Song for the Unraveling of the World

I buy a lot of story collections and anthologies but I almost never read them cover to cover, usually choosing instead to sample, savor, or discard at my own pace. By contrast, this coal car descent through a Jungian shadowland lured me in and dropped the restraining bar on page one, leaving me no choice but to see it through until it ended. The stumbling remnant of me that emerged topside a couple days later wants you to know it was well worth the admission price and then some. Evenson is an absolute master at evoking the radioactive unease and faceless dread that haunts our postmodern periphery. He does so not with violence or spectacle, but with deceptively simple premises and unadorned, almost clinical prose. I might be projecting my own favorite precedents onto a style all its own, but hiding between the lines of these stories (and looking on with admiration) I thought I spotted the Shades of Robert Aickman, Paul Bowles, and Flannery O'Connor. Whatever its true sources or analogs, contemporary Weird Fiction doesn't get any better.

I read this collection, cover to cover, on a cross-country flight in broad daylight with a cup of coffee in hand. That's probably about as atmospheric as I dare with this immaculately written story collection, hands-down the scariest think I've read in a very long time. (Except "Trigger Warning." That's one's laugh-out-loud funny, which you'll find very helpful at that point in the book.) Short stories -- some very short indeed -- and beautifully told, this is a candy jar of uncanny horror, not to be confused with a jar of Halloween candy and horror, which...well, read it and find out why that prospect makes me twitch now, twitch like I've been electrically shocked. Yeah, just like that.

I'm not really sure how to explain this collection of stories. Some of them I didn't understand fully or exactly what was going on. But I liked them anyway. They left me wondering, questioning and intrigued. It is sort of left to you to figure out what is going on in some of them. I like unique, different. This is definitely that! I think you'd either really like or dislike this book. There is no middle ground. If you like different I do highly recommend it and I plan on reading some of the other novels by this author.

Not every story in this book is top-notch, and some are left a little too open-ended for my tastes, however there are many stories that are fantastic, leading me to just marvel at how good and original some of these stories are. They are also quite weird as well, but if you wanted normal you wouldn't be reading horror. And it's not gross-out, gory horror either, most of it is well-done suspense and mystery. Overall, 5 stars. I'm buying more of his books now!

Every single line of this collection is absolutely devastating. I cannot recommend it enough.

Wonderfully hallucinatory horror, darkly humorous at times, stories that create fantastic worlds no one would ever want to inhabit where happy endings are non-existent. If you enjoy sophisticated horror you really need to check out Brian Evenson.

As with all short story anthologies, some stories speak to the reader more than others. The author has unsettling, reflective, open-ended weirdness down pat, which, read sequentially, may be desensitizing and incite a dragging, dull feeling. I'm not one to require closure in stories, so I enjoyed most of the experience. Some of these stories were excellent, like Room Note. Others could have been a pass, like Trigger Warning.

One of the better short story collections I’ve read in a while. Most of them are pretty short but pack in a lot of uncanny and mind bending ideas. Some stories touch on the idea of entities that can move into other bodies, which reminded me of David Mitchell’s Bone Clocks. But Evenson does something entirely different with the concept in several of the stories.

This tantalising brain-fly of a book cannot be squashed without smashing its reader’s skull. And if that is too glib or clever-clever, so be it. It works for me. Same difference, really.The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.

The book quality is flawless, my review is my personal opinion on the content. It's... OkStories are catchy, weird (in a good way) but all and all it's just ok. I wouldn't say for me that they are memorable like some short stories have been.