To lease a place like that for a few weeks would normally have cost well over what they had budgeted for locations. It was for sale, with the old couple who lived there now both in hospice and their children living on the other side of the country and eager to sell. It was empty and spacious and hadn’t been updated since the seventies, which was exactly what Filip wanted. His stories are narrative events, and his formalism has earned him a devoted, even cultish following among writers.At the last possible moment he found the perfect house.
With his junky blend of horror, sci-fi and Beckett, Evenson solves many writerly problems: how to systematically destabilize exposition how to upend the "it-was-all-a-dream" ending how to use the imagination to get out of the mind and into the body. Bloody, ruthless, symbolist, bodily physical and atmospherically hollow. The territory is familiar - identifiably his. Instead of an ambiguous shrug at the end of a suspenseful story, there is a glimmering, jeering, three-dimensional absence ("And then he couldn't manage to think even that." - "The Oxygen Protocol").Įvenson, acclaimed author of the virtuosic Mormon murder thriller The Open Curtain, and the creepy post-apocalyptic novel Immobility, has a well mapped-out moral universe. These stories don't end, but rather leap off cliffs and out of sight ("It was as if none of them really knew what was happening to them: none of them understood it, yet none of them were able to stop. Evenson's stories, as puzzling as they are, never get to The Answer - or, if they do, it's not likely there is a Question. Is the man a maniacal killer, or trapped in an experiment? What happens in the caves? Will the dead boy be avenged? Can Halle survive until the end of the oxygen shortage?įoolish me. How?Īs if wooing Sisyphus, I push hungrily through the 25 stories in Brian Evenson's new collection, Windeye, trying each time to get to The Answer. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Windeye Subtitle Stories Author Brian Evenson
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