The Adventurists

Starred review from November 8, 2021
Landscapes and memories alter, gentrify, and crumble in Butner’s flawless debut collection, which wends ghosts, virtual futures, and the intricacies of friendship into 16 breathtaking, intimate stories. “Holderhaven” slowly unfurls a country house museum’s ghostly mystery into a multifaceted examination of recreation’s limits, who is allowed agency, and the impossible truth behind the legend. “Ash City Stomp,” about an encounter with the devil, and “The Ornithopter,” set in a high-technology future, both imbue their speculative setups with vital humanity. The delicate “Adventure” holds a mirror to the aging process while still honoring a vividly alive present, and in “Sunnyside,” exes attend a successful artist friend’s virtual-reality wake in a breathtaking commentary on the act of remembering. Butner pairs clean, elegant prose with keen and generous human insight, unique imagery, and a broad range of interests, treating Renaissance faires, 1980s counterculture, and rich small-town worlds with the same loving deliberation. Readers of John Crowley, Ray Bradbury, and Sally Rooney alike will find a home in this beautiful, grounded exploration of pasts and futures—and the people suspended between them.

January 1, 2022
Butner's short stories are strange little vignettes of people's lives, tales of the ways time and memory--both what we remember and what we don't--affect the stories we tell about ourselves and the world around us. The collection opens with "Adventure," with a long-overdue visit to an old friend and a tale told about a stranger, which may be just fantasy, but, setting the tone for the collection, the reality is not entirely clear-cut. There are tales about history like "Holderhaven," in which a house-turned-museum has plenty of secrets hidden by both the stories told by the family who owns it and in the architecture of the building itself, and tales in which the past is all too real, like the nostalgia-riddled "Delta Function." Sometimes Butner ventures into near-future speculation, as he portrays people clinging to corporate life in the decaying office park of "The Ornithopter" and climbing the virtual backyard Everest of "Give Up." All in all, a worthwhile collection of not entirely comfortable stories exploring the past, the present, and the future.

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December 15, 2021
An assortment of speculative short stories filled with ghosts, time leaps, and alternate realities. Butner has a knack for a quirky, eye-catching premise. "Holderhaven" turns on the discovery of a hidden staircase in a historic manor. "Horses Blow Up Dog City" imagines a dystopian future in which a puppeteer becomes a pop-culture celebrity. In "Give Up," a man attempts to summit Mount Everest via a virtual reality, while the narrator of "Delta Function" finds himself witnessing the New Wave band he played in back in college. The stories' arch tone, offbeat scenarios, and folkloric elements bear a resemblance to George Saunders' and Carmen Maria Machado's work, though Butner has his own thematic obsessions. Earnest but frustrated struggles to recover the past is a big one, not just in time-travel yarns like "Delta Function," but "The Master Key," in which two friends return to their high school, or the opening "Adventure," in which a reunion of two friends becomes oddly upended by the appearance of a man in a jester suit. In his best stories, Butner effectively merges the strange setups with a bracing mix of humor and dread. "The Ornithopter," for instance, takes place in an office whose staff has been rapidly whittled down to a handful of people, one of whom is a hardcore Star Trek geek. ("The metaphor they're working inside of might be the Nostromo, the spaceship from Alien, not the USS Enterprise," the hero notes.) And "Give Up" conjures the horrifying sense that a glitchy fake Everest might be as challenging as the real thing. But too often, these stories don't rise to their promise, occluded with plot or dense prose that smothers the wit and insight Butner strives to bring to them. Clever, high-concept stories that sometimes lack in the telling.

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