Evenson’s writing career was steeped in controversy almost from the start. The 1994 publication of his debut collection Altmann’s Tongue aroused disapproval at Brigham Young University, where Evenson was teaching, despite his having included some of its stories in his application packet. He resigned from BYU the following year, eventually leaving the Church of Latter-Day Saints.
Works by Brian Evenson
Collections
- Altmann’s Tongue (1994)
- The Din of Celestial Birds: Stories (1997)
- Contagion and Other Stories (2000)
- The Wavering Knife: Stories (2004)
- Fugue State (2009)
- Wind Eye (2012)
- A Collapse of Horses (2016)
- Song for the Unraveling of the World (2019)
- The Glassy Burning Floor of Hell (2021)
- None of You Shall Be Spared (2023)
Novels
- Father of Lies(1998)
- Dark Property: An Affliction (2002)
- The Open Curtain (2006)
- Aliens: No Exit† (2008)
- Last Days (2009)
- Dead Space: Martyr† (2010)
- Dead Space: Catalyst† (2012)
- Immobility (2012)
- The Warren (2016)
Tropes associated with Brian Evenson and his work:
- Abusive Parents: Drago in “Song for the Unraveling of the World” appears at first to be just a concerned father looking for his missing daughter, but gradually emerges as one of these, leaving exactly what happened to the daughter as a troubling mystery.
- After the End: Immobility protagonist Josef Horkai is a Human Popsicle who wakes up paralyzed from the waste down to a Bad Future where some unspecified disaster has destroyed almost all life on earth.
- All Just a Dream: In both The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell and A Collapse of Horses the first story is implied to be a dream by the protagonist of the final story- not that what they wake up to is any less unpleasant.
- Ear Ache: A soldier has his severed ear reattached in “The Other Ear”, but there are complications, including his memory of how he lost it in the first place.
- Fetishized Abuser: Megan of “Shirts and Skins” leads the narrator to a macabre art exhibit that prefigures her controlling tendencies toward him. The story is kind of an even darker variant on the play The Shape of Things by Evenson’s fellow ex-Mormon Neil LaBute.
- Handicapped Badass: Kline from Last Days is a deconstruction. His self-inflicted (if reluctantly so) amputation makes him a hero to members of the self-mutilation cult he infiltrates, but he has severe difficulty living in society, much less working as a private eye.
- Humans Through Alien Eyes: “Sisters” concerns a family of non-human ghouls and their skewed reactions when learning of Halloween traditions.
- Life-or-Limb Decision: Kline from Last Days cut off his own arm to get the drop on a Serial Killer in his last case, which sets the stage for him investigating a dark sect of voluntary amputees.
- Lighter and Softer: The Brotherhood of Mutilation is a dark, Kafkaesque nightmare of a detective story where the protagonist is constantly wading through a situation he can't comprehend. Last Days, its expansion into a novel, ends with him killing most of the people who wronged him in the novella.
- Mad Artist: A film director in “Room Tone” makes a deal with a crooked realtor to shoot a horror movie in an empty house. Then the new owner arrives, and the director notices that he resembles the murder victim in the movie, starting a chain of bad news.
- No Party Like a Donner Party: The pioneer narrator of “An Accounting” becomes a messiah figure to other people on a trail and leads them first to eating a dog for sustainment and then full-on cannibalism.
- Through the Eyes of Madness/Unreliable Narrator: You have a pretty good chance of getting the former if the story is told in third person, and an excellent chance of getting the latter if there’s a first person narrator.
- Your Mime Makes It Real: A girl in “Invisible Box” has sex with a mime who draws a glass box around the two of them, and she can’t shake the feeling she’s still in that box.
