About this item
Highlights
- With minimalist literary horror, Brian Evenson's stories work a nightmare axis of doubt, paranoia, and every day life.
- About the Author: Brian Evenson: Praised by Peter Straub for going furthest out on the sheerest, least sheltered narrative precipice, Brian Evenson has been a finalist for the Edgar Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the World Fantasy Award and the winner of the International Horror Guild Award, the American Library Association s award for Best Horror Novel, and one of "Time Out New York" s top books.
- 240 Pages
- Fiction + Literature Genres, Short Stories (single author)
Description
About the Book
With minimalist literary horror, Brian Evenson's stories work a nightmare axis of doubt, paranoia, and every day life.
Book Synopsis
With minimalist literary horror, Brian Evenson's stories work a nightmare axis of doubt, paranoia, and every day life.Review Quotes
"Some of the stories here evoke Kafka, some Poe, some Beckett, some Roald Dahl, and one, a demonic teddy-bear chiller called 'BearHeart(TM), ' even Stephen King, but Evenson's deadpan style always estranges them a bit from their models: He tells his odd tales oddly, as if his mouth were dry and the words won't come out right." --New York Time Sunday Book Review
"Evenson's fiction is equal parts obsessive, experimental, and violent. It can be soul-shaking." --New Yorker
"Evenson's stories, small masterworks of literary horror, are elegantly tense. They operate in psychological territory, never relying on grossness or slasher silliness to convey their scariness. . . . For the Stephen King fan in the house: an author as capable, if a touch less prolific." --Kirkus Reviews
"Admirers of Evenson (Windeye; Altmann's Tongue) applaud the edge he maintains between the unexplained and the intimate. This latest collection continues to explore that line, and for how much is left obscured, an eerie emotional echo remains. . . . Evenson's journey along the boundaries of short fiction make for an eye-opening dissection of the form." --Publishers Weekly
"You never realize how deep his fiction has wormed its way into your brain until hours, days, even weeks later, when you're lying in the dark and Evenson's images come flooding back, unbidden. A Collapse of Horses will stay with you for a long time...whether you want it to or not." --Chicago Review of Books
"While each piece in A Collapse of Horses stands alone as a tale that combines 'literary' and 'horror' elements in novel ways that blur genre distinctions, the collection intensifies as recurring motifs flow through the various narratives, settings, and fictional psyches: bodily and mental disintegration, the ambiguities of human physicality and consciousness, and the permeable borders between self and other." --Los Angeles Review of Books
"A Collapse of Horses is a perennially dusty, dark, haunted house of atmospheric dilemmas whose plots continually reverse a reader's expectations." --The Collagist
"Evenson is interested in philosophy and semiotics, the impossibility of ever truly knowing or naming the world, and our fundamental, helpless dependence on what our senses tell us. . . . . [His stories] are a wonderful feat of the uncanny." --Los Angeles Review
Entropy, "Ultimate Summer Reading List"
"This is Brian Evenson's 12th collection, and reading it one soon becomes aware of being in the presence of a peculiar intelligence." --Toronto Star
"Evenson is a writer with an uncommonly dark vision, and in 2016 he figures to find his biggest audience yet." --Star Tribune
"Violence is punishing but unbelievably subtle in Evenson's delicate, minimalist stories. And ultimately, there is something cosmic--something utterly Lovecraftian, but without the baroque language--about this type of horror: Beneath the slippery, often abstruse plots lies a vast gulf of nothingness, in the purest and most unsettling sense of the word." --NPR
"Evenson has become a kind of elder statesman for innovative fiction." --Tin House
"A master of literary hor
About the Author
Brian Evenson: Praised by Peter Straub for going furthest out on the sheerest, least sheltered narrative precipice, Brian Evenson has been a finalist for the Edgar Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the World Fantasy Award and the winner of the International Horror Guild Award, the American Library Association s award for Best Horror Novel, and one of "Time Out New York" s top books. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and three O. Henry Prizes, Evenson lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where he directs Brown University s Literary Arts Program."