Books by Brian Evenson

Fugue State

by Brian Evenson

“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 sadistic 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.

Song for the Unraveling of the World

by Brian Evenson

A newborn’s absent face appears on the back of someone else’s head, a filmmaker goes to gruesome lengths to achieve the silence he’s after for his final scene, and a therapist begins, impossibly, to appear in a troubled patient's room late at night. In these stories of doubt, delusion, and paranoia, no belief, no claim to objectivity, is immune to the distortions of human perception. Here, self-deception is a means of justifying our most inhuman impulses―whether we know it or not.

Good Night, Sleep Tight

by Claire Freedman, Brian Evenson

While baby-sitting, Grandma tries several ways to get Archie to feel sleepy but nothing works until she remembers how she used to put his mother to bed when she was a little girl.

Good Night, Sleep Tight

by Claire Freedman, Brian Evenson

“Perhaps tomorrow I will wake up another person. Perhaps tomorrow I will wake up not a person at all.”

From the “master of literary horror” (GQ) comes a collection of new stories tracing the limits and consequences of artificial intelligence and “post-human” relationships. Populated by twins stepping into worlds of absence, bears who lick their cubs into creation, and artificial beings haunted by their less-than-human nature, each page sketches a world where our all-too-real feelings of isolation and ecological dread take on an otherworldly tinge.

In Good Night, Sleep Tight, Brian Evenson deftly weaves ethical dilemmas, maternal warmth, and echoes of apocalypse into his most tender, disquieting book yet.

The Deaths of Henry King

by Jesse Ball, Brian Evenson

In The Deaths of Henry King, the hapless Henry King, as advertised, dies. Not just once or even twice, but seven dozen times, each death making way for a new demise, moving from the comic to the grim to the absurd to the transcendent and back again. With text by Jesse Ball and Brian Evenson complimented by Lilli Carré’s macabre, gravestone-rubbing-style art, Henry King’s ends are brought to a vividly absurd life.
Brian Evenson is the author of a dozen books of fiction, most recently the story collection Windeye and the novel Immobility (both finalists for a Shirley Jackson Award). His novel Last Days won the ALA’s RUSA award for Best Horror Novel of 2009. His novel The Open Curtain was a finalist for an Edgar Award and an International Horror Guild Award. He lives in Providence, RI, where he teaches in Brown University’s literary arts department.
Jesse Ball is the author of five novels, including the forthcoming A Cure for Suicide (Pantheon, 2015), Silence Once Begun, and several others. He has received numerous awards, including a 2014 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship and the 2008 The Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize. He gives classes on lucid dreaming and lying in the SAIC’s MFA Writing program.
Lilli Carré is an artist living in Chicago. She has created several books of comics, including Heads or Tails (Fantagraphics), and her first children’s book, Tippy and the Night Parade (Toon Books). Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Best American Comics.

Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories

by Stephen Graham Jones, Seanan McGuire, Paul Tremblay, Nathan Ballingrud, Richard Kadrey, Joyce Carol Oates, Garth Nix, Ellen Datlow, Alice Hoffman, Ford Madox Ford, Pat Cadigan, Jeffrey Ford, Aliette de Bodard, Indrapramit Das, Brian Evenson, Nick Mamatas, Lee Thomas, Carole Johnstone, Bracken MacLeod, Alison Littlewood, Dale Bailey, Richard Bowes, Siobhan Carroll, F. Marion Crawford, Terry Dowling, Gemma Files, John Langan, Vincent J. Masterson, M. Rickert, M. L. Siemienowicz, A. C. Wise

The essential collection of beloved ghost stories, compiled by the editor who helped define the genre—including stories from award-winning, bestselling authors such as Joyce Carol Oates, Alice Hoffman, Seanan McGuire, and Paul Tremblay.

Everyone loves a good ghost story, especially Ellen Datlow—the most lauded editor in short works of supernatural suspense and dark fantasy. The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories is her definitive collection of ghost stories.

