Spotlight on … Brian Evenson Dark Property (2002)

 

‘There is no living writer so acutely and productively aware of imprecision (or rather, the impossibility of precision) in the use of language as Evenson, no writer as interested in how hazardous a partial or uncertain understanding can be. Indeed, veteran readers will recognize the above quote as a sign of imminent danger. To expect exactitude, in observation or imitation, is to expect too much, and invite terrible risk. …

‘Evenson has become such a consistently celebrated writer of horror and speculative fiction over the last thirty-plus years (the only other name of his generation to approach his level of respect in spite of association with genre literature is Kelly Link) in large part because of his linguistic control. That control, the clear extent of it, helps us to see the separation of prose style and story substance for the contrivance that it is.

‘The term frequently placed on Evenson’s work is “minimalist”. This is fair enough. You can see his appeal on either side of the supposed divide between literary fiction and genre; in the latter case, clipped and direct prose style is a deep tradition in crime fiction especially; in the former case, minimalism evokes the empty spaces, anxiety, and ennui of postwar contemporary life.

‘To a writer like Evenson, minimalism does not necessarily connote the use of few words, but rather the right words. More than terse, Evenson’s language is tight. One gets the sense that very little, if anything, escapes his notice and consideration on the level of the line. Nothing is tossed-off or sketchy, or good enough. Evenson’s restraint implies precision.

‘Thus we might venture that Evenson, due to his control, has few if any tics, or empty repetitions of prose borne of habit, that have escaped his notice. If we entertain this notion, repetition in the text resembles something deliberate. More to the point, the potency of Evenson’s work belies the often stark simplicity of its plot and character. It’s not that nothing happens in these stories, it’s that summaries don’t seem adequate to explain their effect. Through convention’s presumed primacy of plot and character, Evenson’s efficacy seems to come from some unknown, occultic source.’ — John WM Thompson

 

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Further

Brian Evenson Website
Podcast: Brian Evenson’s Dark Property
Excerpt from ‘Dark Property’
Brian Evenson on Finding the Language of Horror
Forrest Aguirre on ‘Dark Property’
‘Laureate of Violence’
‘FUGUE STATE: How Brian Evenson upends the conventions of realism’
“Back Alleys and Hidden Corners”
‘5X5: BRIAN EVENSON’
Brian Evenson interviewed @ Bookslut
FUGUE STATE: ART FOR SALE
BRIAN EVENSON: INTERVIEW
‘The short story equivalent of when Jon Stewart says ‘BOOM!’ on The Daily Show’
Night Time Logic with Brian Evenson
‘Interview: Brian Evenson and the Weird’
‘A Sentence from “Helpful” by Brian Evenson’
Buy ‘Dark Property’

 

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Extras

Deeply Disturbing Horror: An Interview With Brian Evenson

Brian Evenson Reads from THE GLASSY, BURNING FLOOR OF HELL

&Now; Conference: Brian Evenson, 10/16/09

The Monstrous and the Terrible with Brian Evenson

 

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Interview
from Rain Taxi

 

John Madera: The first time I read Fugue State, I was riding on a late night bus to New York City. And once again I learned that it’s unwise to read terrifying stories when all the lights are out save two tiny bulbs above your head. One scary moment hit me while I was reading “Wander.” I had zoned out from fatigue and came to the point where the harried company are in the hall and see “a hole brimmed with water, and through that hole came a bluish light and heat, and looking closer one could see the shape of a blinking eye.” At that moment, I felt—in a kind of faint echo of that episode of The Twilight Zone, “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”—that if I turned to look outside my window, I would have seen that eye staring at me. This all brings me to my first question: why do you write scary stories?

Brian Evenson: The story you tell reminds me of a semester when I was in college when I was taking seven classes (all of them English courses) and working the night shift at a 24-hour taco place. Six of the seven classes met in the same room, so I’d just sit at the same desk as the classes flowed in and out around me. I was getting more sleep on the two days of the weekend than I was getting during the whole rest of the week and began genuinely to feel like a) I was going crazy (which I probably was), and b) the entire world was a hallucination. There were times, sitting in that classroom, when I felt like the desk itself was opening in front of me like a hole that I was about to fall into. Weirdly enough, all that didn’t scare me (though it’s probably good that my girlfriend at the time talked me into dropping the job). Instead, it fascinated me, and caused me to revise notions I had had about consciousness, about what it was and what it could do, and about what it had to do with me. On one level, many of my stories are attempts to investigate a consciousness that has undergone stress or trauma or collapse, because I really think that consciousness reveals things about itself in that state that it doesn’t when the armor is up and it’s protected. As a reader, I like stories that change me, that open me up in ways that I don’t expect, that worm their way through my armor and keep on working virally on me long after the story is over. I’m trying to reproduce that effect in my own fiction.

