An Inventory of Benevolent Butterflies is about the so-called outsider artist Henry Darger (1892-1973), who for decades spent his days as a custodian mopping floors at various Chicago hospitals, his nights writing (one of his novels, In the Realms of the Unreal, is 15,145 pages long; all went unpublished) and making over 350 collages (also never seen by another human in his lifetime) depicting the horrific adventures of the hermaphroditic Vivian Girls whose mission was to save a world filled with child slaves, a metaphor for the one which Darger inhabited.

Olsen’s novel, accompanied by discordant images by collagist Andi Olsen, is interested in capturing Darger’s radical interiority, his non-sequitur imagination, through an intensely subjective first-person point of view.

Looking to writers like Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, and José Saramago for companionship, An Inventory of Benevolent Butterflies raises questions about for whom we really create at the end of the day; about reading as problem; about the importance of serious art as a hospital for soothing hurt rather than as a business privileging quantity over quality.