Reality bends as the other characters become caricatures, and the narration shifts in perspective ever so slightly. Here we meet an unnamed protagonist, unable to remember events he may or may not have been a part of. ‘Click’ is one such story, perhaps the epitome of the ghost of a theme that courses through the narratives. If any of these tales have one thing is common, a central theme perhaps, it is that the characters often straddle the edges of confusion, wondering where they are, who they are, why they are. Time and space no longer ground us in ‘The Moans’ while the same concepts bind us to our destiny in ‘The Blood Drip’. ‘Past Reno’ reminds us that we really can’t go home, that there is no refuge in the past, only more questions we don’t want to answer. With ‘The Dust’, we suffocate on trust, chasing honesty into a dark corner only to discover the lies we tell ourselves. ‘Scour’ conjures images of a sandblasted landscape, where the only solace is the comfort of strangers, a comfort without freedom until we can finally strip away the very thing that makes us human. Bordering the grey area between literary and horror, the stories allow us to get as close as possible to the point where madness begins to boil over into certainty. Peter Straub has said that Evenson’s fiction extends ‘furthest out on the sheerest, least sheltered narrative precipice’, and these tales bring that apt description home. It is here we find that genre doesn’t matter, for Evenson’s style is open enough for the reader to step inside the world and decide for themselves while the story pummels their anticipation of reality to smithereens. Other worlds are dystopian, often apocalyptic, and you may wonder if the Western setting in one story wasn’t actually post-apocalyptic.
Readers will find themselves thrust directly into worlds much like our own, familiar in setting and filled with haunted characters we can relate too, often more than we wish. Evenson’s style is best described as quietly intense with a heavy dose of disturbing, and these books by Coffee House represent some of the best work by the author to date.
The seventeen stories in A Collapse of Horses are a great place for readers to test the waters with one of the giants of the genre. The image, a wolf/man hybrid designed by Evenson’s daughter, is stunning in execution and fits the collection perfectly. The other three books, Last Days, Father of Lies, and The Open Curtain, form a picture when you align the covers together. The collection is one piece of four books recently released from Coffee House Press. “Some of the best work by the author to date.”Ī Collapse of Horses by Brian Evenson collects some of his most powerful short fiction for the first time in one spectacular volume.
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