A Collapse of Horses Paperback – February 9, 2016

It's hard to convey the feeling of reading Brian Evenson's stories to someone who hasn't read them. I once described him as if Edgar Allan Poe stories were written by Cormac McCarthy (albeit with punctuation), and that's not necessarily the worst description out there. Like Poe, Evenson's writing dives into psychologically complex and broken narrators, giving us stories whose veracity and reliability is hard to pin down, and making the mental state of the narrator the story in of itself. But there's more to Evenson than just unreliable narrators. Indeed, what makes his stories so haunting and unsettling is the way that he hints at larger worlds and nightmares without ever overexplaining or clarifying every detail. We never know why the narrator of "A Report" has been imprisoned, or his ultimate fate, or even the nature of what's going on in the next cell - but the story works not in spite of these things, but because of them, using the unanswered questions to enhance the unreality and unease of the situation. We don't know exactly what happens to the milquetoast reluctant tourist of "A Seaside Town," but we know it's wrong on some fundamental level. We don't know what's in the basement glimpsed in the childhood of the protagonist of "Past Reno," but we see the way that lack of certainty has echoed forward throughout his life. In other words, Evenson isn't using ambiguity to raise plot questions - indeed, he has little interest in exploring the central questions of his book. Did the narrator of "Click" commit a crime? Unknown. Is the answer to the science-fiction murder mystery "The Dust" the right one? Maybe, but maybe not. No, what Evenson is interested in is undermining our perceptions of what's real and true - in undermining our sense of reality and our ability to trust that our senses and our minds are capable of interpreting the world around us. That's maybe most directly addressed in the title story, in which the narrator continually is either running from the reality of the world around him, or else being asked to not believe in the reality of it - and Evenson doesn't give us an answer one way or the other.If all of that makes these stories sound unsatisfying or unfulfilling, I don't mean to give that impression. Evenson's stories are masterpieces of mood and atmosphere, building a strange, unsettling world in only a few pages, to say nothing of creating complex narrators whose mental states are both compelling and disturbing. Their goal is not to tell clear, concise stories; their goal is to leave you feeling as though reality is slipping away from you, creating horror not on a visceral or gory level, but on a more existential one that lingers with you long after the short burst of any given tale.Evenson is not a conventional horror author by any means. His prose is jagged and stark; his worlds alien and hard to grab onto; his characters fractured and distressed. The horror he gives you doesn't come from killers (though they're here) or creatures (although they, too, have a part to play), but something deeper and more human. This is literary horror, yes, but not literary horror that's ashamed of its genre trappings - instead, it is horror with a focus all its own. And if you're open to that, you're in for one of the great horror writers of modern times - but be prepared for his tales to get under your skin and stay there for a very long time.

*This review contains potential spoilers, but really, you can't spoil a good Evenson collection*I’ve been a Brian Evenson fan for almost eight years now and I’m happy to say this fact has improved my life. It can improve your life as well with the small investment that is A Collapse of Horses, Evenson’s latest story collection. On the surface it’s much the same as his other short story collections. People variously label this work as horror, or literary fiction, or literary horror (and the publishers include a quirky page after the final story that says “LITERATURE is not the same thing as PUBLISHING”, which comes off as odd in a collection such as this). To be sure, there is horror here—the literary effect. But there is also something else going on that perhaps people are mistaking for horror, and that’s cognitive dissonance. That’s one of Evenson’s true strengths and it shines in stories like “Click,” my personal favorite in the collection, a tale of a recovering (or dying) man who cannot keep his environment straight. He has either been accused of a horrible crime or he has not. He’s either being visited by police and his lawyer or he’s not. What makes Evenson among the greats of this technique is that the success of the story does not rely on the resolution of the “is he or isn’t he” question, but in the ability to make the story work without conscious resolution. And this, my friends, is why I’ve been consistently recommending Evenson’s works to fans of Bizarro fiction. His writing is weird. Not capital W weird, at least not always. He’s doing weird things above and beyond literary horror. He’s doing things that are sometimes weirder than self-described Bizarros.As a whole, A Collapse of Horses is definitely a good introduction to Evenson’s short fiction. It contains a number of very accessible stories. “BearHeart™” begins as a cute, quirky relationship story and gradually devolves into psychosis. “Torpor,” another relationship story, revolves around the physical pains of a woman whose significant other loses an arm. “Cult” examines the mind of man who is contemplating joining a cult to escape an unhealthy relationship. In fact, there really are more relationship stories in this collection than horror stories. Sure, some of them involve horrific elements, but they really focus on loss, sadness, and alienation. There’s no real name for this genre, so let’s call it Sadcore and black our eyes.If I’m not mistaken, this collection includes the first Evenson short that is stated to be set on an alien world—“The Dust,” a story of a failed mining expedition awaiting rescue when the crew begins to be murdered brutally, one by one. This one is a horror story, though the space setting probably has people calling it science-fiction because people always love to recategorize things into whatever niche they enjoy. I just call it awesome because I speak plainly.There’s madness in many of these stories and Evenson has a great grasp of how to play with it. “A Collapse of Horses,” the title track, examines both dementia and obsession in a manner that is loosely reminiscent of his earlier stories “The Polygamy of Language” and “The Wavering Knife” but far more personal. After a head trauma, a man is convinced that some days he has three children, other days four, and this number can only be established by counting beds. The uncertainty, the disconnection from reality, of a man who has three children one day and four the next, is a complicated kind of terror that most writers have a hard time getting to the heart of, but this is a feeling he has been able to produce in me many, many times throughout his oeuvre. The titular story is great example of his masterful craft, but it is not even as powerful as some of his prior excursions into this territory.I could probably obsess over the nuances of this collection for several thousand words, but I’m not sure that would be good for my soul right now. Instead I’ll just move on to the highlights: the wrap-arounders, the first and last stories, “Black Bark” and “The Blood Drip.”“Black Bark” is a story I recognized. It took a shape very similar to that of “The Second Boy,” which appeared in Evenson’s previous collection, Windeye. This is a story of two men escaping into the wilderness, one injured, who have to make camp in a less than ideal locale. The injured man tells an esoteric story that troubles the other man. Upon awaking the next morning, the injured man is nowhere to be found. The other searches for the man and for salvation, but unable to find either, retires to the same campsite where the other man shows up unexpectedly and menacingly repeats the story he told earlier while the other man is powerless to do anything about it. This is a description that could be applied to either of the stories I just mentioned. The similarities struck me and I wondered if this could be accidental. It seemed impossible. And while the stories have many similarities, they are both excellent and worth a read, so there was no complaint that “Evenson is repeating himself” in my mind. It’s like when Chuck Berry or The Ramones re-wrote one of their own hits. Still an enjoyable treat.But when I reached the end of the collection, I started to see yet another story that followed this very similar pattern. And in “The Blood Drip” the campfire story told is loosely “Black Bark.” That’s some pleasingly meta stuff right there. It works so well it made me smile despite the bleak nature of the story. So there’s a really sophisticated commentary going on here, and an exploration of how to achieve similar literary effects with different stories. Evenson is creating his own tropes to play with and it couldn’t be more awesome (that’s the clickbait title for this review, by the way). He’s reinvented the ghost story (that’s the tagline).Definitely a solid four star collection with enough 5 star stories to cause me to recommend it to everyone I know. Are you someone I know? Then you should read this, pronto. Then pick up The Wavering Knife and/or Last Days. Your life will become measurably better.