JM: Sometimes, when I reflect on how destructive our militarist, consumerist, sexist society is to most of the world, and how diminished the possibility there is for any kind of substantial change, especially when the post-industrial world may be likened to an elevator where, if one person lights up and smokes there, everyone leaves it smelling like an ashtray, I almost yearn for some kind of giant reset button, some terrible cataclysm, where almost everything is wiped away—a clean slate, a new beginning. It’s one reason why I enjoy post-apocalyptic novels, from A Canticle for Leibowitz to Dhalgren to The Road, and why I will watch any film with this theme no matter how schlocky, from Planet of the Apes to I Am Legend. This is most likely a residue of my evangelical upbringing, which was filled with stories of plagues, floods, and the like. What post-apocalyptic fiction teaches us, among other things, is that the idea that paradise ensues after the fallout is a fallacy on many levels. In Fugue State the post-apocalyptic theme serves as a backdrop for several of your stories, sometimes explicitly (“An Accounting,” “Wander,” “The Adjudicator”) and sometimes hinted at (“Desire with Digressions” and “Fugue State”). So what is it that attracts you to writing this kind of story? What stories, novels, and films in this genre have affected you deeply?

BE: It probably has something to do with my own religious background as well (Mormonism), and the way that’s become oddly fused with/complicated by an intense philosophical nihilism. I think there’s a constant struggle in me between a kind of relentless optimism and an exhilaratingly bleak worldview; in life I tend to default to the former, and in my work to the latter, and that somehow creates a very workable, albeit potentially schizophrenic, balance. But I think also it’s because my formative years in the late ’70s were a heyday for post-apocalyptic movies. There was a sense in general then, at least among my peers, that the world was ending, that the ecosystem was collapsing, that things were likely to break down completely. Then people were distracted by things like the introduction of the kiwi fruit and the frozen bagel and swoopy hair, and we stopped being people and started being consumers, and through the ’80s and a good part of the ’90s we seemed just to forget about these fears, to repress them. But those fears have started to surge back up again with a vengeance both in popular and literary culture. I think they were always present for me and have always been at the heart of my work.

Two movies that I watched when I was eleven (in 1977) have always stuck with me, though I’d guess if I went back and watched them again I’d probably think they were awful. One was Day of the Animals and the other was Damnation Alley. Around the same time I was playing Gamma World and watching the gas lines (the latter was a little earlier, when I was seven or eight, but it made a huge impression on me). Philip K. Dick was a big influence on me in terms of post-apocalyptic work as well, as were a lot of other SF writers, and I think that Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast did a lot to cement a certain worldview for me. Also David Ohle’s Motorman. More recently, I was impressed by The Road, which initially I wasn’t sure about but which worked on me for months after I finished it. But I’ve watched and read a lot of post-apocalyptic stuff over the years. Each of the stories you mention above tries to take on post-apocalyptic themes in a different way, playing with different genres and subgenres.

JM: Many of your protagonists are either trying to break down blocks in their consciousness, or they are struggling to maintain their identity, their sense of self, in the face of its fragmentation. These are psychological portraits without feeling like case studies. How do these kinds of stories evolve for you? When I read that Sindt had failed in his critical examination of Roger Craven’s work, its “concern with dislocation and possession, its insistence on postulating all human relations as a form of torture,” I thought it might have been a winking self-deprecatory jab, as it might also serve as an apt description of many of your stories in Fugue State. There are sisters’ fragmentary relationships with their parents in “Younger” and “Girls in Tents.” The narrator in “The Third Factor” finds himself “alone and adrift.” In “A Pursuit,” the paranoid, perhaps delusional, narrator admits that his own psychology is “a decidedly murky affair.” How much psychology have you studied? And where do your interests and allegiances lie? What schools of thought do you privilege over others, if any?

