The Butterfly is a short, explosive novel by James M. Cain, the author of the The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, and Mildred Pierce. Those classics were made into films, as was Butterfly in 1982 starring Pia Zadora with a cast that included Orson Welles, Stacy Keach and June Lockhart. Considered trashy, the film was a notorious flop financed by Pia's husband to make her a star. There is nothing like reading the original, which is filled with more taboo passion than any I've read.
West Virginia farmer Jess Tyler comes home to meet young blonde Kady, nineteen or twenty, and impossible to resist when she is so flirtatious. His desire is tempered only slightly when he discovers she is his long lost daughter, his wife having run off with a guy named Moke when she was a baby. He's ashamed at his passion but still tries to figure out a way he can have her. When he finds out she has a special butterfly birthmark proving that she actually isn't daughter, the floodgates open for their sexual affair. The thing is, the reader and Jess know she is not his daughter, but everyone else thinks she is - their temptation is soaked in incest, and she has no problems sleeping with her 'dad'. They keep it secret and he chases away any chance other men have for her, Jess even convinces her to marry him!
They start a moonshine business out of an abandoned coal mine, her illegitimate baby arrives as does the father and Kady's mother who is dying of consumption, along with Moke returning for a deadly confrontation. All this before the law catches up with Jess and Kady, charging them with incest. It's that kind of hillbilly soap opera, but done in fine style.
There is a lot of story packed into these 144 pages. It's to his credit as a writer that incest and the final downfall of the characters is never done in a cheap or gratuitous way. He has respect for them, their sin and shame, desires and manipulations. Inspired in 1922, and written in 1946, the author describes it as a morality tale.
My edition includes a preface from the author where he writes ironically: "Yes, I have actually mined coal, and distilled liquor, as well as seen a girl in a pink dress, and seen her take it off..." Although considered a minor book of his, I think its intensity more than measures up to his reputation as master of dark desires. Its torrid lust bursts off the page, salacious and forbidden.
1946 / Paperback / 144 pages
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