Always challenging, always amazing. Such a unique voice.

Against the far wall, beside the one entrance to a tunnel, was a figure. Bernt went toward it, shining his flashlight. It was a body: an old woman, slight of frame, wearing old and frayed clothes. She had been dead a long time. Her skin had been eaten away, her eyes were gone."Who is it?" Bernt asked."Who's what?" asked Grottor. "That? Don't worry about that, that's nothing.""How can a body be nothing?""When it no longer holds a person," said Grottor flatly. "Then it's nothing." Uncharacteris

Maybe the best thing I've read from Evenson, or pretty close. This is an incredibly broad ranging collection, though held together by an emphasis on endless journeys, unhealing ruptures in the body, unsolvable mystery, and a sense that (whether they're fantastical, contemporary, or somewhere inbetween) the stories take place in a kind of impassable void. There's less excruciating violence here than Evenson is known for, but always in a way that lets the broadness of the subject matter shine thro...

One of the best collections I've read in quite some time.All stories are good to great.Highly recommended!

Windeye a collection of short stories by Bram Stoker finalist for an Edgar award and many other awards Mr. Brian Evenson. In my opinion in the top five for horror and dark fiction. I read quite a few of his previous works and haven't been let down. Below are my favorites, but every page will have you wanting more.Windeye: A game played with her, his sister. Who is she, she disappeared into the "windeye" 5★Dapplegrim: An inheritance becomes ones master. A steed of death. 4★The Dismal Mirror: Haun...

Immediately upon finishing this, I added three or four more of this author's books to my to-read list. That should tell you something.A collection of did-that-happen-or-didn't-it? and what-just-happened? stories, the tales in this book range from the odd and eerie to the downright horrifying. The author's command of language and range of styles are remarkable, from fairy tale to classic monster/demon to magical realism to the completely surreal, and there's a nice sprinkling of unreliable narrat...

This is it, the one with which to begin, the entry point for Evenson initiates unwilling to commit a novel-sized space in their reading world but willing to invest in a small dip. Evenson might be the literary lovechild of Lovecraft and Poe and yet I believe at times his works outshine even those masters. He writes with such an unfortunate intimacy to pain and loss the reader can feel the push of those specters on the author’s wrist as he scratches away the words that become these haunting stori...

4.5 rounded up to 5

The stories in this collection were perfect for me at the moment. They are almost all short, they vary dramatically in content, and they are written in a precise language that draws you into their strange worlds with the utmost economy. I thought some could have been a little longer (e.g. ‘The Dismal Mirror’, which builds a mystery so intriguing that it begged for further development). Others are the perfect length (e.g. ‘Knowledge’, which is a great little metafiction with a philosophically ric...

3.5. Unnerving little tales, some of which become dull and repetitive, but some of which take me so far away from myself and into a dark, uncanny land that I’m compelled to marvel at their genius. I was particularly charmed and mesmerized by “The Sladen Suit,” in which men lost at sea, or at least within a container afloat in something wet, crawl into a rubber umbilicus, inhabit a suit, and are thusly dissolved into thin air. Some zany riffs of the speculatively weird variety. A thematic undercu...

I'm bumping this up to 5 stars for the simple fact that "Grottor" might be the most evil little horror story I've read since Joe R. Lansdale's "The Night They Missed the Horror Show." Just a nasty little nugget that I will never forget. But seriously. This collection is undeniably good. I am not saying every story is a hit as there was a period in the middle where I just became a little tired with Evenson's vague story experiments (basically the four stories from "Hurlock's Law" to "Baby or Doll...

How to tell if you are reading a Brian Evenson story:1. Are the characters often nameless?2. If the characters have names, are they often Scandinavian or Eastern European or otherwise non-American-seeming?3. Is the story quite short? 4. Does the story involve a horrifying conceit, cf. bees inserted into throats, people without faces, cave Chthulhus?5. Is it extremely difficult to summarize the content, nature, and impact of the story? 6. But do you nevertheless feel satisfied, cf. Yes, that was

This book is a collection of stories by a writer whose work I've never read before and I am very happy to have found this book because the stories, although short (one story only takes up one side of the page!), seem to transport you to very different places filled with intrigue and mystery. As every writer knows, it's very hard to write effective short stories and work out whole personality in a few hundred words, but Brian Evenson seems to have a good grasp of that.The title story, Windeye, is...

Evenson is the master of what I'm now calling the paranoid/weird tale. As in, did that really happen? man, that's messed up.. In lesser hands the playing with reality and perception can get tiresome, but Evenson always manages to be thematically spot on and genuinely creepy or uncanny. Besides, do you really need an excuse to read a short story collection with a story about Bon Scott being recruited and then possibly murdered by Mormons? No, you don't.

Amazing, amazing collection of literary horror stories! My highest recommendation to all those who are into weird or horror literature.

***UPDATE: this title was a finalist for a 2012 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Single Author Collection***Rating: 4.25* of five The Publisher Says: A woman falling out of sync with the world; a king's servant hypnotized by his murderous horse; a transplanted ear with a mind of its own--the characters in these stories live as interlopers in a world shaped by mysterious disappearances and unfathomable discrepancies between the real and imagined. Brian Evenson, master of literary horror, presents h...

Incredible imagination at work in these stories - ever weird and strange. I literally cannot second guess where his storytelling will take me.

Brilliant collection of some of the strangest stories I've ever read. Each is a unique and singular experience, fairy-tale horror-stories of the most twisted, yet perfectly self-contained logic imaginable. Yet never does one of the stories take the easy-out 'rug-pull' of introducing an unreliable narrator element in the final pages of the story, the cop-out of 'oh by-the-way, they were crazy the whole time and imagined the whole thing!' Indeed, if Evenson is going to have an unreliable narrator,...

I really like Brian Evenson, but the stories can occasionally be tiresome as they are so purposely vague. It can also be frustrating to read the protagonist struggle with really basic things like the difference between a baby and a doll. The quality of the good stories does ultimately make it worthwhile and I look forward to reading more of his work.The Second Boy and The Dismal Mirror were my favorite stories in the collection and I also enjoyed Bon Scott: The Choir Years, Grottor, and Anskan H...

Astoundingly good. Superb writing, not a word wasted, Evenson uses archetypal horrors mixed with unease to full effect. Suspenseful, creepy, gothic stories that put me mentally straight into that state between wakefulness and sleep the way good stories do. This sucks you right in and doesn't let go. The repeated themes here, including missing family members, missing body parts, tunnels, parallel universes, internal disquiet and anxiety rising to a fever pitch, and so on, are used skillfully and