Lasdun Then there is the very curious Jewish theme, which unfolds in a somewhat obscure manner, but with enough biblical and historical hints dropped to steer the reader toward the basic matrix of meanings at issue. On the one hand there's some sort of secret weapon idea, relating to Judaic traditions of secret teachings, sacred alphabets and the divine power of the Word. On the other there's the idea of Jewish vulnerability - the ancient scapegoating motif - launched, here, with the initial suspicion that Jews are to blame for the plague. The two aspects converge in a strange parody of the blood libel of ritual child murder, whereby a voice from the "Jew hole" (impossibly awful phrase!) steers the scientists towards their life-saving grail: a serum that can be drawn only from terrified children. It's all mildly intriguing, but as the oddities proliferate - underground rabbis, fluid-filled "Moses Mouth" listening devices - so they begin to seem increasingly gratuitous. About halfway through, the book's esoteric and populist aims begin to pull hard in opposite directions and the enterprise starts to fray. There's a thriller plot to fulfil, but its non-realistic terms don't lend themselves to the strict inner logic that makes thrillers thrilling. How concerned can you feel about a character when it turns out all he has to do to save himself is jump down a "Jew hole" and find a scared kid? Elaborate props and movie-style dialogue pump up the sense of crisis - "What are you, on the team now? Part of the inner circle? Do you think you can really be a LeBov?" - and the sundered family plot, beloved of blockbusters, is milked for teary emotionality. It rises to a satisfying conclusion, but nothing quite comes up to the promise of the first half, which is genuinely exhilarating. - James Lasdun.
Kirkus Review
Notable American Women, 2002, etc.). Had something bitten them while they slept by the ocean? That would explain, think Sam and Claire, their itchy skin and lethargy. But how come Esther, their 14-year-old daughter who'd napped beside them, is doing just fine? Then a pattern emerges in their upstate New York community. Adults are getting sick while kids stay healthy. The symptoms include shortness of breath, facial hardening and immobilized tongues, all caused by children's speech. Narrator Sam and Claire belong to an obscure Jewish sect. Their synagogues are two-person huts that enclose holes for transmission cables; there they listen to anti-language sermons that advocate a freakish quietism. The virus is its horrifying, unintended actualization. A prominent medical researcher, LeBov, blames "the toxic Jewish child." His canard doesn't goose the plot, but the novel's first, better half is nonetheless compelling. The panic spreads. Sam and Claire are victims twice over. They have pampered their beloved Esther. Now the teenager turns on them, maliciously spraying them (and others) with words. Marcus is at his best evoking their physical decline and helpless unconditional love for their brat--warmth amid the ashes. In time there's a mandatory evacuation order for adults; children are quarantined. On their way out of town, officials detach the desperately sick Claire from her anguished husband. In the novel's second half, Sam is a researcher in a medical lab, tasked with creating "a new language to outwit the toxicity." This is dull and clinical, though the appearance of the sharp-tongued anti-Semite LeBov perks things up momentarily; he points out that Jewish researchers are needed for their "conductive" skills. A short final section has Sam back at his hut coping, barely, with a grim post-apocalyptic world. Marcus has imagination to spare, but the religious Jewish theme is not a comfortable fit with a raging epidemic, and the suspense ebbs away. ]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Fierce, scary, hurtful, unsettling, and brilliant, this new work by award-winning novelist Marcus (Notable American Women) reminds us that language is dangerous and that we'll do anything to protect our children, even when they are (literally) killing us. In the world imagined here, a terrible epidemic has descended: whenever children speak, adults sicken and eventually die. At first, only Jewish families are stricken, stirring echoes of history's uglier sentiments. But soon every adult is affected. Near death, with her ailments graphically described, Claire still longs for daughter Esther, a standard-issue obnoxious teenager who's hardened with the knowledge of her power. A scene of her crouching over a fallen man, pouring poisoned words into his ear, is positively chilling. But what terrifies Esther's morally tough father, Sam, is that soon Esther will be an adult-and subject to the same horrors as her parents. When a quarantine is called, Sam and Claire prepare to leave, but Claire collapses, and Sam must go on alone; he ends up in a creepy laboratory where a cure for language toxicity is being sought. What keeps him going? The vision of his family. VERDICT Highly recommended, though not for those wanting easy thrills; demanding writer Marcus wants us to think. [See Prepub Alert, 7/18/11.]--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
By early December we huddled at home, speechless. If we spoke it was through faces gripped in early rigor mortis. Our neighborhood had gone blank, killed down by winter. It was too cold even for the remaining children to do much hunting. I don't know how else to refer to their work, but sometimes they swarmed the block, flooding houses with speech until the adults were repulsed to the woods. You'd see a neighbor with a rifle and you'd hear that rifle go off. The trees stood bloodless, barely holding on in the wind. We sat against the window and waited, spying out at the children when they roved through. The children-- they should have been called something else--barking toxic vocals through megaphones as they held hands in the street. I hoped they wouldn't turn and see us in the window, come to the door. I hoped they wouldn't walk up the lawn and push their megaphones against the glass. And always I hoped not to see our Esther in these crowds, but too often there she was in the pack, one of the tallest, bouncing in the winter nighttime fog, breathing into her hands to keep warm. She'd finally found a group of kids to run off with. If there was an escape to engineer we failed to do so, even while some neighbors loaded cars, smuggling from town when they'd had enough. The quarantine hadn't been declared, but in our area they weren't letting children through checkpoints, except by bus. Basic containment. If you wanted to leave, you left alone. Even so, bulky rugs were thrust into trunks. Items that required two people to carry. Usually wrapped in