A Collapse of Horses
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
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 Edgar Allan Poe."—Jonathan Lethem
"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 Geek
Praised by Peter Straub for going "furthest out on the sheerest, least sheltered narrative precipice"
Brian Evenson has been a finalist for the Edgar Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and is the World Fantasy Award 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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. In the title story, a man who has suffered a head injury perceives, among other surreal developments, a pile of listless horses. Unable to tell if they are dead or alive, the man is further disturbed by a fellow he sees filling the horses' trough, as if he either hasn't yet noticed the state of the horses or has gone mad with denial. In "BearHeart," the strongest story, Lisa and Michael are expecting a baby. But after Lisa miscarries late in her pregnancy, a teddy bear equipped with a recording of what had been the baby's heartbeat haunts the couple. "Black Bark" presents two old outlaws, riding stolen horses through unforgiving terrain, wondering which one will die first. Sometimes, however, how much Evenson withholds is less successful. In "The Dust," the collection's longest story, men with Viking-sounding names, like Grimur and Orvar, work in a kind of intergalactic outpost factory, isolated and at the mercy of their machinery. When things start to go very badly for the men, their lack of backstory or context detracts from the suspense rather than adding to it. Overall, though, Evenson's journey along the boundaries of short fiction make for an eye-opening dissection of the form.
