Brian Evenson's fifth story collection constructs a human landscape as unearthly as it is mundane.
Replete with brutality, primordial waste, and savage blankness familiar to readers of his earlier works, Evenson's
Kafkaesque allegories entice the mind while stubbornly disordering it. Enigmatic names, unplaceable landscapes, and
barren rooms all combine to create a semblance of conceptual abstraction, as though the material universe had come to exist
inside someone's head. Small wonder that Evenson's work has attracted so much attention among philosophers, literary critics,
and other speculative intelligences, for it continually projects a tantalizing absence, as though there were some key or code
that, if only we knew it, would illuminate everything. However, the blade of discernment wavers, and we are left to our own
groping interpretations. This is a collection to be read and reread.
There is not a more intense, prolific, or apocalyptic writer of fiction in America than Brian Evenson."
—George Saunders
"Like Poe's, Evenson's stories range from horror to humor; a similar high critical intelligence is always in control.
We read them with care, with our guard up, only to find they have already slipped inside and gotten to work, refining the
feelings, the vision, the life."
—Samuel R. Delany
"Brian Evenson, one of America's darkest and most pungent comic writers, prods with the tip of his verbal knife at
all our assumptions.... He finds the alien in the archetypal, marrying strangeness to intimacy and creating, via syntax
an ever-imploding universe of consciousness. Insidiously and elegantly, Evenson's language claims its prey: the reader's
seduced psyche."
—Mary Caponegro
|
