But when he went to hit it with the hammer, it opened its eye and looked at him. After making camp for the night, one man tells the other a story about a piece of black bark that keeps appearing in someone’s pocket, no matter how many times he tries to get rid of it.įinally he took the black bark out of his pocket, set it on the table, and picked up a hammer. In “Black Bark,” for instance, two fugitives on horseback get lost in the mountains (people tend to get lost in Evenson’s fiction, both geographically and ontologically). Like his landmark collection Fugue State, at times the stories feel like a sudden onset of schizophrenia. His new collection from Coffee House Press, A Collapse of Horses, is another fascinating, ruthless volume of weird fiction.

His characters often pay heavy prices thanks to their hunger for understanding, or their fear of the unknown. His prose is unmistakable, often exploring the darker side of humankind’s subjective, easily confused condition. If you haven’t read any of his fiction yet, you need to get your shit together.Įver since his debut collection led to a highly publicized excommunication from the Mormon church in 1994, he’s been quietly churning out gem after gem of literary horror in a singular, minimalist style. Questions and images like these-unanswerable questions and unforgettable images-are at the heart of every Brian Evenson story. Behind them, a man is filling their trough with fresh water.Īre the horses alive and appearances deceptive? Has the man simply not yet turned to see that the horses are dead? Or has he been so shaken by what he has seen that he doesn’t know what to do but proceed as if nothing has happened?

You come across the corpses of four horses in a paddock. Eventually, you can’t say for sure whether you have three children or four. A window moves a few inches overnight, a hallway seems narrower than it was yesterday. After surgery, you return home to find a house that keeps changing when you aren’t looking. Imagine you’ve suffered a traumatic head injury.

A collapse of horses stories