Hear the Screams of the Butterfly
Troy Camplin is a poet, playwright, and fiction writer living in Richardson, TX. He is married and has three children—a daughter and two sons. He and his older son are on the autism spectrum. He is a freelance writer/editor/proofreader and has a Ph.D. in the humanities, a M.A. in English, and a B.A. in recombinant gene technology.
Camplin is a formalist poet, writing almost exclusively in regular rhythm and rhyme. His plays are typically in verse, about half in blank verse and half in rhyming couplets, and most are tragedies. His short comic play Almost Ithacad won the PIA Award at the Cyberfest Play Festival. His novella Hear the Screams of the Butterfly was published in August 2016 by Transcendent Zero Press, the first work of prose fiction published by this poetry publisher.
Hear the Screams of the Butterfly is a semiautobiographical novella inspired by Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. The protagonist, Patric Molny, is writing from a mental hospital about what drove him there: his unrequited love for a young woman named Sandi. He is persuaded by a friend, who provides the foreword and occasional comments throughout the work, to use writing his story as a way to recover. However, Patric follows many flights of mental fancy throughout his narrative, and the reader is left wondering if Patric not perhaps made himself worse.
Patric meets Sandi in college, and the two become close friends. She is already in a relationship, but the more she complains about her boyfriend, the more Patric seems to fall in love with her. Patric decides he needs to save her from her relationship, and when he does finally tell her how he feels about her, she rejects him in favor of her current boyfriend. This is the first of many blows to his ego, leading eventually to two nervous breakdowns, the second of which puts him in the mental hospital from which he writes. Within that space, Patric waxes poetic and romantic, descending to the abyss and ascending to the heights of mythology—but never settling on earth.