cloth, sometimes squirming of their own accord, a child's foot poking out. A clumsy game of hide-and-seek, children sprawled out in cargo carriers, children disguised as something else, so parents could spend a few more minutes with what ailed them. Claire retired as my test subject. She stopped appearing in the kitchen for night treatments, declined the new smoke. When I served infused milk she fastened her mouth shut. If she accepted medicine from me she did so unwittingly, asleep, whimpering when the needle went in. I couldn't blame her, falling away like that, embracing the shroud of illness. But I did. I conducted nightly campaigns of blame and accusation, silently, in the monstrous internal speech that is only half sounded out, a kind of cave speech one reserves for private airing. In these broadsides Claire spun on a low podium and absorbed every accusation. If I prepared a bowl of steamed grain and left it on the table for her, salted as she liked it, pooling in the black syrup, she passed her spoon through it, held up a specimen for study, and could not, just never could, finally slide it in her mouth. For Claire I cut cubes of meat loaf, and at best she tucked one or two in her mouth, where she could suck on them until they shriveled to husks. Claire no longer slept in her bed and she seemed too listless even to maneuver to the crafts room, to the guest room, to anywhere she might be able to fall unconscious in private. I was always trying to offer her shield, a modesty curtain, so she could come undone alone and unseen. She shouldn't have to collapse in hallways. If necessary I helped her along, at least to a corner, where I could erect a temporary blind. Once I found her asleep in the bathroom, one eye stuck open, leaking a speckled fluid. I crouched down and closed the eye, blotted it with my shirt. It opened again and she whispered at me. "Hi there." I looked down at her and she blinked, perfectly alert. Claire must have thought she was smiling, but that was so far from a smile. With my fingers I tried to change the feeling, to reshape her mouth. I couldn't have her looking at me like that. Her lips were cold and they would not stay where I arranged them. Her face had the weight of clay. "Go back to sleep" was all I could think to say, and I draped a bath towel over her, leaving her to rest on the cold tiles. At home I took charge of what remained of our dwindling domestic project, the blending of food into shakes, the cleaning of all our gray traces. I formed a packing plan, a strategy with regard to the luggage, mapped a route to outskirt lodging. Our pajamas, robes, towels, dishrags, these I washed every day, closing myself in the laundry room where the hot engine of the machine drowned out noise and thought. Against the hum of the washer I was, for a little while, nobody much, and this was how I preferred it. I left Esther's warm, folded clothes in her bedroom. Often they went untouched. Or later, after Esther had plowed through the house before returning to her gang, I'd find the pile toppled onto the floor, a heap of black crumbs, like someone's ashes, dumped over it. Claire's robe went mostly unwashed, because she didn't like to take it off, and if I ever found her half asleep and staring into nowhere from her resting place, she wouldn't respond when I asked if I could do any laundry for her, she'd just smack her lips to indicate thirst. "It'd be nice to have fresh clothes, right? I could clean these and have them right back to you." I tugged at her robe and she pulled away from me, threw an arm over her face. "Your robe will be nice and warm out of the dryer. We could get you covered in extra blankets in the meantime. It'll be nice to be clean. You'll feel better." I spoke to Claire as if she understood me, but she only stared. I spoke to her through a stiff, heavy face that seemed fitted on my head solely to block me from speaking. I sounded like a man underwater. As our tolerance departed for the speech of children, so, too, did our ability to speak. Language in or out, we heard, produced, or received. A problem any which way. To keep Claire hydrated I'd have to peel back her hospital mask, prop her upright, and press the sippy cup straw through the gluey seal of her lips. I lowered the mask when she was done and flowery welts of orange juice soaked through the fabric. When it was time to clean her, I filled a bowl with warm water, settled it over a towel at her bedside. With a washcloth I soaped her neck and face. She lifted her chin, gathered her hair out of the way. I squeezed little pools of water over her throat. I placed another towel under her feet, then lifted and washed each leg, rubbing as softly as I could, watching the little streaks of redness follow my cloth. Claire's legs rose too easily in my hands, as though they'd been relieved of their bones. With the last of the water I reached into Claire's robe and washed her stomach, the skin that once held her breasts. I peeled her from the bed so I could wash her back, pushing the washcloth under the robe, feeling each hollow between her ribs, a sponginess I did not want to explore. Then I settled her back down again, pulled up her covers, lifted the mask from her mouth so I could replace it with a clean one. She forced a smile, but a shadow had spread under her gums, a darkness inside her mouth. When I brought her soup, warmed the long bread she loved, or offered Claire some of the candies that usually she could never refuse-- baby amber globes with a cube of salted caramel inside-- at most she would roll over, heave, pull the quilt above her head. It was only when the front door swung open and Esther came in the house sweating, crazed, in clothing I'd never seen, that Claire sat up, drawing on some last reserve of power. She always wanted to catch sight of Esther, to watch her from a doorway, so she followed her from room to room, keeping her distance, and Esther tolerated the stalking. You could see in her whole body the effort she made to endure this attention she loathed. Esther had changed. Her face was older, harder. Filthy from her outings, but spectacularly beautiful. Of course I must think this, I'm her father. Fathers do not easily succumb to assessments of ugliness where their children are concerned. Esther had never been a cute child, but she'd grown threateningly stunning in the last few months. She let her mother watch from a safe perimeter and she was considerate enough not to turn on her with speech, to stop and speak until Claire fell. Esther saw her mother in doorways, looked away, said nothing. It was her greatest kindness to us, that silence. I will always appreciate the restraint she showed in those last days. Excerpted from The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
