Richard Butner

An extremely tardy review of a LibraryThing Early Reviewer book (won in October 2021, received and properly shelved somewhere - and then it had been playing hide and seek with me - I was almost at the point where I was planning on finding another copy when it finally showed up - on the shelf I thought I had checked a few times before). It is almost amusing that this whimsical behavior of the book fits the stories (well, it also probably means that I need new glasses or I need to stop putting books I should read shortly somewhere just because they fit there).

Butner's first proper collection (Small Beer Press published a shorter one in 2004 as part of their chapbook series) collects 16 stories - the oldest one published in 1996 and the newest ones being published here for the first time). Most of them appear to be mainstream stories for most of their text until they finally cross the line into the fantastical - often showing that even the mundane was not really mundane. Butner has a very similar style in all of the stories - he starts in the present, then jumps back to the past to catch up the reader on how we got to the point we started at and then finishes the story itself. That works better in some stories than in others - in some places it felt as if he had no idea how to get us the background information we needed so a flashback it is. The few stories where that is seemingly not the case engage with the past in different ways - from time travel to ghosts (and even there, the flashbacks are there, less prominent but there. Which also means that reading the collection without a break mutes the later stories - it feels like you reading the same over and over - while you are not, not really. So if you plan to read the collection, do yourself a favor and read only a few stories at a time.

Taken as a collection, the stories span the whole speculative space - from horror and fantasy to science fiction, from near future to the past. Most of them live in the corners - in those borderline genres which literary authors want to pretend are not genre and genre authors like exploring.

Adventure opens the collection with a tale that seems to be about a dying friend - if you ignore the cat that may or may not be immortal and a jester.

Holderhaven is set in an old mansion - once a home of a family, now a museum. There are rumors about ghosts (which old house does not have one of those) but as Rudy starts exploring, he will learn about a past everyone wants to forget - with a little help of a ghost. It is an unsettling story about forgotten people - and how abusers can get away with anything - as long as they are rich.

Scenes from the Renaissance is probably the least enjoyable story in the collection for me. A man comes to what seems like a thematic part to try to talk to an old friend and it seems like the park is really a door to a past - with forces keeping people there and almost amnesiac. While the idea is not bad, something just did not click - it feels more like a sketch than as a story.

Ash City Stomp has the Devil hitch-hiking and that ends up less scary than most hitchhiker stories out there.

Horses Blow Up Dog City starts with a suicide and ends up being an exploration of fame and its influence on the psyche of everyone some time in the future.

The Master Key and Circa both deal with returns - one to an old school, the other to an old house that is about to be demolished. And when the returning friends go exploring, they find something they never expected - something that really cannot be. Everyone makes it alive in both stories so neither is that kind of story.

At the Fair is similar in tone to Scenes from the Renaissance - except that it is a fair and not a theme park - with some magic mixed in. It is short and that saves it - it makes even less sense than the other one.

Pete and Earl is set in the future - where class divisions had not really disappeared and grudges are held for a long time. The choice of narrator and the pacing make it a lot better story than it seems to be.

The Ornithopter is another story set in a future - a future that stays undefined and seems to be heading to apocalyptic - while our protagonist is trying to figure his job.

Stronghold's setting is unclear. Is it a future? Is it a parallel world? In either case, a murder intrudes into the ordered life of a rich man and changes his life.

Delta Function is the one story where time travel is not just hinted it - it is the the core of the narrative. 30 years after leaving the small town where he went to college, Gray comes back on a work assignment - and ends up back in 1979. Literally.

Give Up looks at another future - one in which you can do anything in your own back yard - including climbing Mount Everest. But at what price? The final sales pitch made me laugh - it may be the future but Sales is Sales.

Chemistry Set starts like another story of returning back home and just like The Master Key and Circa ends up in an unexpected place.

Under Green mixes the person returning home and a murder mystery and salts the narrative liberally with nature, including a talking tree. I am not sure what the point of the ending was - lose a friend to find another? Whatever it was, it ran a bit too long - the only story that felt too long in the collection.

In Sunnyside, a virtual wake for an artist takes a bit of a sinister turn - without any monsters. Despite that, it is actually one of the more nostalgic stories in the collection - it is all about memories and what we chose to remember and about what friendship means when you make it in the world.

Overall an enjoyable way to pass a few hours even if it was not perfect and even though some stories seem very similar to each other when you look back at them. But that is inevitable - writers don't discard ideas just because they already used them and exploring the same idea in different ways make sense.

I will be curious to see what Butner does next (plus his dedication of the book to John Kessel did not harm him - he is one of my favorite SF authors).… (més)

From the very beginning of this strange collection, I was enchanted.

There's an adorable awkwardness, and confident frailty, to many of Butner's characters here, and even when I began a story with one eyebrow raised or feeling a bit skeptical of where things were going, the turns and choices and progressions in nearly every story pulled me in to the individual world and reality...to the extent that I simply wanted the collection to keep right on going. The way Butner interweaves his own versions of reality and fantasy with characters who seem so real that we could know them is truly something wonderful, and it's easy to see why some of these stories were published in top magazines. But importantly, even the stories which were unpublished prior to this collection stand up to the standards set by others.

In the end, I'm left anxious to read more of his work, because even though some of these stories didn't quite make me fall in love with them like others did, even those that left me less than entralled showed such creativity and life that I didn't mind having read them. Some of my favorites from the collection are: "Scenes from the Renaissance", "Ash City Stomp", "Circa", "Delta Function", "Give Up", and "Sunnyside".

Absolutely recommended for lovers of weird fiction and SFF in short form.… (més)

I only needed to know that this book came from Small Beer Press to know I wanted to read it, even though I hadn't previously read any of Richard Butner's work. The name of course, evokes editor and writer Kelly Link, whose prose style I absolutely love. Based on my affinity for Link's work, I took a chance on Butner, and I'm glad I did. His debut collection, The Adventurists is a short story collection carefully curated to leave the reader with a feeling of having touched upon something - the lives of the characters and their deepest longings, most inextricably bound to their histories. Some brush up against the speculative, though Butner rightly keeps his hand steady here. What emerges is a collection that feels like just that- a cohesive piece of storytelling that keeps you coming back for more.… (més)