300,000,000
300,000,000, or also referred to as Three Hundred Million is a 2014 novel by American writer Blake Butler. Butler created the novel from his preconception of Roberto Bolaño's novel 2666. Inspired by 2666, the story is formatted in five sections with titles that start with "The Part About...". 300,000,000 was written over the course of two years writing every day, and a took a further two years of revising. It is a satire on the commented oversaturation of murder, gore, and crime in American television as stated by Butler.
One of the characters Darrel is said to be inspired by BOB from the TV show Twin Peaks.
Plot
The five sections of the novel are "The Part About Gravey", "The Part About the Killing", "The Part About Flood ", "The Part About America", and "The Part About Darrel".The first section is the transcribed journal of the cult leader Gretch Gravey's notebook. Gravey is a cult leader and mass murderer who envisions the world's population should be condensed into one single body. The cult he leads consists of teenage boys seeking drugs from Gravey, and in exchange they bring back "mothers", women of all ages, to Gravey to be ritualistically raped, murdered, dismembered, or cannibalized. Gravey is connected to the murders of 440 people, including some of his own cult members, and hundreds of bodies of the victims are stacked in his home he calls the Black House.
The transcriber of the journal is police detective E.N. Flood and is an unreliable narrator, supposedly going insane from investigating Gravey's crimes. Flood investigates the site of the mass grave, and underneath is an underworld meant to become the City of Sod, similar to the living world except devoid of people, that Flood becomes trapped in. Later, Gravey is arrested but everyone who comes into contact with Gravey goes insane and become commit killing sprees. Mass killings spread wider and death tolls spread in the wider area until it infects the whole of the United States with the death toll every day until the entire population of 300,000,000 are killed.