An Inventory of Benevolent Butterflies

With the literary mastery of Samuel Beckett and Thomas Bernhard, award-winning author Lance Olsen presents a lyrical imagining of an artist’s solitary, disembodied life, as dreamlike as it is captivating. At the end of his life in 1973, Henry Darger’s mind is a series of recollections: of his decades spent working as a custodian mopping floors at various Chicago hospitals; of his nights writing and making hundreds of collages that would never be seen until after his passing; of the man who was once his lover; of his abuse as a child, at the hands of his father and his boarding school instructors. Informed by the real writings, collages, and other fragments of Darger’s solitary life, An Inventory of Benevolent Butterflies is a project of meticulous research and masterful telling, diving deep into the imagination of a man who wasn’t interested in attention, even less in fame, and created for no one save himself—and to save himself. In an intense, chimeric first-person, Lance Olsen captures the radical interiority of an artist about whom extraordinarily little is known. Paired with the photo collages of visual artist Andi Olsen, this is a literary scavenger hunt for fans of Mark Z. Danielewski, Lidia Yuknavitch, and José Saramago.