The Butcher Game

Fiction | Short Story Collection | YA | Published in 2024

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Chapter 7

Chapters 8-14

Chapters 15-21

Chapters 22-28

Chapters 29-33

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

Human Hearts

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, graphic violence, child abuse, and mental illness.

Images of anatomically correct hearts—and physical hearts themselves—become a motif that informs the theme of Power and Obsession.

In The Butcher and the Wren, Wren’s anatomical heart bracelet is a symbol of Jeremy’s obsessive nature in particular and the obsessive nature of serial killers in general. In The Butcher Game, Jeremy carves the image of Wren’s bracelet into the wrist of one of the Tytus Mansion victims. When Wren looks at the photograph of the victim, she notes, “The heart is cut to reveal the raw dermis layer. Red, like a heart should be. It’s all so artistic and repugnant. It’s Jeremy. It’s the perfect dichotomy of beauty and horror, just like him” (188). While hearts typically represent love, Jeremy transforms this symbol into a gruesome reminder of the horrors of his shared past with Wren. He believes that they have an almost magical emotional connection as victim and murderer, and he wants Wren to be as fixated on him as he is on her.

Jeremy’s next use of the heart motif is even more chilling: After killing Jenna, he dissects her corpse, takes out the heart, and leaves it on the boat as another clue to Wren. This heart is also meant to emphasize the connection between Jeremy and Wren. Wren sees that the heart wasn’t simply ripped out of the victim’s chest—“there was some precision and skill involved” (261). Jeremy’s knowledge of anatomy and dissection draws on his background as “Cal,” who befriended Wren during medical school. Jeremy knows that Wren will look closely at the incisions he made and remember trusting Cal until he revealed himself to be Jeremy.

Graveyards

Graveyards serve as a symbol of Wren’s inner peace. When Wren struggles to cope with her anxiety or dread about Jeremy, she turns to graveyards as a place of calm. Wren is comfortable with death because of her work as a forensic anthropologist, so cemeteries have a positive emotional association in her mind.

However, the comfort that Wren finds in graveyards is ruined when Jeremy poses one of his victims in a cemetery in The Butcher and the Wren. Wren couldn’t save that person, so “[t]he memory of it continues to haunt her, but it’s especially fraught when she finds herself in a cemetery. It’s maddening that a place that has always given her so much serenity has become tainted by Jeremy’s vicious scent” (27). Cemeteries thus transform into symbols of her failure—she is “haunted” there, just as she hears the ghosts of Jeremy’s many victims.

Wren’s description of Jeremy as a “tainting” cemetery pollutant becomes literal when Wren thinks she sees Jeremy in the Salem graveyard that she and Richard visit. She tries to calm herself with logic—“He wouldn’t do this here. There’s so many people. He wouldn’t do this here” (164)—but still panics until she physically bumps into the man and confirms that he is not Jeremy.

However, the Salem graveyard is already not a place of peace even before this encounter. Richard and Wren look at the graves of men associated with the Salem witch trials, in which many innocent people were tortured to death under the assumption that they had dealings with Satan. The novel connects these unfair deaths to those of Jeremy’s victims, just as it also links him to the realm of the demonic.

Christianity

The novel connects the punitive application of Christianity and the Church to its interest in Power and Obsession. To explain Jeremy’s serial killer impulses, the novel creates a backstory of childhood abuse (a common trope in fiction about murderers). Jeremy had a dysfunctional relationship with his mother, who often utilized Christianity as a weapon to keep Jeremy’s behavior in line. She portrayed her religion’s dogma as unassailable authority, using it to humiliate her son: “His mother would always punctuate a sentence with something biblical. It was her way of shaming him” (108). However, instead of stifling Jeremy’s murderous desires, her threats shaped Jeremy’s decision to refuse all judgment of himself and his psyche: “Shame is a waste of energy, a waste of emotional bandwidth. It’s rare for people to truly even feel it when they are ‘supposed’ to. The degradation that woman would heap onto her son always surrounded situations he didn’t feel a lick of shame about” (108). Jeremy’s difficult relationship with his mother makes him seek comfort in his depraved urges, which he conflates with the protection and love of being “in a womb, silent and warm” (216).

Organized Christianity also surrounds the new main antagonist who emerges in the novel: Philip, who uses his standing as a pastor to deflect suspicion about his own violent activities. The novel suggests that Philip murdered Andrea, and it confirms that he helps Jeremy kill Richard. Philip grew up in privilege; as the son of Great Barrington’s judge, he was never held accountable for his teenage misdeeds. Now, as not only a man from a prominent family with law enforcement connections but also as a figure of religious authority, Philip is deeply entrenched in the town’s power structure. He uses his connection to Christianity to silence his ex-wife, whose complaints about his infidelity can only be veiled posts online, to enjoy the sexual interest of the women in his Bible study and earn the admiration of the town’s men. Philip’s power comes both from his desire to kill and from the seemingly legitimate control that Christianity bestows on him.