Set in the year 1836, the 63rd novel by the great American writer Joyce Carol Oates is inspired by real events that took place in an insane asylum for women, where Doctor Silas Aloysius Weir has taken refuge after being accused of a lethal experiment on a newborn girl. At the asylum, the decidedly creepy physician carries out cruel procedures on women who are vulnerable and overlooked by the health system. They become guinea pigs for experiments that defy every ethical principle, and in an era when mental health attracted very little empathy. Although his actions are deeply reprehensible, Doctor Weir is glorified by the society of the day as a brilliant avant-garde surgeon and is even dubbed “the father of gyno-psychiatry”.
A central element of the novel is represented by the character of Brigit Kinealy, a young Irish maid who turns into the main target of Doctor Weir’s experiments. Brigit is the only person who is able to stand up to the physician’s authoritarian control, and she brings to the novel a touch of sentiment in such a grim setting, since she eventually becomes the doctor’s assistant, and Weir, obsessed with her unearthly beauty, comes to believe there is a special, if tacit, communion between the two of them. Brigit’s character proves that humankind can resist, even in the most desperate of circumstances, thanks to hope, a light in a world in which madness and terror prevail.
Butcher has the feverish energy, narrative drive, and descriptive power of most of Oates’ previous novels. Ultimately, however, this novel has broader social implications that one might expect, and becomes a perceptive and empathetic reflection on women’s rights, the misdeeds of the patriarchy, and the servanthood of the poor and outcast. As she always does, Oates succeeds in creating a world that is different from ours yet also familiar, making it impossible for readers to ignore her observations on the twisted nature of human beings and the violence often associated with it.

Joyce Carol Oates was born in Lockport, New York. After living in both the United States and Canada, since 1978 she has resided in New Jersey. Year after year, she has been a frontrunner for the Nobel Prize, and several times a finalist for the Pulitzer, for her over seven-hundred literary works, in the form of novels, short stories, memoirs, plays, young adult literature, essays and poetry. Her oeuvre has received important honors, such as the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. Oates taught creative writing at Princeton University from 1978 to 2014 and is currently a professor at UC Berkeley, where she teaches short fiction. She has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978. Since 1963, Oates has written over a hundred novels and other books, trying her hand at a variety of genres and honing her unique style in tales of families, our roots, domestic violence, the loss of innocence, and the shattering experience of romantic love, all while decrying the corruption, sexism, and racism inherent in American culture. She has proved her mettle as an uncompromising marvel of a writer, impossible to pin down. Evil is at the heart of her storytelling: an evil so natural that it becomes the driving force of many of her stories and very essence of their protagonists. On the occasion of the Raymond Chandler Award, the writer has declared: “It is a great honor to receive a prize first bestowed on Graham Greene, a master of the literary genre that combines mystery with a strong moral core, and the driving forces of suspense with the permanent powers of myth and the thrill of a story, which is our oldest legacy. A thriller is a vehicle and noir is the landscape, a vision of life that, for many people, is more accurate than the mirrors in which life is reflected.”
There have been 25 film adaptations of Oates’ books, between short films and features, from 1978 to 2022, the most popular, of late, being the recent Blonde (2022), by Andrew Dominik, about the life of Marylin Monroe, which was nominated for an Oscar®; and the 2018 film Double Lover by François Ozon, starring Jérémie Renier, selected for the Cannes competition lineup, and based on Oates’ story “Lives of the Twins”. Much earlier, Foxfire (1996), by Annette Haywood-Carter, also Angelina Jolie’s screen debut, and the French remake by Laurent Cantet in 2012, Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang, based on Oates’ novel of the same name.