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These stories represent the early work of Brian Evenson, a writer of astonishing power. He has been compared to Poe, to Kafka, to other great writers whose vision was bleak and dark, and whose characters act out of appalling despair. Evenson is worth such comparison, but his work is different from these. His worlds are without any emotion at all. Neither cruelty nor pity, happiness nor misery, compassion nor suffering, hope nor despair exist in his tales of inexorable and inhuman logic. They are written too in a faultlessly efficient prose, so that we see these strange worlds in the clearest and coldest of lights. And, paradoxically, we become aware of life without a purpose, of laws without sense, of victims who do not know they are victimised and aggressors who act without aim or malice. Evenson is a moralist, telling us that our very humanity is at risk, and that we must defend it.
Leslie Norris, winner of the Katherine Mansfield Triennial International Award |
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Seventeen surreal and magic realist short stories set in South America. Number sixteen in the Wordcraft Speculative Writers Series.
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