Spoiler alert!Reading CoH made me think of that Steve Wright gag that goes something like; "The other day somebody stole everything in my apartment and replaced it with an exact replica."Evenson’s characters often find themselves faced with a similar challenge to their perception of reality; nothing's changed, but everything’s changed. Whereas most of us rely on spouses and friends for our reality-testing, Evenson’s protagonists tend to be isolated, lonely and suffering from a heightened emotional state that might be the result of a knock on the head, a medical operation, or near-starvation, or a life-time of murderous resentment, or a diminishing oxygen supply. These people aren’t quite thinking straight, but you get the feeling that Evenson thinks they’re seeing a fundamental truth about the world and their sense of self.Interestingly, for an author who relies on open-ended, mysterious endings, lack of closure, and withheld information, quite a lot of these stories return to the same theme; the cost of evasion, the price to be paid for not looking at something squarely. (Or, maybe the impossibility of seeing anything even if you’re looking at it squarely. It’s hard to say anything with any certainty in an Evenson story ) This correspondence of theme and form creates echoes that multiply in all directions, and made it, for me, a hugely exciting read.The gothic drama is undercut by the simple clear prose. (but he can still give you a sentence like this with all it’s alliteration; “He watched the sunlight slide up the side of the slope and disappear, leaving the air suddenly chill, the papery bark of the trees slowly greying in the fading light.”) He will often underplay, or look obliquely, or clinically, at moments of real physical horror, eg the amputation of a finger. Whereas, he’ll give ordinary, everyday interactions a deep menace and drama. For example, how in Past Reno does he make the prosaic image of a customer hungrily eating a bowl of soup so sinister? In Past Reno, the horror is in all the parts that have been left out. As a story, it’s like a Jenga tower that’s still standing despite having most of itself removed. (Hmmm, not sure if that metaphor works a 100%) Nowhere in the story is cannabilsm mentioned. The closest we get to it is, I think, a mention of the meat of ‘large animals’. So how does he do it? It’s like a magic trick involving suggestion, sleight of hand. It also has one of the best openings for a story ; “Bernt began to suspect the trip would turn strange when, on the outskirts of Reno, he entered a convenience store that had one of it’s six aisles completely dedicated to jerky.”This is a truly amazing collection. Geniuinely original and unnerving.The cover image by Sarah Evenson (that can only be seen properly when four new and reissued Evenson books are placed next to each other) is brilliant too. Another quality product from Coffee House Press

Haven’t read it yet but looking forward to it. Book arrived on time & in great shipping condition. I am satisfied with my purchase. Thank you!

Love his writing, will be reading more

A wonderful collection of disturbing and disorientating stories, beautifully written.

What a waste of time. Trying to be too clever. Try writing proper stories. Pretentious rubbish. Get into story then it suddenly ends.