BE: I think my stories tend to evolve eccentrically; I never know exactly where they’re going to take me until I’m almost done with them—if I figure that out too quickly, I don’t end up finishing them. I’m very interested in the way that consciousness structures itself and also interested in the way that we, as consciousnesses (if that’s what we are), interact with the world, about what it feels like to be embodied in a particular situation. I never took a psychology class in college but have read a lot of psychiatrists and philosophers who deal with similar issues: Freud, Jung, Klein, Kristeva, Bachelard, Foucault, Ferenczi, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Deleuze and Guattari, etc. I’m also very skeptical of a lot of generally accepted notions about the structure of the mind—I’m not convinced, for instance, that there is such a thing as a subconscious, at least not in the way that Freud and others discuss it. That model leaves a lot to be desired. I find Deleuze and Guattari provocative and feel they move in a more productive direction, particularly in 1000 Plateaus. More recently I’ve been reading Thomas Metzinger, and find his models very compelling.

JM: What is the short story form for you? Do you find yourself working on them as separate entities in between novels? Do you begin stories without regard for what they are going to be until you’ve made a lot of progress within them—that is, is there a certain point when you realize, “This has the makings of a short story,” and then take it from there to completion? Or do you begin with the idea of a form?

BE: I’m always working on three or four things at once and usually have a few stories I’m working on as I’m trying to write a longer piece—a novel or novella. Some of them never get finished, and some get finished and then put into a drawer to be revised later and some actually work. I’ve got pages of notes of ideas for stories that I’ll probably never get around to writing, and which say things like “man looking for his brother so as to prove that he’s not him.” I once knew what I intended by that but no longer know. With most of these notes I no longer have any idea what I was actually thinking when I wrote them.

Sometimes a story will start from those notes or from a fleeting thought or in response to something I’m reading or listening to. Other times, I’ll simply sit down to a blank page and try a few starts at random until something clicks. Still other times, I’ll have a mood or a character name or something else in mind and I’ll try to tease something out of it. It’s a very random and organic process for me and never works in exactly the same way twice.

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Book

Brian Evenson Dark Property
Black Square Editions

‘A woman carries a dying baby across a desert waste, moving toward a fortress harboring a mysterious resurrection cult. Menaced by scavengers, she nevertheless begins to suspect that the reality within the fortress may be even more unsettling than the blasted environment outside. As she slips unobtrusively towards the city of the dead, she is pursued by a bounty hunter who cuts a bloody swath after her. On one level, Dark Property is an exploration of religious fanaticism. Although Evenson’s characters owe more to the Book of Mormon than the Koran, their frightening intensity will spark recognition in both reviewers and readers. This brooding tale is reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and J. G. Ballard’s more disturbing works of fiction.’ — BSE

 

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Excerpt

The darkness stripped back, unveiled for her eyes a dim man blocking her passage.

“What is wanted?” asked the gatekeeper.

She gangled the child toward him.

“Yes,” he said. “You carry the dead.”

“A child,” she said.

“A dead child,” he consented.

She stepped to step past. He stretched out his palm, repelled her by main force of his hand.

“What is wanted?” he asked again.

She displayed again the child.

“Yes,” said the gatekeeper. “You carry the dead. This much has been established.”

“Child,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “We have conceded as much.”

She tried to shoulder past, found the repulsant palm ever before her. She fought past, felt her body lifted, hurled back down the hall-way to strike against the gates.

Clutching her ribs, she agonized to her knees. She took up the child, rose to her feet. The gatekeeper stood serene, arms folded against his chest.

“What is wanted?” he asked.

“Admission,” she said.

“That is correct,” he said. “You may enter.”

He took the child from her, led her through a door into a sparse room. Placing the child upon a desk, he vanished.

A man at the other side of the desk motioned her to come forward. She sat, saw him turn his attention to the child. He upturned the child’s face. He pushed the limbs flat, observed the limbs to curl back. Taking a pen, he made notation upon paper.

He reached into a drawer of the desk, removed a carpet bag, dropped it onto the floor beside.

He straightened the limbs of the child, watched them crumple back.

“Dead a long while?” he asked, not taking his eyes from the child.

She shrugged. “No?” she said.

“No?” he said.

He made notation. He extirpated from the carpet bag a coil of copper wire, followed by a pipe wrench. These he placed upon the desk, cronied them with the corpse.

“No?” he said.

