![]() In Evenson’s fiction, the intellectual and the visceral are inexorably, often horrifically, connected. ![]() It can be read as a haunted-house story, a tale of the fallibility of memory, or an ominous exploration of language-and it satisfies on all levels. ![]() The title story of his 2012 collection Windeye enacts the erasure of one of its characters from existence. Think of a Calvino-esque nestling of locations, in which the delight taken in a well-built world is revealed to be an elaborate trap, or a fraying away of reality. His narratives frequently explore situations in which a seemingly stable space abruptly turns sinister through a series of subtle metafictional tweaks. A story can’t hurt.”Įvenson’s body of work stands as a long and ominous proof that stories can, in fact, hurt. The first makes his case: “It’s just a story. One offers to tell a story the other wavers. Well, one of them might not be a man, exactly-a ghost, perhaps, or a hallucination? But still, it’s an archetypal scene: two men, a roaring fire that’s the only light and heat in sight, and the aftermath of violence. ![]() In “The Blood Drip,” the story that ends A Collapse of Horses, the new collection from Brian Evenson, two men on a postapocalyptic frontier have gathered beside a fire. ![]()
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