Who Would Like This Book:
If you love your horror unsettling, cerebral, and just a little bit surreal, this collection is for you! Brian Evenson delivers stories that mess with your sense of reality, filled with unreliable narrators and nightmarish worlds. Whether you’re into weird fiction, subtle dread, or literary horror that lingers long after you put the book down, you’ll find these tales deliciously disorienting. Fans of authors like Shirley Jackson, Thomas Ligotti, or Kafka will feel right at home - and anyone who enjoys exploring the unstable ground between horror and existential uncertainty will be hooked.
Who May Not Like This Book:
If you’re looking for tidy plotlines, traditional scares, or concrete answers, this book might leave you frustrated. Some readers don’t enjoy the ambiguous endings, recurring themes, or Evenson's stripped-down prose - which can feel repetitive or purposely oblique. If you want stories that wrap up neatly or provide clear explanations, these tales of unresolved horrors and dreamlike logic might not be your thing.
About:
A Collapse of Horses by Brian B.K. Evenson is a collection of strange and unsettling short stories that delve into psychologically complex and broken narrators, blurring the lines between horror and science fiction. Evenson's writing style is described as a mix of cinematic sensibilities with the moodiness of weird fiction, creating stories that are both familiar and extraordinary, leaving readers feeling uneasy and questioning reality. The narratives in the collection often revolve around themes of evasion, the cost of not facing the truth, and the fragility of perception, leading to ambiguous and open-ended endings that linger with the reader long after finishing the tales.
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Sensitive Topics/Content Warnings
Content warnings include mentions of mental illness, trauma, existential themes, and unsettling depictions of psychological distress.
From The Publisher:
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.
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1 comment(s)
The best collection of his stories I've read (IMHO) so far.
What can you read after
A Collapse of Horses?
About the Author:
Brian Evenson: 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 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. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and three O. Henry Prizes, Evenson lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where he directs Brown University s Literary Arts Program.
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