'Flame Alphabet': Are Your Kids Making You Sick? In this eerie dystopian novel by Ben Marcus, the speech of children becomes (quite literally) toxic. Communication breaks down, ...

Books 'The Flame Alphabet' review: Marcus goes from an A to Zzz . Updated: ; Jan. 21, 2012, 6:00 p.m. | Published: ; Jan. 21, 2012, 5:00 p.m.

For me, “The Flame Alphabet” triggered the very allergic reaction to verbiage that it describes. A relentless sameness to the drear, queasy atmosphere is stifling: Page after page, characters ...

Spend too much time with 24-hour news networks and it’s easy to feel that exposure to that much talk can make you sick. Taking the idea a few steps further, author Ben Marcus imagines a world in ...

In an election year, nasty rhetoric is par for the course. But what if all that toxic language was, well, actually toxic? That's the premise of The Flame Alphabet, the new novel by Ben Marcus ...

Ben Marcus' bracing 2012 novel The Flame Alphabet (Knopf) makes high, messy art from the fantastic. His premise — that the language of children suddenly is toxic to adults — has an immediate power but ...

In this eerie dystopian novel by Ben Marcus, the speech of children becomes (quite literally) toxic. Communication breaks down, but so do the metaphors, leaving the reader wondering what to take ...

In an election year, nasty rhetoric is par for the course. But what if all that toxic language was, well, actually toxic? That's the premise of The Flame Alphabet, the new novel by Ben Marcus ...

Near the end of The Flame Alphabet, Ben Marcus's rhapsodic apocalyptic novel of a world where language has become toxic, Sam, the narrator, commenting on a fable of a young bird blindfolded as a ...