Available Formats
Paperback
Published: 30th September 2025
Paperback
Published: 31st October 2024
Hardback
Published: 2nd October 2024
Butcher
By (Author) Joyce Carol Oates
HarperCollins Publishers
Fourth Estate Ltd
30th September 2025
22nd May 2025
United Kingdom
General
Fiction
Psychological thriller
Historical fiction
Biographical fiction / autobiographical fiction
Modern and contemporary fiction: general and literary
813.54
Paperback
352
Width 129mm, Height 198mm, Spine 26mm
240g
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Based on authentic historical documents, Butcher is a nightmare voyage through the darkest regions of the American psyche.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 womens 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 Americas long war on women' CrimeReads, 'The Best Historical Fiction of 2024'
'Humour doesnt 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 Americas cracked, calamitous heart Esquire
Americas preeminent fiction writer The New Yorker
Joyce Carol Oates is a novelist, critic, playwright, poet and author of short stories and one of Americas 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.