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The Butterfly Collector is full of people you know: a beautician, a lawyer, a man with Alzheimer’s who takes his first nightcap at three in the afternoon. But each of these thoroughly knowable protagonists is faced with a situation that causes them to become extraordinary. In these stories, Fred McGavran is both author and investigator, out to prove that every person has at least one really good story to tell.
“A collection of gems. By day Fred McGavran is a highly regarded Harvard-educated lawyer. By moonlight he crafts page-turners that draw on his deep experience with law and life…McGavran’s masterly writing invited comparison with John Grisham. But stir in Stephen King and Kafka–and an eye for the absurd, an ear for dialog and a wicked sense of humor. McGavran ranks as a top lawyer-writer. His abiding concern with moral values reaches into literary traditions that include the best of Melville, Chekhov, and Graham Greene. His stories go down smoothly, but they linger and haunt…These stories are required reading for law-and-lit fans, lawyers with a sense of humor and all devotees of the art of short fiction.”
-Michale H. Hoffheimer
“Fred McGavran’s The Butterfly Collector is sardonic, erudite, and unexpectedly frightening. He will leave you wanting more.”
-P.F. Kluge
“Fred McGavran’s first collection of short fiction, The Butterfly Collector, etches the American haute bourgeoise with satire that stings in carefully observed detail but then predictably swerves into generous invention. The world he works with is O’Hara’s and Updike’s suburbia, mildly Midwestern, citified–but populated by lawyers, priests, occasionally therapists and academics, most of them aging badly, few of them attractive to women. His Dickensian devastation of the law, updated with voir dire, takes turns with magical realism. McGavran writes about memory, often about an unfortunate inability to remember selectively. Things keep coming back-submarines that rise years later to disgorge their dead or, elsewhere, unkillable bears and stags. Oddly dismembered limbs run through his stories, metaphors for what travels uselessly.”
-Britton J. Harwood
“The Butterfly Collector takes one into a kind of nether world in which the seemingly ordinary serves as a doorway to another, stranger dimension. The dead return to life to confound their heirs…well-heeled suburbanites hunt deer with home-made spears across the broad expanses of their lawns…a man retreats into silence when he realizes how colorless his life has been. There is a sense of loss at the core of many of the characters that we meet in these pages but there is also humor and insight!”
-John K. Brackett
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