I've made no secret of the fact that I love Brian's work; both his non-fiction and his fiction. I've published his work myself not once, but twice. I've only had the chance to meet him in person once, many years ago, but have had correspondence with him off and on for a long time now. He even let me have the honor of accepting the International Horror Guild Award on his behalf when he couldn't make it to a convention I was attending. So I might be a little biased. But only a little; even if he a...

5 word review (not counting these words here, hidden in the parenthesis, but these stories were so weird and disturbing and burrowing, yes, burrowing, inside, inside you.) Loved it. And blurbed it. Here's my blurb!“Brian Evenson's collection A Collapse of Horses is equal parts Franz Kafka, J. G. Ballard, Sam Peckinpah, and George Miller's Mad Max. His apocalyptic and paranoid stories are as ontological as they are disquieting, creating a remarkable unity of effect, a timeless yet recognizably tw...

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...

I don’t read short stories as often as novels, and I don’t really know how reviewers typically go about analyzing them. But I do remember an assignment in a personality psych class for which we (the students) each had to choose ten pictures (from magazines, newspapers, etc.) ‘at random’, and write a very brief story about each one. After we’d done this, we were to read over the stories and decide if there were any common themes or ideas that we hadn't been aware of while writing. Sure enough the...

Solid collection of strange stories, mostly of the quiet but unsettling kind. Ambiguity abounds. There were a couple stories that I didn't get at all, but overall I really enjoyed it.

4 stars--I really liked (?) it.First of all, the title of this collection is perfect. Not only is it the title of (arguably) the collection's most well-known story, but there are a lot of dead or dying or collapsed horses in these stories!Evenson's stories are about loneliness, feeling stagnant, feeling out of place or disjointed, being unable to move on, being trapped, feeling despair or disquiet or being otherwise out of sync with other people/reality. They're weird and unsettling. There's an

Brilliant and disturbing, Evenson's latest is a textbook example of "the uncanny" and "fantastic hesitation." This collection successfully expands upon the familiar trope of the double through the bookended stories "Black Bark" and "The Blood Drip:" tales of a guilty descent into insanity for two men on the run. Characters suffer from mental afflictions such as hallucinations, paranoia, social anxiety, schizophrenia, brainwashing, and Capgras Syndrome. "Past Reno" and "Cult" are psychologically

After I open the book I just need to accept that I'm in Brian Evenson's world now and he will not be held accountable for changing the rules in whatever way he likes--the rules of storytelling, the rules of physics, the rules of decorum. In Brian Evenson's fictional world I'm always crawling helplessly along the liminal border between the realistic and the terrifying. You might even say that I'm a snail, crawling along the edge of a straight razor. This is my dream; this is my nightmare. Crawlin...

‘Evenson’s fiction is stark and often jaw-droppingly funny…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 Times‘There is not a more intense, prolific or apocalyptic writer of fiction in America than Brian Evenson.’Ge...

3.5 stars rounded up because it’s Evenson (especially for the way he slyly connects the first and last stories) and despite there being a smaller proportion of really good stories in this collection than in some of his other books, it still has enough good ones spaced out to provide a solid foundation. Also, it’s always hard for me to tell with Evenson when a story is just ‘average’ because the bar is set so high for his best stories that the average ones seem to be of much lesser quality than I...

I recently attended a Brian Evenson reading held at Skylight Books in the appropriately understated, enduringly cool east Hollywood enclave of Los Feliz. During the Q & A session after he read his latest collection's titular piece, Evenson shared a personal story that had occurred in a parking garage just days before. As he was walking to his car one afternoon, he noticed a fluttering object up ahead of him, trapped in the corner of the structure, that appeared to be a distressed bird most likel...

I once went to Powell's in Portland with the purpose of bringing home several Brian Evenson books. I had gone to reading he had done at Powells a few weeks earlier and didn't have money that night. I went to the horror section and couldn't find it. He had done a reading there the week before, you think they would have it. So I looked him up on the catalog. Literature. I'll be damned. I mean anyone reading my blog knows that I feel the genre ghetto is really a false wall, but I was surprised by t...

A 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'

If Children of the New World: Stories is reminiscent of Black Mirror, A Collapse of Horses is more of a slightly grown-up, less-resolved version of the Goosebumps and Are You Afraid of the Dark stories many of us enjoyed growing up.There are few, if any, stories in here that would be unsuitable for teenage readers, and somehow we are offered a collection that is both predictable and confusing at the same time. These stories don’t have a solid resolution, leaving it up to the reader to decide, bu...

"Black Bark," where have you been all my life?

Brian Evenson's astonishing new collection from Coffee House Press, A Collapse of Horses, coincides with the re-release of three previous works: the much heralded novels Father of Lies, Open Curtain and Last Days. Each cover depicts an illustration of part of a creature that when taken together form a beast that doesn't exist.There's an apt metaphor here, but a misleading one. While these stories have all the earmarks of Evenson's fiction with varying degrees of violence, horror and dread, A Col...

Solid collection of eerie, subtle tales with a philosophical bent and a metafictional angle. Evenson's prose is laconic but sharp and the best stories are effective in how fleeting they are, like you're only seeing a snapshot of something that doesn't make sense, a sort of Lovecraftian horror in the usage of literary form and space alone. The best stories here flirt with Kafka though, like the disquieting "A Report" which features a central terror of torment committed by a faceless and unknowabl...

Some people say Evenson is the new Lovecraft, a modern heir to Poe, the best psychological terror writer in decades. Well, I think that even after a full creative writing program at Miskatonic University he would not be allowed to clean the master's boots! This book is a collection of highly irregular short stories, some of them pretty good (e.g "The Dust", "Bear Heart") but the majority is just a series of shallow suspense exercises with reasonable plot ideas but that should be much more worked...

Simply one of the best short story collections I've read in a long time. Deeply uncanny. These unlocked places in my mind that have not been traversed before and twisted some well-visited places in such surprising ways. There was not a miss in this collection, and some of them greatly unnerved my sense of comfort. In short, I'll be reading more Evenson. I did not think Logotti had any contenders on my horror short story list. It does now. P.S. 'The Dust' is worth the price of the book alone.

*Just the title story.*On the surface seemingly about paranoia, perception and Schrodinger’s cat. Hints of the narrator being trapped, suffocating in his own mind after an accident or breakdown. Also (maybe) an unreliable narration. This effects an overwhelming sense of a freefall, a lack of anchor.I smiled all the way through imagining meaning, so many off-shooting possibilities. There seems a danger of trivialising or breaking it down into functional parts, not stepping back far enough to see