These twenty-nine stories, including all new works from New York Times bestselling authors Joyce Carol Oates, Alice Hoffman, Seanan McGuire, and Paul Tremblay, span from the traditional to the eclectic, from the mainstream to the literary, from pure fantasy to the bizarrely supernatural. Whether you’re reading alone under the covers with a flashlight, or around a campfire with a circle of friends, there’s something here to please—and spook—everyone.

Contributors include: Joyce Carol Oates, Alice Hoffman, Vincent J. Masterson, A.C. Wise, M. Rickert, Seanan McGuire, Lee Thomas, Alison Littlewood, M.L. Siemienowicz, Richard Kadrey, Indrapramit Das, Richard Bowes, Nick Mamatas, Terry Dowling, Aliette de Bodard, Carole Johnstone, Dale Bailey, Stephen Graham Jones, Bracken MacLeod, Garth Nix, Brian Evenson, Jeffrey Ford, Gemma Files, Paul Tremblay, Nathan Ballingrud, Pat Cadigan, John Langan.

Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: Bookmarked (Bookmarked, 8)

by Brian Evenson

A haunting meditation on love, loss, companionship, and finding one’s way through the dark, Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is one of the most important and influential short story collections in contemporary literature. In his entry in the esteemed Bookmarked series, acclaimed author Brian Evenson offers his personal and literary take on this classic Carver collection.
Brian Evenson is the author of several books of fiction, most recently the story collection A Collapse of Horses (Coffee House Press, 2016) and the novella The Warren (Tor.com, 2016). His 2012 books Windeye and Immobility were both finalists for a Shirley Jackson Award. His novel Last Days won the American Library Association’s award for Best Horror Novel of 2009. His novel The Open Curtain was a finalist for an Edgar Award and an International Horror Guild Award. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches in the Critical Studies Program at CalArts.

The New Black: A Neo-Noir Anthology

by Roxane Gay, Stephen Graham Jones, Benjamin Percy, Brian Evenson

The New Black is a collection of twenty neo-noir stories exemplifying the best authors currently writing in this dark sub-genre. A mixture of horror, crime, fantasy, science fiction, magical realism, and the grotesque—all with a literary bent—these stories are the future of genre-bending fiction.

Table of Contents:
Foreword by Laird Barron
Stephen Graham Jones, "Father Son, Holy Rabbit"
Paul Tremblay, "It's Against the Law to Feed the Ducks"
Lindsay Hunter, "That Baby"
Roxane Gay, "How"
Kyle Minor, "The Truth and All Its Ugly"
Craig Clevenger, "Act of Contrition"
Micaela Morrissette, "The Familiars"
Richard Lange, "Fuzzyland"
Benjamin Percy, "Dial Tone"
Roy Kesey, "Instituto"
Craig Davidson, "Rust and Bone"
Rebecca Jones-Howe, "Blue Hawaii"
Joe Meno, "Children Are the Only Ones Who Blush"
Vanessa Veselka, "Christopher Hitchens"
Nik Korpon, "His Footsteps are Made of Soot"
Brian Evenson, "Windeye"
Craig Wallwork, "Dollhouse"
Tara Laskowski, "The Etiquette of Homicide"
Matt Bell, "Dredge"
Antonia Crane, "Sunshine for Adrienne"

This Side of the Divide: Stories of the American West

by Melinda Moustakis, Tobias Wolff, Brian Evenson, Nona Caspers

From Baobab Press, in coordination with the University of Nevada, Reno’s Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program, comes This Side of the Divide: Stories, the first anthology in a literary series attempting to capture the newness, vastness, territoriality and sense of transience alive in the American West.

Set west of the Continental Divide, these narratives skillfully demonstrate the beauty, austerity, and danger of the untouched wilderness, delight in the mutual ease and asphyxiation of the hyper-urban and chart the interstitial spaces of the developing and the abandoned. Inhabiting the West’s richly varied landscapes, the characters in these stories provide a glimpse of the social and cultural diversity on display in these regions. Among these 15 stories, gathered from rising literary voices, a single mother struggles to maintain her individuality while raising an autistic son; a cathartic hike brings an unsuspecting widow face-to-face with her own mortality; a man injured in a train wreck questions his existence as he blindly wanders the desert; an aging cowboy rides the highways astride his magnificent horse, a final remnant of a fleeting era; Sasquatch looks for love in all the wrong places; and a divorcee tries to reconcile her present with her past, her heart with her head.

Positioning the voices of emerging authors alongside acclaimed writers such as Tobias Wolff, Brian Evenson and Nona Caspers, these collected stories, at turns hilarious, frightening, and devastating, showcase the variety of identity, amalgam of voice and depth of character that make the American West such a truly brilliant, literary mosaic.

Contributors include Tobias Wolff, Maile Meloy, Brian Evenson, Melinda Moustakis, Nona Caspers, Douglas W. Milliken, David Gillette, Miranda Schmidt, Michelle Willms, Andrea Lani, Leah Griesmann, Vanessa Hua, Cathy Warner, Mark Maynard, Aharon Levy, Sian Griffiths, L.L. Madrid, Kirk Wilson, Ashley Davidson, Carl Beideman, E.G. Willy, Shelley Blanton-Stroud, and Linda Lenhoff.

Father of Lies

by Brian Evenson

"[Evenson's] scary fictional treatment of church hypocrisy has the feeling of a reasoned attack on blind religious obedience."—Publishers Weekly
Provost Eldon Fochs may be a sexual criminal. His therapist isn't sure, and his church is determined to protect its reputation. Father of Lies is Brian Evenson's fable of power, paranoia, and the dangers of blind obedience, and a terrifying vision of how far institutions will go to protect themselves against the innocents who may be their victims.

A Collapse of Horses

by Brian Evenson

A stuffed bear’s heart beats with the rhythm of a dead baby, Reno keeps receding to the east no matter how far you drive, and in a mine on another planet, the dust won’t stop seeping in. In these stories, Evenson unsettles us with the everyday and the extraordinary—the terror of living with the knowledge of all we cannot know.

Praise for Brian Evenson:

"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

"One of the most provocative, inventive, and talented writers we have working today." —The Believer

"There is not a more intense, prolific, or apocalyptic writer of fiction in America than Brian Evenson." —George Saunders

“Brian Evenson is one of the few who will still be read a hundred years from now: either by our grandchildren, or by the machines who have killed our grandchildren.” —Hobart, “An interview with Brian Evenson”

"Packed with enough atrocities to give Thomas Harris pause. . . . Not many writers have the imagination or the audacity to transform what looks like salvation into an utterly original outpost of hell." —Bookforum

“Evenson’s writing is something to be read in short intervals, like a good tea that you want to savor to the last drop.” —Twin Cities Geek

Praised by Peter Straub for going "furthest out on the sheerest, least sheltered narrative precipice"

Brian Evenson has been a finalist for the Edgar Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and is the World Fantasy Award and the winner of the International Horror Guild Award, the American Library Association's award for Best Horror Novel, and one of Time Out New York's top books.

Last Days A Novel

by Brian Evenson

"The deceptively simple prose keeps the book brisk and even gripping as its puzzles grow more craggy and complex. This is Evenson's singular, Poe-like gift: He writes with intelligence and a steady hand, even when his characters decide to lop their own limbs off."--Time Out New York

When Kline is kidnapped by a dark sect that believes amputation brings you closer to God, he's tasked with uncovering who murdered their leader. Will he uncover the truth in time to save himself, take on the mantle of prophet, or destroy all he sees with a rain of biblical violence?

The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell Stories

by Brian Evenson

"Here is how monstrous humans are."

A sentient, murderous prosthetic leg; shadowy creatures lurking behind a shimmering wall; brutal barrow men--of all the terrors that populate The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell, perhaps the most alarming are the beings who decimated the habitable Earth: humans. In this new short story collection, Brian Evenson envisions a chilling future beyond the Anthropocene that forces excruciating decisions about survival and self-sacrifice in the face of toxic air and a natural world torn between revenge and regeneration. Combining psychological and ecological horror, each tale thrums with Evenson's award-winning literary craftsmanship, dark humor, and thrilling suspense.