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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

"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

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, Brian Evenson unsettles us with the everyday and the extraordinary--the terror of living with the knowledge of all we cannot know.

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.

A post-human civilization of synthetic beings, fixated on the concept of children, grapples with the meaning of life... after all life ceases to exist.

This story was originally published on Tor.com on 21 June 2023. Read it for free at Tor.com

This shot story originally appeared in the anthology ParaSpheres: Extending Beyond the Spheres of Literary and Genre Fiction: Fabulist and New Wave Fabulist Stories (2006) edited by Rusty Morrison and Ken Keegan, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, December 2012. It can also be found in the anthology Best American Fantasy (2007).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Mapping a literary space uniquely his own, Evenson's CONTAGION AND OTHER STORIES pursues to a new level the crepescular and delirious exploration begun in his acclaimed and controversial ALTMANN'S TONGUE. In the O'Henry Award winning "Two Brothers," a minister breaks his leg while his sons watch then refuses to call an ambulance, remaining convinced even unto death that God will arrive to lift him up and make him whole. The self-acclaimed language specialist of "The Polygamy of Language" indiscriminately blends linguistics with murder. "Contagion" is a skewed retelling of the early history of barbed wire, which interweaves metaphysics and the Western genre. "Watson's Boy" shows a boy endlessly wandering the human equivalent of a conditioned response box while the protagonist of "By Halves" finds himself trapped in a relationship that may not exist. Throughout, Evenson's immaculate prose draws us mercilessly up to confront troubled and troubling lives that, astoundingly, are no less human than our own.

"[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.

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.

When you open your eyes things already seem to be happening without you. You don't know who you are and you don't remember where you've been. You know the world has changed, that a catastrophe has destroyed what used to exist before, but you can't remember exactly what did exist before. And you're paralyzed from the waist down apparently, but you don't remember that either.

A man claiming to be your friend tells you your services are required. Something crucial has been stolen, but what he tells you about it doesn't quite add up. You've got to get it back or something bad is going to happen. And you've got to get it back fast, so they can freeze you again before your own time runs out.

Before you know it, you're being carried through a ruined landscape on the backs of two men in hazard suits who don't seem anything like you at all, heading toward something you don't understand that may well end up being the death of you.

Welcome to the life of Josef Horkai....

Intense and profoundly unsettling, Brian Evenson’s Last Days is a down-the-rabbit-hole detective novel set in an underground religious cult.

The story follows Kline, a brutally dismembered detective forcibly recruited to solve a murder inside the cult. As Kline becomes more deeply involved with the group, he begins to realize the stakes are higher than he previously thought. Attempting to find his way through a maze of lies, threats, and misinformation, Kline discovers that his survival depends on an act of sheer will.

Last Days was first published in 2003 as a limited edition novella titled The Brotherhood of Mutilation. Its success led Evenson to expand the story into a full-length novel. In doing so, he has created a work that’s disturbing, deeply satisfying, and completely original.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Other Aliens (2016), edited by Bradford Morrow and Elizabeth Hand. It can also be found in the anthology The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017, edited by Charles Yu and John Joseph Adams.

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.

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.

Table of Contents:

• Leg - (2020) - short story
• In Dreams - short story
• Myling Kommer - (2020) - short story
• Come Up - (2017) - short story
• Palisade - (2018) - short fiction
• Curator - (2019) - short story
• To Breathe the Air - (2020) - short story
• The Barrow-Men - short story
• The Shimmering Wall - (2021) - short story
• Grauer in the Snow - (2019) - short story
• Justle - (2019) - short story
• The Devil's Hand - (2020) - short story
• Nameless Citizen - (2017) - short story
• The Coldness of His Eye - (2019) - short story
• Daylight Come - short story
• Elo Havel - (2020) - short story
• His Haunting - (2019) - short story
• Haver - (2018) - short story
• The Extrication - short story
• A Bad Patch - (2019) - short story
• Hospice - short story
• The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell - (2020) - short story

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

"A contemporary gothic tale about the apocalyptic connection between religion and violence."--Publishers Weekly

When Rudd, a troubled teenager, embarks on a school research project, he runs across the secret Mormon ritual of blood sacrifice, and its role in a 1902 murder committed by the grandson of Brigham Young. Along with his newly discovered half-brother, Rudd becomes swept up in the psychological and atavistic effects of this violent, antique ritual.

X doesn't have a name. He thought he had one--or many--but that might be the result of the failing memories of the personalities imprinted within him. Or maybe he really is called X.

He's also not as human as he believes himself to be.

But when he discovers the existence of another--above ground, outside the protection of the Warren--X must learn what it means to be human, or face the destruction of their two species.

A woman falling out of sync with the world; a king's servant hypnotized by his murderous horse; a transplanted ear with a mind of its own. The characters in these stories live as interlopers in a world shaped by mysterious disappearances and unfathomable discrepancies between the real and imagined. Brian Evenson, master of literary horror, presents his most far-ranging collection to date, exploring how humans can persist in an increasingly unreal world. Haunting, gripping, and psychologically fierce, these tales illuminate a dark and unsettling side of humanity.

Praised by Peter Straub for going "furthest out on the sheerest, least sheltered narrative precipice," Brian Evenson is the author of ten books of fiction. He 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, and the American Library Association's award for Best Horror Novel. Fugue State was named one of Time Out New York's Best Books of 2009. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and three O. Henry Prizes, including one for the title story in "Windeye," Evenson lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where he directs Brown University's Literary Arts Department.

Table of Contents:

• Windeye - (2009)
• The Second Boy - (2012)
• The Process - (2012)
• A History of the Human Voice - (2012)
• Dapplegrim - (2010)
• Angel of Death - (2012)
• The Dismal Mirror - (2009)
• Legion - (2012)
• The Moldau Case - (2012)
• The Sladen Suit - (2012)
• Hurlock's Law - (2012)
• Discrepancy - (2012)
• Knowledge - (2012)
• Baby or Doll - (2012)
• The Tunnel - (2012)
• South of the Beast - (2012)
• The Absent Eye - (2011)
• Grottor
• Bon Scott: The Choir Years - (2012)
• Tapadera - (2012)
• The Other Ear - (2012)
• They - (2012)
• The Oxygen Protocol - (2012)
• The Drownable Species - (2012)
• Anskan House - (2012)

After thirty years of cryogenic sleep, Detective Anders Kramm awakens to a changed world. The alien threat has been subdued. Company interests dominate universal trade. Terraforming is big money now, with powerful men willing to do anything to assure dominance over other worlds.

But Kramm has a secret. He knows why The Company killed twelve of its top scientists. He knows why the aliens have been let loose on the surface of a contested planet. He knows that the information he has is valuable, and that The Company will do everything it can to stop him from telling his secret to the world. Haunted by memories of the brutal murder of his family, Kramm is set adrift amid billion dollar stakes... with aliens around every corner, waiting for him to make a mistake!

Postfantasy fiction that defies definition is at the center of a groundbreaking issue edited by Bradford Morrow and Brian Evenson in the Spring 2009 edition of Conjunctions. Imagine an everyday world in which meat is grown in vats by men called collies and butchered by BattleBots while adults play Frisbee with robots. Imagine a world in which secret societies meet in private to have "soft evenings" during which they travel "psychotic highways." Imagine what might follow the opening lines of "Brain Jelly" by Stephen Wright: "Apostrophe came from a country where all the cheese was blue. The cows there ate berries the whole day long. You should see their tongues." Along with other fictions gathered in this issue, these stories begin with the premise that the unfamiliar or liminal really constitutes solid, though undeniably strange, ground on which to walk. Contributors include such veterans as Jonathan Lethem, Elizabeth Hand, Theodore Enslin, George Saunders, Peter Straub, James Morrow, China Miéville, Robert Coover, Kelly Link, Jeff VanderMeer, M. John Harrison and Ben Marcus, as well as emerging writers such as Jon Enfield, Karen Russell, Micaela Morrissette and Stephen Marche.

Table of Contents

• Brain Jelly - short fiction by Stephen Wright
• Hungerford Bridge - short story by Elizabeth Hand
• Secret Breathing Techniques - short fiction by Ben Marcus
• The Personasts: My Journeys Through Soft Evenings and Famous Secrets - short fiction by Stephen Marche
• Poiuyt! - short fiction by J. W. McCormack
• Uranus - short fiction by Joyce Carol Oates
• From The City & The City - short fiction by China Miéville
• BioticaKF - short fiction by Jon Enfield
• Feral - novelette by Julia Elliott
• Ourselves, Multiplied - short fiction by Jedediah Berry
• The Stolen Church - short story by Jonathan Carroll
• A Design History of the Icebergs and Their Applications - short fiction by Scott Geiger
• Dowsing for Shadows - short fiction by Karen Russell
• La Tête - short story by Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud
• Bigfoot and the Bodhisattva - novelette by James Morrow
• The Spirit of a Lark - short fiction by Theodore Enslin
• The Golden Rule, or, I Am Trying to Do the Right Thing - short fiction by Edie Meidav
• Disappearance and - short fiction by Stephen O'Connor
• Predecessor - short story by Jeff VanderMeer
• Flat Daddy - short fiction by Shelley Jackson
• The Next Country - short fiction by Michael J. Lee
• Dr. Eric - short fiction by Rob Walsh
• The Familiars - short story by Micaela Morrissette
• A Man of Vision - short fiction by Patrick Crerand
• The Logic of the World - short fiction by Robert Kelly