Brian Evenson

[Dr. Zirk]

Thanks to N/A for the recommend on Evenson's The Brotherhood of Mutilation. I read it last night and it's a doozy. A nice little murder mystery surrounded by a bizarre setting and characters that are surprisingly well defined for such a short work.

Sort of reminds me of some of Peter Greenaway's films (particularly The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover) with a grotesque environment and chilling characters wrapped around an (almost) standard genre plot - a very impressive and nasty little piece of literature!

[Dr. Zirk]

I was pleased to learn that Brian Evenson won the 2004 International Horror Guild Award for a Collection for his book The Wavering Knife. I just finished reading that one recently and he certainly deserved the award. It's a great book overall, and the story "The Progenitor" is particularly haunting.

The Wavering Knife is definitely recommended, along with Contagion and Other Stories if you're curious about Evenson and his uniquely intense vein of black humor and moral bleakness.

[The New Nonsense]

Some Brian Evenson news:

Brian Evenson has a new novel coming out very soon titled LAST DAYS. This is an expansion his 2003 novella, BROTHERHOOD OF MUTILATION to a full-length novel with intro by Peter Straub. Straub praises Evenson for going, "furthest out on the sheerest, least sheltered narrative precipice,"

Evenson also has a new collection of horror stories called FUGUE STATE, due out in July of '09.

Seems his relocation to Providence, RI has stirred his creative muse, much as it did another Providence writer before him.

[The New Nonsense]

Evenson's FUGE STATE is now available.

From Amazon:

"The stories in this collection will thrill, unsettle, and captivate. Like lanterns in dark rooms, paper boats carried down on subterranean waters, they lead the reader into mysterious and perilous territory. Read at your own risk."—Kelly Link

Illustrated by graphic novelist Zak Sally, Brian Evenson’s hallucinatory and darkly comic stories of paranoia, pursuit, sensory deprivation, amnesia, and retribution rattle the cages of the psyche and peer into the gaping moral chasm that opens when we become estranged from ourselves. From sadistic bosses with secret fears to a woman trapped in a mime’s imaginary box, and from a post-apocalyptic misidentified Messiah to unwitting portraitists of the dead, the mind-bending world of this modern-day Edgar Allan Poe exposes the horror contained within our daily lives.

[Monolith]

I love Brian Evenson. Has anyone read 'A Collapse of Horses'? Stories like Black Bark and Click totally feel like they inhabit the same world as Ligotti.

[Nemonymous]

Quote Originally Posted by Monolith

I love Brian Evenson. Has anyone read 'A Collapse of Horses'? Stories like Black Bark and Click totally feel like they inhabit the same world as Ligotti.

Me, too. I reviewed that collection here:
A Collapse of Horses | The Des Lewis Gestalt Real-Time Reviews

[Gnosticangel]

I also love Brian Evenson! People who describe him as "a modern Poe" seem to be right on the mark.

And that is an excellent and insightful review, Des! I had not seen that one before; thank you for posting that.

[Monolith]

Quote Originally Posted by Nemonymous

Me, too. I reviewed that collection here: A Collapse of Horses | The Des Lewis Gestalt Real-Time Reviews "...you would think you would NEED it to get more ostentatiously strange, with even stranger words and ideas, more deeply textured with semantics and tentacular syntax, teeming with strangenesses and an inscrutably rich intaglio of objective-correlatives. But, no. This story has proved that someone like you who is addicted to such fiction actually NEEDS things to become drier, dustier, more bolus-shaped..."

Exactly!

[GirlyGirlMask]

He's fantastic. Only a mind warped by religion could conceive of such morbid beauty.

[Mr. Veech]

I haven't read anything by him. A Collapse of Horses is a beautiful title, though.