Crumbling Worlds
The outer and inner horrors of Brian Evenson’s stories.
BY TIMOTHY DAY
I FIRST ENCOUNTERED Brian Evenson’s particular kind of literary horror upon coming across his previous short story collection, Song for the Unraveling of the World. An avid viewer of horror movies but a novice to horror literature, I was thrilled to discover that Evenson’s stories did what my favorite horror films did, creating a claustrophobic atmosphere of dread that often omitted moments of overt terror in favor of the implied and unseen. Psychological horror mingled with bleak, shadowy worlds, the stories full of unreliable narrators, slow descents into madness, and endings that reverberated with an ambiguous sense of doom.
Evenson’s new story collection, The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell (Coffee House Press), builds on all these qualities. As with his previous work, the twenty-two stories here explore a series of decaying landscapes and troubled psyches, but with the addition of a greater thematic focus on environmental disaster. With pieces such as “Curator,” “Nameless Citizen,” “Elo Havel,” and “The Extrication,” Evenson places us in bleak futures of natural devastation and little hope for humankind. His narrators, in these situations, often wonder about the morality of helping humans adapt to the earth’s newly toxic conditions. In “Curator,” for instance, a character known as “the archivist” is left in charge of preparing a record of humanity along with a means of repopulation in the face of imminent extinction, but is conflicted about how easy she should make it for humans to come back, fearing that they would only ruin the earth again.
In other apocalyptic stories, such as “The Barrow Men,” Evenson foregoes background and simply drops us into a ravaged universe, where creatures such as the titular barrow men seem to have taken up rule of the earth, killing and gathering up humans through violence carried out in a disturbingly placid manner. Much of the dark humor found in the collection comes from futuristic or alien figures that frequently populate the stories, depicted by Evenson as simultaneously courteous and brutal. The barrow men, for example, are terrifying and murderous, but also very concerned about carrying out proper, respectful burying rituals.
While the theme of environmental collapse and its horrific consequences adds a deeply compelling, urgent layer to the collection, I can’t help but remain most enthralled with Evenson’s work when it is narrower in scope, mystifying and unsettling the reader through more self-contained, psychological plunges into uncanny terror. In these stories, the line between dream and reality is blurred as we follow Evenson’s characters through distilled odysseys of disorientation, their worlds as they know them slowly coming loose at the seams, nightmarish elements seeping in. There’s often a haunting cyclical nature to the horror here: characters wake up in the same room no matter how far they go from it; they encounter images suggesting that what is about to happen to them has already happened; they take the place—literally—of shadowy figures they once observed with fear.
At many times, the collection finds characters having strange out-of-body experiences, feeling as if they are watching themselves do things instead of consciously doing them. The murky, sinister forces at the wheel sometimes take up residence within the characters physically, while at other times the forces remain strictly cerebral, or exist only through suggestion. It’s never easy—for either the reader or the characters inside Evenson’s broken-mirror worlds—to distinguish between what is real and imagined.
Take “Haver,” in which a psychiatrist, Haver, becomes obsessed with his patient’s eerily clairvoyant drawings. The drawings depict the same room over and over—the scene identical every time, until it isn’t. The drawings begin to include Haver, portraying where he has been and suggesting where he will be, and his fixation on them intensifies. Here, too, our narrator seems to experience a gradual loss of agency. About midway through the story, he hears his voice trail off “almost as if it belonged to someone else.” Later, he is at the door to his patient’s art studio “without quite understanding how he had gotten there.” Finally, Haver reaches a point where he believes his own will to mean nothing, his fate wholly determined by the drawings. But to what extent is he truly bound to what the images dictate?
Evenson’s resistance to providing answers to questions like these are part of what make reading him so entrancing. His stories rarely end on the last page, instead lingering in the mind like the ominous photograph seen by Jussi, the narrator of “Myling Kommer,” while visiting his mother’s house—a picture of his great-grandmother (who may or may not be trying to “claim” him from beyond the grave) that he could have sworn wasn’t in the room when he went to sleep. As Jussi tries to do when considering the photograph, we might try to finish an Evenson story, think about it for a moment, and then simply move on—but more often than not, our attempts won’t take. The stories stick around, refusing to settle, leaving us with the abiding impression that something is very wrong.
Timothy Day lives with his plants in Portland, Oregon. He holds an MFA in creative writing from Portland State University and his fiction has appeared in Booth, The Adroit Journal, Barren Magazine, and elsewhere.
