The Butterfly Garden

The Butterfly Garden, a 2016 suspense novel by Dot Hutchison, blends psychological horror with biblical analogy in its disturbing tale of the Gardener, a serial killer/kidnapper who “marks” his teenage victims with elaborate butterfly tattoos and imprisons them in a huge, greenhouse-like garden. Told largely from the point of view of Maya, a 16-year-old runaway who becomes one of his captives, Hutchison’s unflinching crime thriller grapples with themes of sexual abuse, narcissism, toxic masculinity, and family dysfunction, as well as friendship, resilience, and hope. The Butterfly Garden is the first book in The Collector series, a quartet of suspense novels by Hutchison that fictionalizes the Crimes Against Children unit, a division of the FBI. The Butterfly Garden was nominated for the Goodreads Awards - Best Horror Novel of 2016.

This guide refers to the 2016 Thomas & Mercer paperback edition of The Butterfly Garden.

Content Warning: The source material and this guide feature depictions of sexual violence and harassment, rape, child abuse, child sexual abuse, child death, kidnapping, emotional abuse, physical abuse, illness and death, death by suicide, and suicidal ideation and self-harm.

Plot Summary

A prolific serial killer/kidnapper known as “the Gardener” has just been apprehended by the FBI, who have rescued over a dozen of his surviving victims, some of them critically injured. Agents Victor Hanoverian and Brandon Eddison have been tasked with identifying the girls, who were all tattooed with large butterfly designs on their backs, as well as given new names by their kidnapper. One of the victims, a cagey, sharp-tongued young woman whom the Gardener named “Maya,” has drawn the agents’ scrutiny, due to her leader-like status among the other girls and her refusal to provide the agents with pertinent details about her past. Her confidence, sarcasm, and evasiveness make them suspect that she might have been an accomplice to the Gardener’s many crimes.

Insisting on telling her story in her own way, Maya starts at the beginning, describing her loveless upbringing as the only child of a narcissistic couple who fought constantly and had extramarital affairs. After numerous incidents of abuse and neglect, including being abandoned by her parents at a carnival at the age of six, Maya runs off to New York City at age 14 and buys a fake ID that adds five years to her age. 

Now known as Inara Morrissey, she finds work as a waitress at an upscale restaurant, sharing a big loft apartment with seven other young women, all of them looked after by a motherly former sex worker named Sophia. Two years after Inara’s arrival in New York, the restaurant is rented out for a butterfly-themed party that requires the waitresses, including Inara, to wear butterfly wings on the backs of their dresses. Inara, who has a small butterfly tattoo on her ankle, draws the attention of the rich, middle-aged host, and two weeks later she is knocked out and abducted while walking home from the library. 

Inara wakes up in the “Butterfly Garden,” a huge greenhouse-like enclosure containing flower gardens, a stream and pond, a cliff and waterfall, and a row of cell-like rooms for the Garden’s many prisoners, all beautiful girls between the ages of 16 and 20. The tycoon who hosted the butterfly party at the restaurant, who calls himself the Gardener, has been abducting girls for 30 years to use for sex in his secret harem, which is hidden in a remote part of western Maryland. 

After kidnapping a new girl, the Gardener “marks” her as his own with an elaborate tattoo of a butterfly, then rechristens her with a name of his own choosing (e.g., Maya, Lyonette, Bliss, Giselle). Over 20 girls—or “Butterflies”—inhabit the Garden at any one time, all at the mercy of the Gardener and his sadistic son, Avery, both of whom rape them at will. The Gardener, who affects to “love” his captives, is much gentler than Avery, who frequently tortures his partners, sometimes to death. For this reason, the Gardener often bans Avery temporarily from the Garden. However, every Butterfly is fated, by the Gardener’s rules, to a short life: To ensure that they never grow old, the Gardener kills each girl on her 21st birthday, preserving her body in a slab of clear, hard resin in a museum-like gallery just down the hall from the girls’ rooms.

When Lyonette, Inara’s closest companion, turns 21 and is murdered by the Gardener, Inara takes on Lyonette’s unofficial role as the “guide” and comforter of the newcoming girls. The solace and consolation she offers them turn out to be all-important to their survival, because Butterflies who fail to “adjust” psychologically to their new life are quickly murdered by the Gardener, so as not to breed discord in the Garden. 

After Inara has been in the Garden for about a year and a half, the Gardener’s younger son, Desmond, finds his way into the hidden Garden by spying on his brother Avery. At first, the sensitive Desmond believes his father’s cover story that the Butterflies are unhoused, at-risk young women whom he has provided with a beautiful communal home purely out of charity. As he grows closer to Inara, and witnesses some of his father’s and Avery’s unseemly behavior, Desmond slowly realizes that the young women are actually prisoners, and that his father holds the power of life and death over them. 

Inara feels attracted to the smart but naïve Desmond, and, with the Gardener’s encouragement, begins a romance with him, hoping to coerce him into calling the police, or at least into letting her go so she can summon help. Desmond, fearful of “killing” his sickly mother with the public exposure of his father’s crimes, vacillates endlessly. Finally, after six months of delay, he reaches his breaking point when Avery kidnaps and rapes a 12-year-old girl.

Desmond calls the police, who conduct a search but find nothing suspicious because the Garden’s retractable walls have hidden the Butterflies in their cells. However, the close call sparks a violent quarrel between Avery, Desmond, and the Gardener. Avery, who has long felt that the Gardener favors Desmond over himself, shoots Desmond and the Gardener, severely wounding them. At this point, the noise of sirens outside the greenhouse signifies that the police are returning in greater numbers, and Avery panics, leaving his gun behind. With a remote control device, the Gardener unlocks his secret laboratory, so the girls can obtain first-aid supplies for him and Desmond. A suicidal Butterfly named Sirvat sets fire to the lab’s stores of formaldehyde, igniting a catastrophic explosion and fire. As the Butterflies try to break through the Garden’s glass walls to save themselves and the two wounded men, Avery attacks them, killing one of the girls. In response, one of the girls (Bliss) shoots and kills him with his own gun. As flames engulf the Garden and deadly shards of broken glass rain down on the girls, police and firefighters armed with axes smash through the greenhouse wall, opening an avenue of escape for the survivors.

As Inara nears the end of her story, Agents Hanoverian and Eddison escort her to the hospital, where the Gardener, Desmond, and the other Butterflies are recuperating from their injuries; out of 23 girls, 13 have survived. In the hallway, Inara’s former housemate Sophia runs to her, and they embrace. She and Inara reveal to the agents that, 10 years before, Sophia too was a prisoner of the Garden; she was the only Butterfly who had ever escaped. Coincidentally, she told Inara about her ordeal shortly before Inara’s own abduction. Inara’s knowledge that Sophia had managed to escape kept her hopes alive during her two years of captivity. Now, Sophia surprises Inara with the news that she has lovingly protected Inara’s clothes, property, and money during her long absence, praying for her return. Telling her, “You’re one of my girls too” (274), her maternal love cracks Inara’s hard shell of cynicism, bringing tears to her eyes for the first time since age six. 

Having found a “family” at last, Inara finally tells the agents her legal name, the one on her birth certificate: Samira Grantaire. Inara Morrissey, however, is the name she will keep because it is the one Sophia knows her by. As for Desmond, he will probably be tried for complicity in his father’s crimes because he waited six months to report them. Inara theorizes that Desmond finally went to the police not out of love for her but because of his age-old rivalry with his older brother.