Review by Booklist Review
Brian Evenson (Altmann's Tongue, 1994), known as a master of literary horror, is back with a collection of short, terrifying stories about people from all walks of life. Young twins walk into a world where everything is gray, beings of artificial intelligence struggle with their human and not-so-human natures, bear mothers make their cubs by magically licking them into existence, and a man learns the consequences of trusting strangers with the one source of power he has left, his name. These and other stories make up a collection that is written not to bring the reader to satisfying conclusions but to amplify the dread of unfinished business. While some of the stories make use of tropes often seen in the horror genre and some of the writing is jerky and struggling, overall, this book is cleverly done, focusing mainly on the characters as they make (sometimes very bad) decisions, or get stuck in situations beyond their control, and are forced to deal with the often-fatal consequences.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
This collection of unsettling stories blurs the lines between dream and reality, life and death, human and not, Bradbury and Borges. An award-winning fantasist who's been compared to Kafka, Evenson combines matter-of-fact verbal precision with anything-goes conjecture. The strongest pieces here, such as the title story, leave it unclear whether they're illuminating psychological disturbance or supernatural terror. A man remembers how his mother, on rare occasion, would tell him stories that would scare him in a way that no mother ever should. His mother has no memory of this, nor would anyone else think it likely of her. But now that he has a son of his own, he reluctantly takes the boy to visit his grandmother, and the man's worst fears are realized. The reader must determine whether the protagonist has suffered a total breakdown or has been right all along. Following that is the even stranger "Vigil in the Inner Room," in which a mother--there's a lot of focus on mothers--orders her daughter, Gauri, to hold vigil at the bedside of the girl's recently deceased father while her brother, Gylvi, stands guard outside the doors. Both of them know their roles, for they've done this each time their father has died, "several dozen deaths." In "Untitled (Cloud of Blood)," a painting causes the death of anyone who has the misfortune to possess it, or maybe causes them to die by suicide, and keeps a tally of the deceased on the back of its canvas. Some stories are a little heavier-handed, more like science fiction parables, concerning climate change, class warfare, and the myth of free will. Some humans behave inhumanly while their bionic constructions have learned to develop (or approximate?) an ethical dimension. Call it speculative or SF, fantasy or horror, this is fiction that keeps the reader off balance, unsure and nervous. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
