An Inventory of Benevolent Butterflies (A Novel After Henry Darger)

With the literary mastery of Samuel Beckett and Thomas Bernhard, award-winning author Lance Olsen presents a lyrical novelization 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 death; of the man who may have been his lover; of his abuse as a child at the hands of his father and his boarding school staff.

Informed by the real writings, collages, and other fragments of Darger’s solitary life, An Inventory of Benevolent Butterflies is a masterful and imaginative look into the life 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 this intense, chimeric first-person novel, 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.