“Yes?” she said.

He took up the pipe wrench, hefted it in a hand. Quickly he screwed the jaws closed. With his free hand he twisted around one of the child’s arms. The upper flesh crackled, the shoulder ball rolling counter the socket. He brought the pipe wrench down to shatter the elbow. He shattered its twin, crushed the caps of both knees.

She murmured from an impulse born no less of incomprehension than of the maternal. He winced at her sounds, spoke sharply. “If you find the task unpleasant, avert your eyes,” he said. “This is no longer your child.”

He unwound the spooled wire, spread it in loops across the desk. Worrying the carpetbag, he at last forced from within a pair of wire cutters.

He severed a length of wire, sectioned it.

“There is blood on your hands?” he asked.

“No,” she said.

“Show them to me,” he said.

She held her hands to him across the desk.

He scrutined the nails, levered the palms skyward. He snorted, pushed her hands away.

“There is blood upon your hands,” he said.

He tightened a strangle of wire around the child’s forearm, ran the wire over the elbow, bound the length around the separated joint of the shoulder. He bent the wire, encouraged the arm to bend. Selecting a second wire, he forced it around the other arm. Carefully he contorted wire around knees, ankles, hips. Bending the wires, he made the corpse to stand.

Bending and unbending wires, he locomoted the child across the desk, talking to it in an odd and soothing singsong. He spread the body flat upon the desk.

She took the child up, felt the cold of the copper braces against her hands.

The deskman reached across his desk, pried her hands off the child. He pressed his ear to the chest, thumped the skull.

“All is not well for the child,” he said.

He reached across the desk, took her by the arm, pulled her up out of her chair. He pressed his ear to her upper breast, pulled her feet othe floor, pulled her hips onto the desk.

“Nor is all well for you.”

He led her down corridors past identic men. He led her through doorway, up stairway, left her alone and dim-roomed without a word. She sat upon the edge of a raised pallet, knees abutted, child cradled upon her lap. Near the pallet squattled a wheeled and metal table. Metal apparati hung forth as shadows from the walls. She dozed to and from sleep, her hands resting lightly upon the wire-bound flesh. She awoke, placed the child upon the table. Spreading her body upon the pallet, she cradled her head in the palm of her hand.

She awoke numb-hipped. She caused her pockets to extrude their last contents. Stones dropped, scattered themselves across the floor. She examined her palms in the dim, and, for all, could see nothing of blood to them. Soon, she slept.

She awoke to a squat face. In place of eyes were round spectacles opaque with light. The face moved toward her own face, a pen-light lodged between its teeth flashing her eye.

She fluttered an eyelid, found it to retain itself open despite her efforts. The blade of light flitted across her face. Gloved hands palpated a path down her flesh.

The face moved back into a man, smocked white. He spat the penlight into a palm. He regarded her askance. He pointed toward the door.

Covering her breasts, she rose to sit at the edge of the palette. She buttoned her shirt, closed her trousers.

The surgeon set a satchel upon the pallet at her side. She slid from the pallet. He tossed his penlight into the satchel.

She took up the child, slung it over an arm.

“What of the child?” she asked.

He folded the jaws of the satchel together, closed the clasp. Removing himself to the sink, he stripped ogloves as if layers of skin, discarded them. He opened the faucet, ran his red hands under the water.

“Take it from here and dump it,” he said.

“Where?” she asked.

His smile was disjointed and twisted. He shook his head. Closing the faucet, he wiped his fingers upon his smock. He approached a bin in the corner, depressed its pedal. The lid gaped, disjointed its jaw.

“Throw it in,” he said.

She shook her head.

Shrugging, he allowed the lid fall. He sprung the clasp of the satchel, broke apart the top.

He approached the table, hands outstretched, fingers splayed. He demanded she reach into his smock, slide out the penlight. He instructed her to its operation, insisted she direct the beam in accord with his desire.

He bent over the child. He probed the holes of the lesser head, lacerated the intact eye. As he scrutined the exterior skeleton of wire, he gave a queer smile.

He muddled within the satchel, removed a pair of wire cutters. He sheared through the wire, cast it onto the floor. He applied a genuclast to the knees, broke apart the joints, beating the lesser joints mobile with a fist.

