A Collapse of Horses

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 GeekPraised 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.

New York Time Sunday Book Review

“Some of the stories here evoke Kafka, some Poe, some Beckett, some Roald Dahl, and one, a demonic teddy-bear chiller called 'BearHeart™,' even Stephen King, but Evenson’s deadpan style always estranges them a bit from their models: He tells his odd tales oddly, as if his mouth were dry and the words won’t come out right.”

New Yorker"Evenson's stories, small masterworks of literary horror, are elegantly tense. They operate in psychological territory, never relying on grossness or slasher silliness to convey their scariness. . . . For the Stephen King fan in the house: an author as capable, if a touch less prolific."

“Evenson’s fiction is equal parts obsessive, experimental, and violent. It can be soul-shaking.”

Publishers Weekly

“Admirers of Evenson (Windeye; Altmann’s Tongue) applaud the edge he maintains between the unexplained and the intimate. This latest collection continues to explore that line, and for how much is left obscured, an eerie emotional echo remains. . . . Evenson’s journey along the boundaries of short fiction make for an eye-opening dissection of the form.”

Chicago Review of Books

“You never realize how deep his fiction has wormed its way into your brain until hours, days, even weeks later, when you’re lying in the dark and Evenson’s images come flooding back, unbidden. A Collapse of Horses will stay with you for a long time...whether you want it to or not.”

Los Angeles Review of Books"A Collapse of Horses is a perennially dusty, dark, haunted house of atmospheric dilemmas whose plots continually reverse a reader's expectations."

“While each piece in A Collapse of Horses stands alone as a tale that combines 'literary' and 'horror' elements in novel ways that blur genre distinctions, the collection intensifies as recurring motifs flow through the various narratives, settings, and fictional psyches: bodily and mental disintegration, the ambiguities of human physicality and consciousness, and the permeable borders between self and other.”

Los Angeles ReviewEntropy, "Ultimate Summer Reading List"

“Evenson is interested in philosophy and semiotics, the impossibility of ever truly knowing or naming the world, and our fundamental, helpless dependence on what our senses tell us. . . . . [His stories] are a wonderful feat of the uncanny.”

Toronto Star"Evenson is a writer with an uncommonly dark vision, and in 2016 he figures to find his biggest audience yet.”

“This is Brian Evenson’s 12th collection, and reading it one soon becomes aware of being in the presence of a peculiar intelligence.”

something utterly Lovecraftian, but without the baroque language

“Violence is punishing but unbelievably subtle in Evenson's delicate, minimalist stories. And ultimately, there is something cosmic

GQ"This new collection, released alongside new editions of three of his older works, offers a great summation of Evenson’s strengths as a writer.”

“A master of literary horror, Evenson’s books mix literary sentences with science fiction and fantasy tropes and tie them together with a thread of uncanny dread.”

a haunting uncertainty about knowledge, about the fixedness of reality

“A Collapse of Horses, [Evenson’s] 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

The White Review, interview

“The stories that comprise A Collapse of Horses . . . venture into increasingly dark, even apocalyptic, terrain while maintaining a narrative control that owes at least as much to the experimental spirit of the Oulipo as to the usual suspects of American weird (Poe, Bowles, Burroughs).”

The Brooklyn Rail

“A Collapse of Horses is a stunning collection of disparate tales of existential terror, which could serve as a good introduction to readers who are not familiar with his work. However, allow your reviewer to warn you: once you have read Evenson, you will want to read all of Evenson; yet beware, like most addictions, it is a dangerous pursuit and one not easy to pass through unscathed.”

Strange Horizons

“There is no colour in these stories, and hardly an image. Taken separately, they can seem as cold as ice. But allowed to touch each other horribly, they burn. The collection as a whole comes as close to adding up as the world is likely to allow to those who have lost their way. Each story says what the world does to those who drift into its claws without a lie to cling to.”

Campus Circle

“One of the premier dark fiction writers working today, Brian Evenson releases a new collection of his hallucinatory stories, A Collapse of Horses. The brilliant title story reads like an Oliver Sacks case study rendered by Edgar Allan Poe. His standout novel Last Days, a labyrinthine mystery inside a cult of amputees, also gets a new reissue.”

San Diego City Beat

“While these stories have all the earmarks of Evenson's fiction with varying degrees of violence, horror and dread, A Collapse of Horses doesn't complete the picture of Evenson's career so much as spin it in a number of fascinating new directions, each more unsettling than the last.”

San Francisco Chronicle

“America’s greatest horror writer evokes the schism between perceptions and realities, and, to unsettling effect, collapses the unseen bond that so delicately bridges them.”

VICE

“Brian Evenson is one of the most consistently vital and unnerving voices in writing today. . . . No matter where you start with Evenson's work, the door is wide ajar, and once you go through it you won't be coming out.”

Electric Literature, "A Master at Work"

“A Collapse of Horses is a master class in unnerving storytelling; seventeen short narratives that range from horror to science fiction and from surrealism to noir. The variety is outstanding, the writing is superb, but what makes this collection deserving of attention is how Evenson manages to achieve a perfect balance between what is on the page and what is left out.”

Vol.1 Brooklyn"A Collapse of Horses is the first of Evenson's books I have read. Since finishing it, I have read three more, in succession.”

“Brian Evenson’s fiction can both bowl you over with its unpredictable narrative experimentation and chill you to the bone with its ability to unsettle and horrify.”

Windsor Independent

“For fans of Stephen King, Kafka, and Lovecraft, A Collapse of Horses is a delightfully terrifying collection.”

a way of slowly introducing the reader into the same medium as the characters, and indicting them in the process.”

“Weaving the act of storytelling into these terrifying stories is no small accomplishment. Evenson’s precision allows him to give his latest book multiple layers

Rue Morgue

“[Brian Evenson] happily straddles both literature and horror in an amalgam that’s rarely so powerful and convincing as in this collection.”

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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