Butcher
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4.5 • 4 Ratings
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
‘Simply the most consistently inventive, brilliant, curious and creative writer going’ GILLIAN FLYNN
'Gripping … Bravura storytelling' VOGUE
'A blood-soaked, gothic nightmare' FINANCIAL TIMES
From one of our most accomplished storytellers, an extraordinary and arresting novel about a nineteenth-century women's asylum, and a terrifying doctor who wants to change the world.
Humiliated by a procedure gone terribly wrong, Dr Silas Weir is forced to take a position at the New Jersey Asylum for Female Lunatics. There, his work focuses on women who have been neglected by the state – women he subjects to grotesque modes of experimentation.
Based on authentic historical documents, Butcher is a nightmare voyage through the darkest regions of the American psyche.
'A ghastly and harrowing page-turner' STEPHEN KING, via X
'A triumph of style and brio’ FINANCIAL TIMES
'Terrifying' FLAUNT
'Vividly and compellingly-drawn' iNEWS
Reviews
'A ghastly and harrowing page-turner … Faint of heart? Stay away' Stephen King, via X
‘A blood-soaked, gothic nightmare … A triumph of style and brio’ Financial Times
An empathic and discerning commentary on women’s rights, the abuses of patriarchy and the servitude of the poor and disenfranchised' The New York Times Book Review
'Butcher is vivid and compellingly drawn, its prose scalpel-sharp … Oates remains a master storyteller with her finger on the pulse of humanity, forever alive to its moral failures and flaw' iNews
'Terrifying, Oates’ storytelling so effective that at times I found myself averting my eyes from the words on the page’ Flaunt
'A creepy, circuitous tale … splendidly written' Kirkus
'Oates' writing is so deft and the world she creates so vivid, one keeps turning the pages, all the way to the deeply unsettling ending' The New York Journal of Books
'Butcher is JCO at her best … an essential text for understanding America’s long war on women' CrimeReads, 'The Best Historical Fiction of 2024'
'Humour doesn’t get more macabre than this’ Sophie Mackintosh, Literary Review
Praise for Joyce Carol Oates:
‘One of the greatest — and most productive — living American writers’ Financial Times
'Oates is a massive literary heavyweight, and many earnestly believe she could knock the other contenders for the title of Great American Novelist' Guardian
‘[A] notoriously prolific chronicler of America’s cracked, calamitous heart’ Esquire
‘America’s preeminent fiction writer’ The New Yorker
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Oates (Zero-Sum) delivers a deliciously arch and relentlessly gloomy fictional biography of Dr. Silas Aloysius Weir, a character based on two 19th-century doctors. Weir, known during his time as the "Father of Modern Gyno-Psychiatry," was also called the "Red-Handed Butcher" for his gruesome experiments on women during his 35-year stint at the New Jersey State Asylum for Female Lunatics in Trenton. The bulk of the novel is presented as a Nabokovian manuscript composed of accounts by Weir's colleagues, family members, and patients, which have been assembled and annotated by his oldest son, Jonathan. Banished from a Pennsylvania hospital after a failed cranial surgery on an infant, Weir applies his "colossal egotism" to his new patients at the asylum, asserting that "mental illness in females is a consequence of infection, particularly of the female genitals." To that end, he turns a tablespoon into a speculum and introduces sadistic treatments with misleading names like the "Chair of Tranquility." The recipient of many of his surgeries is Brigit Kenealy, a young, indentured albino Irish servant who becomes his romantic obsession and assistant. Oates's scathing indictment of the physical and psychological treatment of women by the medical establishment makes for compulsive but challenging reading. Unlike the ghastly procedures depicted, Oates's inventive gothic novel pays off.
Customer Reviews
Couldn’t put it down
Horrific, stomach churning and completely gripping. Based on historical documents and memoirs this book grabs you and forces you to confront the horrors that were carried out in the name of science.
Heartbreaking, rage enduring and at points satisfying.
A must read