Review
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Title: The Florilegium of Madness
Author: D.J. Butler
Publisher: Hemelein Publications
Genre: Short Stories
Year Published: 2021
Number of Pages: 312
Binding: Paperback
ISBN: 978-1642780086
Price: $17.99
Reviewed by Conor Hilton for the Association for Mormon Letters
The Florilegium of Madness is a delightful collection of short works, mostly stories, by D.J. Butler. It also happens to be the first volume in the Hemelein Publications “Legacy of the Corridor” series. If the rest of the series is as fun and intriguing as this one, we’re all in for a treat. Many of the works included here are published elsewhere, often in various multi-author anthologies. I’ve read a couple of Butler’s stories in other collections and loved them, so I was excited to dig in here and was not disappointed.
The collection includes 20 stories, an essay on magic systems, a delightful piece about Barnes and Noble, and an acceptance speech (different and better than you’re expecting, I’d wager). This is the first time two of the stories, an essay, and the speech, are available. Many of the stories are explicitly Mormon, often featuring Hiram Wooley (a character in Butler’s novels The Cunning Man and The Jupiter Knife, both co-written with Aaron Michael Ritchey). There’s a horror thread that runs through many of the stories as well, with Butler interested in a variety of different styles and sub-genres of horror throughout the stories in the collection.
Butler’s stories are rich with detail and a sense of time and place, where you can almost immediately feel where and when you are. Regardless of the setting, the narratives are fast-paced and often grappling with interesting questions and ideas. That’s not to say that they feel heady or intellectual; they’re more pulp and genre-oriented than “literary fiction,” with Butler infusing these pulp and genre stories with thoughtful ideas and premises.
I enjoyed many of the stories in Butler’s collection but particularly loved “The Guns of Perdition,” “Seed,” “Twenty-Five Dollars and No Residuals, “Recording Devices,” and the Hiram Wooley stories. Butler includes some brief prefatory material before many of the works in the collection. In these materials, he offers some notes on the origin of the various works, where they’ve been published, and on at least one occasion, his response to some of the controversy inspired by the story’s initial publication.
Butler shows a keen interest in folklore and legend, with many of the stories explicitly dealing with various motifs, narratives, ideas, characters, and images from different folklore and legends. These are often, but not always, tied to the West, with some stories thinking about occult lore and legends that transcend that neat geography and some stories engaging with lore and legends from other parts of the United States. Butler’s stories demonstrate a fascination with magic and the relationship between magic and belief, as well as thinking about the power and danger of belief more broadly.
If you enjoy pulpy, genre, often explicitly Mormon fiction that dabbles in various horror sub-genres, then this is for you. The variety of works and genres that Butler includes in the collection means that there’s something for most readers interested in those broad categories. Especially given the fun, fast-paced, adventure vibe of much of the fiction which balances out the truer horror stories (giving scaredy-cat readers like myself a respite). I Can’t wait to read more of D.J. Butler’s work and to see what else the Legacy of the Corridor series has in store!