'A. S. Patrić’s The Butcherbird Stories aims to unsettle. Each story plunges the reader into a unique scenario, enhanced by the author’s penchant for beginning in medias res. Further discombobulating the reader, the stories often experiment with voice, milieu and structure. However, the work may be thematically organised by an interest in masculine violence, and in liminal states that hover somewhere between the rational and irrational.' (Introduction)