`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 Based on authentic historical documents, Butcher is a nightmare voyage through the darkest regions of the American psyche.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