‘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Based on authentic historical documents, Butcher is a nightmare voyage through the darkest regions of the American psyche.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

'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

Joyce Carol Oates is a novelist, critic, playwright, poet and author of short stories and one of America’s most highly respected literary figures. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including We Were the Mulvaneys, which was an Oprah Book Club Choice, and Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Princeton University and a recipient of the National Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction.