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.

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.

At the urging of his wife, Provost Fochs reluctantly agrees to see a therapist, Dr. Feshtig. Through the therapist's detailed notes, correspondence from the church, and the provost himself, the provost's sickness emerges and the reader is drawn into the disturbing inner workings of a violent pedophile.The provost relays his crimes in excruciating detail. 'God told me that where evil made its mark, good must follow, burning evil out and purifying the body.' Fochs describes a dream in which he sodomizes two boys from the parish in an effort to exorcise their sins. Soon thereafter, two boys come forward accusing Fochs of that very deed. In another dream he strangles and dismembers a young girl in the woods near his house, where a child from his parish is later found. As the provost's dreams are discovered to be reality and accusations against him are made public, the church is forced to respond. In an effort to protect one of its own, and, in turn, to protect itself, the Committee for the Strengthening of the church demands that Dr. Feshtig turn over his notes about Provost Fochs. This marks the beginning of the church's all-out effort to cover up for the provost -- and launches the race to the novel's final revelation of whether good, in the form of the law, or evil, in the hands of the provost (and by association the church), will prevail. Brian Evenson holds the reader to the page until the novel's fateful end. En route, he questions whether obedience to God justifies taking every possible liberty, right or wrong. And he brings to light how an institution supposed to be under divine guidance can be as eager as its worldly counterpart to soil its hands in the furthering of the cause of supposed righteousness.

“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.