Irritant

“There are two books I’ve read only ever in bed somewhere on the cusp of sleep and waking drunk in the logic of their sentences, those being Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Darby Larson’s Irritant has turned into the third. It is a puzzle machine of engrossing order, deceptively simple in how it wakes and slips and snakes itself with mesmerizing syntax inside a single 900-page 1-paragraph-shaped monolith of colors and suns and prayers. The result is a relentless, terrifying spell, or book of spells, or library of books of spells, or worse, a multi-mega-leveled text-world the likes from which I or my ability to sleep may never find an exit.” – Blake Butler