Brian Evenson Books In Order

Novels

  1. Father of Lies (1998)
  2. Dark Property (2002)
  3. Open Curtain (2006)
  4. Last Days (2009)
  5. Immobility (2012)
  6. The Deaths of Henry King (2016)

Collections

  1. Altmann’s Tongue (1994)
  2. The Din of Celestial Birds (1997)
  3. Contagion (2000)
  4. The Wavering Knife (2004)
  5. Fugue State (2009)
  6. Windeye (2012)
  7. A Collapse of Horses (2016)
  8. Future Dreams (2018)
  9. Whose Future Is It? (2018)
  10. Song for the Unraveling of the World (2019)
  11. The Nightside Codex (2020)
  12. Oculus Sinister (2020)
  13. The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell (2021)
  14. Hymns of Abomination (2021)

Graphic Novels

  1. Ed vs. Yummy Fur (2014)

Novellas

  1. The Warren (2016)
  2. Solution (2020)

Anthologies edited

  1. Conjunctions 62 – Exile (2014)

Novels Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Graphic Novels Book Covers

Novellas Book Covers

Anthologies edited Book Covers

Brian Evenson Books Overview

Father of Lies

Delivered with cold precision, ‘Father of Lies‘ is the haunting tale of a violent pedophile who is supported by the church, even after his crimes become known. Brian Evenson holds the reader to the page until the novel’s fateful end.

Dark Property

A woman carries a dying baby across a desert waste, moving toward a fortress harboring a mysterious resurrection cult. Menaced by scavengers, she nevertheless begins to suspect that the reality within the fortress may be even more unsettling than the blasted environment outside. As she slips unobtrusively towards the city of the dead, she is pursued by a bounty hunter who cuts a bloody swath after her. On one level, Dark Property is an exploration of religious fanaticism. Although Evenson’s characters owe more to the Book of Mormon than the Koran, their frightening intensity will spark recognition in both reviewers and readers. This brooding tale is reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and J. G. Ballard’s more disturbing works of fiction. ‘I admire Evenson’s writing and respect his courage.’ Andrew Vachss

Open Curtain

When Rudd, a troubled teenager, embarks on a school project, he runs across a series of articles from the 1902 New York Times chronicling a vicious murder committed by the grandson of Brigham Young. Delving deeply into the Mormon ritual of blood sacrifice used in the murders, Rudd, along with his newly discovered half brother, Lael, becomes swept up in the psychological and atavistic effects of this violent, antique ritual. As the past and the present become an increasingly tangled knot, Rudd is found at the scene of a multiple murder at a remote campsite with minor injuries and few memories. Lyndi, the daughter of the victims, tries to help Rudd recover his memory and, together, they find a strength unique to survivors of terrible tragedies. But Rudd, desperate to protect Lyndi and unable to let the past be still, tries to manipulate their Mormon wedding ceremony to trick the priests and God by giving himself and Lyndi new secret names names that match the killer and the victim in the one hundred year old murder. The nightmare has just begun…

Last Days

Still reeling from a brutal dismemberment, detective Kline is forcibly recruited to solve a murder inside a religious cult that takes literally the New Testament idea that you should cut off your hand if it offends you. Armed only with his gun, his wits, and a gift for self-preservation, Kline must navigate a gauntlet of lies, threats, and misinformation. All too soon he discovers that the stakes are higher than he thought and that his survival depends on an act of sheer will. Brian Evenson is the author of eight books of fiction, most recently The Open Curtain, which was a finalist for the Edgar Award and the International Horror Guild Award. He is the recipient of both an O. Henry Award and an NEA award. Evenson’s writing has been described as dark, violent, philosophical, critical, and lyrical. ‘A writer of disconcerting power.’ – The London Times ‘Evenson’s new masterpiece…
an astonishing work.’ – Paul Di Filippo ‘Wickedly brilliant. A superb thriller that’s a darker shade of noir. Brian’s writing is scalpel sharp.’ – Simon Clark

Altmann’s Tongue

Brian Evenson has added an O. Henry Award winning short story, ‘Two Brothers,’ to this controversial book and a new afterword, in which he describes the troubling aftermath of the book’s publication in 1994.

Contagion

Mapping a literary space uniquely his own, Evenson’s Contagion AND OTHER STORIES pursues to a new level the crepescular and delirious exploration begun in his acclaimed and controversial ALTMANN’S TONGUE. In the O’Henry Award winning ‘Two Brothers,’ a minister breaks his leg while his sons watch then refuses to call an ambulance, remaining convinced even unto death that God will arrive to lift him up and make him whole. The self acclaimed language specialist of ‘The Polygamy of Language’ indiscriminately blends linguistics with murder. ‘Contagion‘ is a skewed retelling of the early history of barbed wire, which interweaves metaphysics and the Western genre. ‘Watson’s Boy’ shows a boy endlessly wandering the human equivalent of a conditioned response box while the protagonist of ‘By Halves’ finds himself trapped in a relationship that may not exist. Throughout, Evenson’s immaculate prose draws us mercilessly up to confront troubled and troubling lives that, astoundingly, are no less human than our own.

The Wavering Knife

Brian Evenson’s fifth story collection constructs a human landscape as unearthly as it is mundane. Replete with the brutality, primordial waste, and savage blankness familiar to readers of his earlier works, Evenson’s Kafkaesque allegories entice the mind while stubbornly disordering it. In the title story an obsessive consciousness folds back on itself, creating a vertiginous m lange of Poe and Borges, both horrific and metaphysical. Here, as in ‘Moran’s Mexico,’ and ‘Greenhouse,’ the solitary nature of reading and writing leads characters beyond human limits, making the act of putting words to paper a monstrous violation opening onto madness. In ‘White Square’ the representation of humans by dimly colored shapes confirms our feeling that something lies behind these words, while seeming to mock us with the futility of seeking it. Evenson’s enigmatic names Thurm, Bein, Hatcher, Burlun placeable landscapes, and barren rooms all combine to create a semblance of conceptual abstraction, as though the material universe had come to exist inside someone’s head. Small wonder that Evenson’s work has attracted so much attention among philosophers, literary critics, and other speculative intelligences, for it continuously projects a tantalizing absence, as though there were some key or code that, if only we knew it, would illuminate everything. However, the blade of discernment wavers, and we are left to our own groping interpretations.

Fugue State

Brilliant…
Evenson manages to capture madness with a masterful tone. The specific genius of Fugue State rests in subtlety, in Evenson’s ability to maintain suspense, dread and paranoia through utter linguistic control. Time Out New York 19 satisfying and surreal stories…
packed with subtly hilarious sentences. Cleveland Plain Dealer 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 ‘The stories in this collection will thrill, unsettle, and captivate. Like lanterns in dark rooms, paper boats carried down on subterranean waters, they lead the reader into mysterious and perilous territory. Read at your own risk.’ Kelly Link Illustrated by graphic novelist Zak Sally, Brian Evenson s hallucinatory and darkly comic stories of paranoia, pursuit, sensory deprivation, amnesia, and retribution rattle the cages of the psyche and peer into the gaping moral chasm that opens when we become estranged from ourselves. From sad*istic bosses with secret fears to a woman trapped in a mime s imaginary box, and from a post apocalyptic misidentified Messiah to unwitting portraitists of the dead, the mind bending world of this modern day Edgar Allan Poe exposes the horror contained within our daily lives. Brian Evenson is the author of the Edgar and International Horror Guild award nominated novel The Open Curtain. Visit his website at www. brianevenson. com.

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