Then the new owner arrives, and the director notices that he resembles the murder victim in the movie, starting a chain of bad news. Mad Artist: A film director in “Room Tone” makes a deal with a crooked realtor to shoot a horror movie in an empty house.Last Days, its expansion into a novel, ends with him killing most of the people who wronged him in the novella. Lighter and Softer: The Brotherhood of Mutilation is a dark, Kafkaesque nightmare of a detective story where the protagonist is constantly wading through a situation he can't comprehend.Life-or-Limb Decision: Kline from Last Days cut off his own arm to get the drop on a Serial Killer in his last case, which sets the stage for him investigating a dark sect of voluntary amputees.Humans Through Alien Eyes: “Sisters” concerns a family of non-human ghouls and their skewed reactions when learning of Halloween traditions.His self-inflicted (if reluctantly so) amputation makes him a hero to members of the self-mutilation cult he infiltrates, but he has severe difficulty living in society, much less working as a private eye. Handicapped Badass: Kline from Last Days is a deconstruction.The story is kind of an even darker variant on the play The Shape of Things by Evenson’s fellow ex-Mormon Neil LaBute. Fetishized Abuser: Megan of “Shirts and Skins” leads the narrator to a macabre art exhibit that prefigures her controlling tendencies toward him.Ear Ache: A soldier has his severed ear reattached in “The Other Ear”, but there are complications, including his memory of how he lost it in the first place.After the End: Immobility protagonist Josef Horkai is a Human Popsicle who wakes up paralyzed from the waste down to a Bad Future where some unspecified disaster has destroyed almost all life on earth.Abusive Parents: Drago in “Song for the Unraveling of the World” appears at first to be just a concerned father looking for his missing daughter, but gradually emerges as one of these, leaving exactly what happened to the daughter as a troubling mystery.Tropes associated with Brian Evenson and his work: The Glassy Burning Floor of Hell (2021).Song for the Unraveling of the World (2019).The Din of Celestial Birds: Stories (1997).He resigned from BYU the following year, eventually leaving the Church of Latter-Day Saints.

The 1994 publication of his debut collection Altmann’s Tongue aroused disapproval at Brigham Young University, where Evenson was teaching, despite his having included some of its stories in his application packet. Said horror can be supernatural but is very likely to contain a psychological element either way.Įvenson’s writing career was steeped in controversy almost from the start. Brian Evenson (born Augin Ames, Iowa) is an American academic and author of novels and short stories, often in or adjacent to the horror genre.

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