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 Geek
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 provocative collection of literary horror stories by one of America's most acclaimed and inventive writers whose unique prose "can be soul-shaking" (New Yorker). "Preoccupied with the uncanny, the unsettling, and the unknowable" (The Los Angeles Review), Evenson's seventeen stories in this collection "evoke Kafka, some Poe, some Beckett, some Roald Dahl, and . . . Stephen King" (The New York Times Sunday Book Review). Whether it's a stuffed bear's heart that beats with the rhythm of a dead baby, or the city of Reno that keeps receding to the east no matter how far you drive, or a mine on another planet where the dust won't stop seeping in, the astonishing stories in A Collapse of Horses range from horror to science fiction to noir and all the weird, edgy places in between. Wherever Evenson takes you in his minimalist horror, he "doesn't shy away from blood, murder, apparitions, surrealism, dreams, torture, and weirdness, but he also refrains from letting those elements take over" (Electric Lit).