Reviewed by K.C. Mead-Brewer
Gail Butensky and Grant Faulkner’s photography-flash fiction hybrid something out there in the distance [University of New Mexico Press, 2026] celebrates the wonderful-strange art of collaboration. Not only does their slim, lovely book celebrate the collaboration between a writer and photographer but that between lovers to create a relationship, even that between cells to create a body.
For its main characters, Dawn and Jonny, something out there in the distance delves into the bittersweet collaboration between beauty and loss. The pair road trip together across the western United States—Jonny driving while Dawn photographs, steals, creates poems and other loving havoc—both trying to outrun Dawn’s cancer diagnosis.
The written half of the book is entirely from Jonny’s point of view, largely in the past tense, looking backward. The photographs, their gazes trained forever forward, all belong to Dawn. Woven together, Jonny’s words and Dawn’s photographs give something out there in the distance a winding, fascinating shape, not unlike the shape of roadside attractions as seen from the endless highway.
The book’s unique shape is further enlivened by the narrative’s unusual (for flash fiction) long-form story. Faulkner’s spare and expert prose tells a single story in an almost novel-like (or highway-like) fashion instead of in the flash genre’s more classic story collection form. Butensky’s photographs operate as the roadside stops of flash fiction, her visual story collection dotted throughout Faulkner’s longer-form tale.
Even the book’s physicality speaks to the story’s collaborative soul. The hardcover, completely sans text, displays one of Dawn’s richly colored photographs—except this cover is cut short, like Dawn’s life, while Jonny’s words peek out from the wider, colorless pages that stretch onward beneath.
The story’s layout marks another clever interaction between the book’s physical and spiritual lives. The photographs and paragraphs are presented in almost poem-like fashion, blithely exploring the space each new page provides, much like clouds drifting in the sky or billboards checkering an orange-desert landscape.
I tend to sniff unappreciatively at books that open with rhetorical questions, as this one does—seven of them, to be exact—but Faulkner’s prose quickly finds its rhythm, and what a tender, loving rhythm it finds: crisp and bright and earnest to the end. I have not been able to shake this incredible moment from my mind: “‘If I get chemo, my hairbrush will be lonely,’ she said. Her doctor gave her a stern lecture. Dawn shrugged. ‘It’s my disease to do what I want with.’”
Dawn may be airy and eccentric, unreliable and unknowable, but Faulkner’s assertive, haunting style reassures us that—at least to Jonny—she is no Manic Pixie Dream-Girl. She is an artist. She is love. Faulkner’s style transforms Jonny’s grief into something sacred and prayer-like, evoking the sensation of driving down a long, empty, night road when, just as you glance up to the moon, your lost-love’s favorite song surprises you on the radio.
Jonny introduces us to Dawn through playful dichotomy:
She loved golf courses, especially those carved into the desert. Swaths of lushness bordered by desiccation. ‘The land of eternal green,’ she’d say in a singsong voice. ‘Everything painted so perfectly.’
She hated golf courses. ‘Utopias of stolen water,’ she said. ‘Everything painted so perfectly.’
Introductions as brightly dissonant and nuanced as this are a rare treasure.
Perhaps this is why I find it strange that the first of Dawn’s photographs to be shared (if you’ll allow me to exclude the cover from this observation) is the photograph that strikes me as the least playful and least dichotomous of them all. The photo is a grayscale (almost lavender-scale) portrait of a distant human standing in a field of wheat, yet all Butensky’s succeeding photographs have a much richer color palette (including the black-and-whites) and often enjoy a more unusual composition. Her portrait of a suburban house is a personal favorite; the zing of bright colors immediately reminds me of Dorothy’s first steps into Oz.
Butensky reveals new elements of Dawn’s character through photographs simultaneously poignant and whimsical, eerie and puckish. A waggishly colorful, over-bright photograph offers a swimming pool crowded by potted plants and palmetto trees, an American flag waving in the center. You can practically hear Dawn thinking that aliens would confuse the flagpole with a type of tree, or that the pool-owners who planted the flag probably felt like astronauts claiming the moon. I feel certain that Dawn loved the beauty of this landscape even as she considered the pool-owners to be water thieves (not to mention the layers of colonial thievery on display here as well). Probably this is why she feels no compunction about stealing their fishing poles.
My very favorite of Butensky’s photographs is a Ferris wheel at night, its yellow-orange lights hazy in the distance, the soft-focus turning the wheel into a massive burning eye. Faulkner must see this eye as well, because he partners the image with a description of a carnie’s eyes as “vacant pinwheels looking at something from another world,” a something that might very well be Dawn’s approaching death. Jonny feels it in her later that same night:
Our bodies were a furnace when curled together, but she shivered. Another world was stirring. Her head on my chest, her hair pasted to her skin with sweat. This was the first time I felt her dying.
You will see this burning eye in something out there in the distance at least once more, looking across worlds to that highway upon which only Death drives. You will see it in Butensky/Dawn’s final photograph in the shape of a circular, pink-orange cloud dissipating against dark, desert twilight. The burning eye looks out from everywhere. The burning eye sees us all. Dawn experiences that burning eye firsthand as she weeps to Jonny, “Say something pretty to me. I want to hear something pretty. Even if you have to fake it.” And so, loving her, Jonny gives us his pretty words.
Gail Butensky and Grant Faulkner’s book something out there in the distance is available for preorder from University of New Mexico Press via Bookshop, releasing on January 13, 2026.
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K.C. Mead-Brewer is an author living in beautiful Baltimore, MD. Her fiction appears in Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, Strange Horizons, The Rumpus, and elsewhere.
