Writing In PopMatters, Simon Lowe insightfully explores Lance Olsen’s An Inventory of Benevolent Butterflies (Dzanc Books), a marvelous novel that enters the fractured inner world of outsider artist Henry Darger.

As Lowe writes, Olsen’s novel is shaped by “intricately placed sentences that jump and spill in Olsen’s distinct, prismatic style.” He continues: “The first person voice, Darger’s voice, is not an act of ventriloquism but an orchestration of perception, collaging thoughts and memory in fractured, truncated sentences, placed out of time, aphoristic and broken further by ellipses, gaps: nothingness—much like Darger’s life.” On the experience of reading the novel, Lowe observes: “Reading An Inventory of Benevolent Butterflies provides a similar experience[;] it’s like falling into worlds, actual, imaginary, neither, both.”

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