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#63782 in Books Brian Evenson 2016-02-09Original language:EnglishPDF # 1 8.20 x .70 x 5.50l, .0 #File Name: 1566894131240 pagesA Collapse of Horses | File size: 66.Mb

Brian Evenson : A Collapse of Horses before purchasing it in order to gage whether or not it would be worth my time, and all praised A Collapse of Horses:

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful. Evenson is creating his own tropes to play with and it couldn’t be more awesomeBy Gary A Brown*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.3 of 3 people found the following review helpful. A quiet, panicked take on horrorBy Autumn ChristianA quiet, panicked take on horror - Brian Evenson's short stories are filled to the brim with dark water - possibilities spilling out past the corners of the pages. His stories are the kind that produce short-breathed, cosmic questions, and are masterful at provoking anxiety by not answering them. Favorites were 'Black Bark', 'The Dust', "BearHeart(TM)', 'A Collapse of Horses,' and 'The Blood Drip'2 of 2 people found the following review helpful. Well Done So FarBy Chico MauiHave only read four stories but one spooked me to the point that I stopped reading the book alone in the house at night. I'm not much of a short story guy but so far he appears to have mastered the format. And typically I'm not easily spooked.

A stuffed bear’s heart beats with the rhythm of a dead baby, Reno keeps receding to the east no matter how far you drive, and in a mine on another planet, the dust won’t stop seeping in. In these stories, Evenson unsettles us with the everyday and the extraordinary—the terror of living with the knowledge of all we cannot know.Praise for Brian Evenson:"Brian Evenson is one of the treasures of American story writing, a true successor both to the generation of Coover, Barthelme, Hawkes and Co., but also to ." —"One of the most provocative, inventive, and talented writers we have working today." —The Believer"There is not a more intense, prolific, or apocalyptic writer of fiction in America than Brian Evenson." —George Saunders“Brian Evenson is one of the few who will still be read a hundred years from now: either by our grandchildren, or by the machines who have killed our grandchildren.” —Hobart, “An interview with Brian Evenson”"Packed with enough atrocities to give Thomas Harris pause. . . . Not many writers have the imagination or the audacity to transform what looks like salvation into an utterly original outpost of hell." —Bookforum “Evenson’s writing is something to be read in short intervals, like a good tea that you want to savor to the last drop.” —Twin Cities GeekPraised by for going "furthest out on the sheerest, least sheltered narrative precipice"Brian Evenson has been a finalist for the Edgar Award, the , and is the 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.

“Some of the stories here evoke Kafka, some Poe, some Beckett, some Roald Dahl, and one, a demonic teddy-bear chiller called 'BearHeart™,' 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 “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 s“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 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 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 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 horror, Evenson’s books mix literary sentences with and fantasy tropes and tie them together with a thread of uncanny dread.” —GQ"This new collection, released alongside new editions of three of his older works, offers a great summation of Evenson’s strengths as a writer.” —Vol. 1 Brooklyn, "Mid-Year 2016: The Year's Best Fiction (So Far)"“A Collapse of Horses, [Evenson’s] recent collection of seventeen short stories, maintains a perfect balance of literary and horror. While not every entry would be categorized as strict horror, there’s something that lurks at the edges of these stories—a haunting uncertainty about knowledge, about the fixedness of reality—that gnaw and frighten the reader the way horror does.” —Pleiades“The stories that comprise A Collapse of Horses . . . venture into increasingly dark, even apocalyptic, terrain while maintaining a narrative control that owes at least as much to the experimental spirit of the Oulipo as to the usual suspects of American weird (Poe, Bowles, Burroughs).” —The White , interview“A Collapse of Horses is a stunning collection of disparate tales of existential terror, which could serve as a good introduction to readers who are not familiar with his work. However, allow your reviewer to warn you: once you have read Evenson, you will want to read all of Evenson; yet beware, like most addictions, it is a dangerous pursuit and one not easy to pass through unscathed.” —The Brooklyn Rail“There is no colour in these stories, and hardly an image. Taken separately, they can seem as cold as ice. But allowed to touch each other horribly, they burn. The collection as a whole comes as close to adding up as the world is likely to allow to those who have lost their way. Each story says what the world does to those who drift into its claws without a lie to cling to.” —Strange Horizons“One of the premier dark fiction writers working today, Brian Evenson releases a new collection of his hallucinatory stories, A Collapse of Horses. The brilliant title story reads like an Oliver Sacks case study rendered by Edgar Allan Poe. His standout novel Last Days, a labyrinthine mystery inside a cult of amputees, also gets a new reissue.” —Campus Circle“While these stories have all the earmarks of Evenson's fiction with varying degrees of violence, horror and dread, A Collapse of Horses doesn't complete the picture of Evenson's career so much as spin it in a number of fascinating new directions, each more unsettling than the last.” —San Diego City Beat“America’s greatest horror writer evokes the schism between perceptions and realities, and, to unsettling effect, collapses the unseen bond that so delicately bridges them.” —San Francisco Chronicle“Brian Evenson is one of the most consistently vital and unnerving voices in writing today. . . . No matter where you start with Evenson's work, the door is wide ajar, and once you go through it you won't be coming out.” —VICE“A Collapse of Horses is a master class in unnerving storytelling; seventeen short narratives that range from horror to science fiction and from surrealism to noir. The variety is outstanding, the writing is superb, but what makes this collection deserving of attention is how Evenson manages to achieve a perfect balance between what is on the page and what is left out.” —Electric Literature, "A Master at Work"“Brian Evenson’s fiction can both bowl you over with its unpredictable narrative experimentation and chill you to the bone with its ability to unsettle and horrify.” —Vol.1 Brooklyn"A Collapse of Horses is the first of Evenson's books I have read. Since finishing it, I have read three more, in succession.” —LitReactor“For fans of Stephen King, Kafka, and Lovecraft, A Collapse of Horses is a delightfully terrifying collection.” —Windsor Independent“Weaving the act of storytelling into these terrifying stories is no small accomplishment. Evenson’s precision allows him to give his latest book multiple layers—a way of slowly introducing the reader into the same medium as the characters, and indicting them in the process.” —Bookforum"While they run the gamut of genres, these stories all lie in the same orbit of dark gravity: a field of dust, blood, head trauma, inert flesh, semicorporeal stuff and fear–mainly the terror of what we're capable of." —The Rumpus"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." —This is Horror (UK)"Evenson's latest book, A Collapse of Horses, reveals that his unsettling talents have grown subtler and stronger—between seventeen stories featuring unsolvable mind-games, drugged-out cults, and space-station claustrophobia, all rendered in Evenson's unmistakable prose, which is capable of suggesting both grounded realism and jittery paranoia, often at the same time. . . . Evenson excels at bringing different worlds and genres together, and his gift for making contradictory versions of reality overlap often intensifies his work's creepy effects." —Bookforum“[Brian Evenson] happily straddles both literature and horror in an amalgam that’s rarely so powerful and convincing as in this collection.” —Rue Morgue

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