reading notes

by Brian Evenson
with illustrations by Zak Sally
ISBN: 9781566892254

In one of those chains of connected reading, I decided to look for this book after reading things Matt Bell said about Evenson; I was reading Bell’s website because I really liked his story in Monkeybicycle 6.

Evenson writes intensely creepy, very good stories. Warped and wrong and probably the sort of thing you shouldn’t read after dark if you are alone, but of course if you have the book around, and you’ve already started it, you will.

You won’t actually regret it, but you might not sleep well on account of the paranoia, post-apocalyptic grimness, violence, or general unease. Evenson does reveal a sense of humor amid the horror, though. Opening lines like the one from “Invisible Box” are evidence of, if not a laugh out loud funny, a twisted but also kind of ha-ha funny: “In retrospect, it was easy for her to see it had been a mistake to have sex with a mime.”

As a collection, it is a dark, intriguing mix. A man’s brain causes his power of speech to fail, but that is only the obvious communication problem in “Mudder Tongue”. The “Girls in Tents” have been left alone, together, in the aftermath of their parents’ split. There are publishing industry workers acting like monsters (“Ninety Over Ninety”) as well as an actual monster (“Wander”) and this gets at what I found most fascinating in reading the stories — how anything, any possibility, seemed to be on the table, equally real, compelling attention and belief. That’s a hell of thing to be able to do.

The stories aren’t easy because they make you think, and that’s one of the best things I can say about a short story collection.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 5th, 2009 at 7:01 pm and is filed under fiction.