The Open Curtain by Brian Evenson5/11/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() (Later, the character looks into the mirror and thinks, “What frightened me was not how the man thrown back so little resembled me, but how he so greatly did.”) In “Mudder Tongue,” a man’s loss of control over his speech (thinking one word, “fishing,” but involuntarily saying another, “gravy”) leads him first to a darkly comic situation of almost speaking in tongues, then to placing a shotgun in his mouth. “Dread,” an illustrated story, chronicles how a man’s obsession with the phrase “He no longer resembled me” portends a fate of self-mutilation. His characters cling to sentences, phrases and words with the intensity that usually accompanies unrequited love. In his new collection, “Fugue State,” Evenson’s stories most often serve as detective-style investigations into the horror of everyday speech. Yet the grimmest turns in Evenson’s writing have always been connected to a singularly modern obsession with language Over a career of four novels and five story collections, he has birthed a distinctive, postmodern style for exploring his favorite macabre topics - amputation, post-apocalyptic landscapes, doppelgangers, “creatures of darkness” and religious bloodshed. Brian Evenson is the Donald Barthelme of psychological horror. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |