A Collapse of Horses by Brian Evenson (review)

There’s a new frontier in the world of fiction: literary genre fiction. For decades, there’s been a no-man’s-land dividing the two, an uninhabited stretch between authors who consider themselves literary authors, relying on lyricism and theme, and those who consider themselves genre authors, relying on plot and conflict. However, lately a growing number of authors have taken to residing here: Justin Cronin, Benjamin Percy, and Nathan Ball-ingrud. They have taken the poetics and leitmotif of the literary and structured it with compulsively readable plots.

Brian Evenson has been firmly fixed in this territory since the mid-nineties, garnering the praise of peers such as George Saunders and Peter Straub. His work ranges from the more controversial and academic Altmann’s Tongue, his first collection of stories, to Dead Space, a series inspired by the space-horror video game and written under the moniker B.K. Evenson. Notably, his 2009 novel Last Days is perhaps one of the most unblinking examinations of faith, brutality, and violence. Yet even with over fifteen books under his belt, Evenson still reserves the ability to surprise.

A Collapse of Horses, his recent collection of seventeen short stories, maintains a perfect balance of literary and horror. While not every entry would be categorized as strict horror, there’s something that lurks at the edges of these stories—a haunting uncertainty about knowledge, about the fixedness of reality—that gnaw and frighten the reader the way horror does.

Framing the collection are two stories of men in the wilderness telling a story over a campfire. The premiere story, “Black Bark,” recounts an injured man’s telling of a story involving black tree bark. The tale defies logic and reality, but “Black Bark” isn’t so much about the story being told as it is about the second man’s attempt to rationalize the irrational. He tries to make it conform to the way he understands the world to be, and he’s told, “Don’t you try to puzzle it out none and think that it means something other than what I said. Every time you think you have the world figured, trust me, that’s just when the world’s got you figured and is about to spring and break your back.”

Similarly, the last story, “The Blood Drip,” contains an injured man, a listening man, a campfire, and a story. Again, the injured man tells a story, only the listening man responds differently this time. He doesn’t want to hear the story. The listening men in both stories can be seen as a simulacrum for the reader. Evenson predicts that we’re driven by the tantalizing mystery and fringe lethality of his stories in “Black Bark,” but by “The Blood Drip,” the reader has been changed by the macabre collection. Evenson’s trying to tell us that a story can change us through its telling, and sometimes that’s a dangerous thing. Or maybe you believe the injured man when he desperately pleads for an audience: “It’s just a story. A story can’t hurt.”

These stories seem like not only an interrogation of Evenson’s relationship with his reader, but almost an apology. Understanding that sharing a story or idea is like a bell that can’t be unrung, he seems to question the implications of his role as an author.

Evenson at his most cerebral in “A Collapse of Horses” explores a popular thought experiment from quantum mechanics, Schrödinger’s Cat. Our narrator encounters collapsed horses, but flees before learning if the horses were dead or alive. “They remain both alive and dead, which makes them not quite alive, nor quite dead. And what, in turn, carrying that paradoxical knowledge in your head, does that make you?” The uncertainty changes him into someone who will go to any lengths to find even a semblance of certainty. “Any Corpse” keeps its readers in the dark. Not only do we struggle to understand the significance of each plot point, but we’re forced to...