Ben Marcus's fiction has always felt vaguely sinister. It looks and reads like English, but you can't get very far into it before a bizarre word choice flashes from out of nowhere and sideswipes you. Then everything starts crawling: Sentences slither sideways, and a strange cadence unlike the usual galloping rhythm of most prose develops; it's like an extra hoof is somewhere under there, adding an unsettling extra metronomic beat that you can never quite identify or get used to.

Consider the second sentence of "Snoring, Accidental Speech" from his collection The Age of Wire and String: "The snoring person can be stuffed with cool air to slow the delivery of its language, but perspiration froths at key points on the hips and back when artificial air is introduced, and thus the sleep becomes sketchy and riddled with noise." In this sentence, the sideswipe comes with "stuffed," a perfectly acceptable but bizarre verb that brings to mind asphyxiation as readily as oxygenating. Then the sentence canters off crookedly into the idea of snoring as "language," a person as an "it," and perspiration that "froths," landing in a cockeyed explanatory riff that sends your brain reeling to find purchase. Are you reading a how-to guide? A fiction? A prose poem? Something else? Yes, yes, yes, and yes! respectively.

Marcus's new novel, The Flame Alphabet, is the story of what happens when language transforms into an epidemic. Words are making people sick. But not all words—adults only develop painful, flulike symptoms and start slipping toward death when they hear children speaking. Marcus's perverted grammar, written in his deliberate, loping voice, makes you wonder, in some superstitious corner of your brain, if his alien prose can infect your body on a microscopic level, change you fundamentally from what you were before, somehow weaken you. While reading, you become infected by a quiet inner monologue of concern for your own health....

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