Customer Reviews (3)

Mountain passions
Jess Tyler lives alone in a mountain shack until a young woman shows up at his door one day.He is powerfully attracted to her, even when he finds out that she is his long-lost daughter.This is only the first twist in a densely plotted novella that plays out among the poverty-stricken mountain people of West Virginia.James M. Cain takes his characters to some very dark places, hurling them from the heights of joy to the blackest pits of despair.What a ride!

Hard, stark story
Cain portrays the dark sides of his characters so vividly that you come away with the queasy feeling that such people might actually exist. You might also come away feeling grateful that you are who you are, and not them.

Jess Tyler lives alone, up at the edge of a worked-out coal mine. He has a farm plot and a few animals, but that's about it. He had another life once, or maybe more than one, but that's behind him. Then, one day, a part of that past stands in front of him. It's a young woman that he's drawn to so strongly that he has no choice in the matter. He doesn't know who she is, just that she feels right in his arms and in his bed. The problem is, it's the daughter he never saw grow up. With her, his quiet, upright life begins to topple. More of the past arrives, and not just his past. The tensions that tore his old life away from him arrive too, as taut as ever or more. Cain's story unfolds with the lethal inevitability of an end game in chess. As the strategy of each piece emerges, the need to attack or defend increases in urgency. The heat of flaring hatreds creates a pressure that builds, down to the last page.

Cain wrote his own introduction to this story. It's written in the same way as his fiction, so that every word matters and every thought is so sharp you could cut yourself on it. Maybe Cain isn't as well known as Hammet or Chandler, but he ranks right with them as a founder of noir as we know it.

//wiredweird, reviewing the 1979 Ace edition

incest in rural West Virginia - not handled well by Cain
'Butterfly' is the latest of several James M. Cain novels I've read.Unfortunately it seems that beyond his best known works ('The Postman Always Rings Twice', 'Mildred Pierce', 'Double Indemnity') he has pumped out a number of mediocre novels, including 'Butterfly'.

'Butterfly' is a novel on incest in a coal mining community in rural West Virginia during the 1930s.No doubt the story was shocking when first written (in 1946) but now the material seems fairly lame.The essence of older man/teenaged girl lust is captured much better in the infamous 'Lolita'.In 'Butterfly' we don't get to really feel smoldering passion or the intense shame associated with incest.While the prose is very readable the characterizations are fairly weak, as one would expect in a novel of little more than 100 pages.

Bottom line: James M. Cain on a bad day is still pretty okay, but he has done much better (especially in 'Mildred Pierce'). ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Sex and Power In Washington
The last time I have had a chance to mention the work of James M. Cain, author of the classic noir works The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity a couple of novels that take place in the 1930-40's in sunny California, was a later work Mignon set in the Louisiana of the American Civil War days. As usual when I get `high' on an author I like to run through most of his or her work to see where he or she is going with it. Thus, this review of a lesser work, a much lesser work by Cain is something of an obligation. As is familiar to anyone who runs through an author's lifetime of writing efforts not all such endeavors are equal. The Institute written late in Cain's literary career shows a man who has run out of steam in his literary efforts.

Why is that so here? Well, the premise that Cain is working under is well-worn. Power, sex and philanthropy or some such combination in the corridors of Washington and its environs has been done to death both before and after this 1976 effort. In his earlier work, the classic stuff,Cain distinguished himself by writing novels that verged on being `potboilers' but when the dust settled they were little gems of literary insight into how the human psyche operated when it got its `wanting habits' on. Not so here as the plot is predictable concerning the powerful showing off their wealth by endowing an institute of learning and several off-hand rather surreal romances, the twists lead nowhere and in the end it turns into a sappy melodrama as all is forgiven and the main characters (who survive) the brainy Dr. Palmer and beautiful Mrs. Garrett, lovers and newly-hatched parents ride off into the sunset. Give me those chiselin' dames and handy ne'er-do-well guys from the old days anytime. Sorry, James.
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Customer Reviews (2)

Not quite classic Cain
What is Cain is good. His narrators are always people that just don't get it, whatever it is that defines the morality that you and I take for granted. In this case, the narrator is a teenaged girl. She's ringingly aware of her emerging womanhood, as is the creepy stepfather. And there's a "real" father in the background somewhere. Unseen and unknown, she builds an elaborate happy-family fantasy around him. (That fantasy is believable. I've seen it happen.)

Then things fall apart. Family stresses reach the rupture point, and she runs. That "real" father doesn't live up the fantasy, of course, so Mandy looks elsewhere for the reward she wants. Alone, she looks in the wrong places, and becomes involved with a botched bank robbery, three murders, and a sweet-talking psychopath. That creates the noir setting that Cain handled so masterfully.

But pieces just didn't fit. For one, James Cain never seemed to present the teenage girl's voice in a completely convincing way. For another, the story has a happy ending - so Cain was way out of his element. Lots of other details grated against each other, too. I didn't know until I finished the book that this was published posthumously, but I was pretty sure by the time I finished it. If he had been happy with the work, he would have published it himself back when it was originally written - probably the early 1960s, or near there. Taken as a finished work, I found this a disappointing addition to Cain's ouvre. Taken as a sketch or work in progress when he died, I found it more interesting. It shows an early stage of a story's development, leaving me wishing that he had finished it.

//wiredweird

"[My father and I] would live on a desert isle that we'd swim to when our plane was wrecked at sea."
(3.5 stars) Published in 1985, eight years after James M. Cain's death, this novel is atypical of Cain's work.Using a sixteen-year-old girl, Amanda Vernick, as the main character and speaker, he focuses on the ways in which she is hurt by older men--abused by her stepfather and exploited by other men with whom she comes in contact.Developing sympathy for her in the course of the novel, Cain is far from the "hard-boiled" stylist one expects from his earlier work, and his dialogue, instead of being clipped and abrupt, reflects the thinking of an inexperienced teenager as she reflects on and tries to justify many of her actions.

Mandy has had a hard life with a mother who has had two "husbands," the last of whom has been abusing Mandy sexually from the time she was thirteen, with her mother's knowledge.When she decides to leave home in search of her real father, she meets Rick, a 19-year-old boy, on the bus, and he suggests that they share the cost of a room.Later a gang of thieves makes their acquaintance and decides to use them in the grand heist of a Baltimore bank, with Mandy driving the getaway car.Events become more complicated when the holdup goes awry and people are killed.Mandy's attempt to reclaim her life, become a "good girl," and live safely constitute the main action of the book.

Throughout the novel, Mandy is looking for her "enchanted isle," a place where she can feel safe, protected, and most of all, loved.The novelfocuses as much on her character as it does on the action, unlike other Cain novels, and instead of being "noir" in style, it verges on the sentimental and works toward a happy ending.Though the narrative moves quickly and has its bloody moments, the reader's attention is drawn primarily to the effects of the action on Mandy, not on the excitement of plot for its own sake.A far cry from Double Indemnity and many of the novels Cain wrote in the 1940s, this is Cain at his most melodramatic.nMary Whipple
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