Remember that time at the mall, when you looked down the service hallway and someone was there and you fell in love with them, and when you looked again they were gone? When you found a tunnel under an old building and couldn’t resist going in?

There are things buried here. You might want to save them. You might want to get out of their way. The rules are always clear but never fully known in Richard Butner’s stories. Sometimes a door will open into a new world, sometimes into the past. Putting on a costume might be the restart you are half hoping for. There are ghost stories without ghosts, time travel without machinery, punks and hippies living together in peace but not harmony.

With a close eye on the furniture of our daily lives and a calm but not detached vision of the multiple selves carried within each person, Butner’s allusive and elusive, nostalgic and modernist stories reach into the uncanny corners of life — where there are no job losses, just HCAPs (Head Count Allocation Procedures), where a tree might talk to just one person, where Death’s Fool is not to be ignored.

Richard Butner

Books