Escaping to the West: A Review of Grant Faulkner and Gail Butensky’s something out there in the distance
“And so we drove. Because in movement there’s always something else. Something new.” -Grant Faulkner, something out there in the distance
How far would you go to escape reality? Is it possible to truly escape at all? In their innovative flash novel, something out there in the distance, writer Grant Faulkner and photographer Gail Butensky join forces to collaborate on a story in which a couple decides to embark a road trip through the American West as a form of escape. Throughout their journey to various destinations, Jonny and Dawn are faced with love, loss, and danger, and are forced to make difficult decisions. They never stay in one spot for too long, as photographs and passages of flash track their attempts to outrun fate.
Faulker is the co-founder of 100 Word Story, co-founder of the Flash Fiction Collective, and the executive producer of America’s Next Great Author. His work has appeared in published in The New York Times, Poets & Writers, LitHub, Writer’s Digest, The Writer, The Southwest Review, Tin House, The Gettysburg Review, Five Points, The Rumpus, and Miracle Monocle. Butensky, meanwhile, is the author of the photography book, Every Bend. Her photographs of alternative and punk rockers were recently featured in The New Yorker.
In the novel, Jonny drives Dawn, a photographer, through the American West in an attempt to outrun her recent cancer diagnosis, making both planned and unplanned stops along the way. As Jonny drives, Dawn takes pictures to document their journey, which are seen alongside Jonny’s narration. In terms of who is driving and who is riding in the passenger seat, this is a perfect representation of the two different characters and their personalities: Jonny is the calm and collected type, while Dawn is more carefree and “out there.” I read Jonny’s role as the driver as his attempt to regain control; he’s already at risk of losing Dawn. Meanwhile, she’s focused on the world passing them by.
After the pair visits Dawn’s grandparents, she says, “I like to think that some crimes go unnoticed, the ones with need at their core.” This is an attempt to rationalize her choice to remain silent when her grandfather gave them money. She later reveals, in an emotional moment, that she’d already taken money from her grandmother.
Neither Dawn nor Jonny are perfect, and I found them more and more relatable as I continued to read—despite the fact that they weren’t always making great choices. As Jonny says, “People always say it’s bad to live in denial, but I don’t know what’s so bad about being happy with whatever little bits of happiness you can hold.” I’m sure the feeling of wanting to pack up and run away when things get bad will resonate with many readers.
When Dawn says, “The worst thing that can happen to you is a stomachache,” I couldn’t help but laugh. This passage caught my attention on my second time through the book because it highlights a dichotomy present in many people. Even with her looming diagnosis, it’s Dawn who tells Jonny that a stomachache is the worst that can happen. We can often become so focused on small things happening in the moment as a way of blocking out and forgetting what’s happening in the bigger picture.
Butensky’s photographs vary from a drained swimming pool, a straight shot of a highway, to a sole Yucca standing before a bright blue sky. At times the photos are paired with text in a more literal sense: capturing a specific sign or location that was mentioned, or a high contrast photo of a rose, the edges dark and creeping in as Jonny’s narration reveals that Dawn “prayed that her cells would turn into roses.”
At other times, I felt that the photos captured the emotions of the text, rather than focusing on a certain stop along their way. One that especially stood out to me was a dark and smokey sky. The brown and yellow hue of the sky appears almost apocalyptic, creating a feeling of dread and impending doom. Between Faulkner’s lyric brevity and Butensky’s powerful photography, the reader is immersed in Dawn and Jonny’s journey.
It’s worth mention that the book itself is a thing of beauty. The cover features a dirt road stretching toward a bright blue sky, tire tracks winding over each other. The hardback portion of the cover is about a fourth shorter than the pages within, revealing a white page. The title broken, running on and off the page, emerging from beneath the partial cover.
The layout of the pages are often reminiscent of the format of an art book, with a spread containing a photograph on one side and text on the other. While some photos take up half a page or less, others expand onto the second page of the spread. At times, some spreads have no photos, the blank space around the text emphasizing the feeling of being lost and in a moment of transition.
Once I started the novel, I couldn’t stop. I had to know what happened to the characters and was especially interested in learning the outcome of Dawn’s cancer diagnosis. something out there in the distance is unlike any other novel I’ve read before, but it’s one that I would recommend to a broad range of readers. To get your copy, pre-order from the University of New Mexico Press. The novel will release on January 13, 2026.