He removed a cleaver, stropped it across the surface of the table. Centering the child upon the table, he aligned the head. He braced his legs, tightened his hand upon the cronge of the cleaver, split the dry body in two. The halves fell apart, as if unhinged. A storm of insects spewed out of the gut, scattering off all sides of the table, spreading themselves out across the floor. He braced his knees against the table, worked the cleaver loose, wrenched it free.

The woman stepped back, bumped against the pallet. She crawled backwards onto the pallet and over it, crouched on the far side. He regarded what was to be seen of her, birthed a horse-laugh.

He stripped the flesh off the joints, forced thin wires in through the cartilage. He renervated the wires beneath the flesh, connected the bundles from joint to joint, brought them together in a tangle which he left lying between the halves of the corpse. He patched the flesh over the joints. He tugged upon the coil of wires. Limbs moved, fingers flexed. Driving her forth from her refuge, he di-rected her to hold steady the penlight. He prodded the viscerae, evacuated the corpse. He freed the split tongue, sewed in its place a trip of crushed velvet. He pried out the halves of the windpipe, inserted a column of lead. He dug out the heart, insinuated in its cavity an apple, suturing the arteries to the wormy skin. Severing the lobes of the lungs, he blunted them in a line along the table. He inflated two balloons, forced them under the cage of ribs. He sucked the eyes out, filled the sockets with foamy spittle. He scraped out the mushed hemispherics of the brain and positioned the bundle of wires between the barren bowls of the skull. Striking the woman, he commanded her to hold steady the light. The severed genitalia she saw him slip into the pocket of his smock. He tore out the stomach, sewed in a hot water bottle. He unraveled the intestines, coiled in the belly-hole a dirty length of hemp.

He forced the two halves of the body together, stapled the split bones. He stretched the flesh over the gaps, sewed it down.

He clamped an apparatus upon the child’s chest, threw a switch. The limbs contorted, laxened. The eyes frothed. The body began to hum.

The doctor stripped the flesh off his fingers, disposed of it. He gathered his instruments, packed his satchel, left mother and son to their joy.

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** CS, Hi. Oh shit, I’m so sorry to hear that. You defogging? You okay? Yes, that sentence is in ‘Frisk’. Or I’m about 97% sure. Take very good care of yourself. ** Adem Berbic, Fujiko Nakaya, who did the fog sculpture in ‘TiHYWD’ only uses water, the purest water, so no aroma. She has a big fog sculpture at the Pinault Collection right now. Wonderful timing since it’s going up to 40 insane degrees here in the next few days. As I guess you saw. Okay, maybe I’ll approach that theater. ‘Pickpocket’! ** _Black_Acrylic, I own a fog machine, but it’s in LA, and I think it’s probably dead. You and Rod sitting in a tree … ** jay, I will hop over to read that story, you bet. I wish I had minuscule fog machines in my ears so I could properly express anger. Dude, congratulations on the job longevity and security! That’s big! I kind of wish I’d been there for that rant. But I guess google will have to do. Stay cool. ** Malik, Hi, Malik! Lovely to see you. Back when I made home haunts in my parents’ basement I had big bowls full of dry ice all over the place. It was kind of the only way to make fog way back then. Summer’s been not too shabby, but we’re heading into an historically brutal heatwave tomorrow, so the rest of summer is a little scary. Four screamo bands, cool. I’d love to go see even one. It’s been ages. Awesome thanks for your mid-year lists. I need to hear that underscores album. Everyone seems to be talking about it. ‘I Love Boosters’ is good? Good. I’ve been very curious. That Mackey book is so nice, right? And serious envy about that title. Thanks! I hope your summer keeps giving you tons of everything. xo. ** Sarah, Hi, Sarah! Yes, I love your book! I hope you’re getting major plaudits left and right. So cool to get to see you. All’s good? ** laura w, Thanks. Table top game stores, of course. There’s a great, super nerdy one over where I often am. The kind were they not only sell stuff but have dozens of tables where intense board game kids gather to set up their games and pound the tabletops. I’ll check there. Oh wow, those teeth dice are crazy great. I might have to order them even. What a perfect way to start a collection. Thank you so much for the pass along. Hm, I can’t say that I understand what ‘Rejection’ and ‘The Sluts’ have in common, but maybe you can tell me. Aircon is about to become the most important thing in the world, and Parisians still think it’s decadent, the bastards. ** HaRpEr //, Problem child, you!? Haha. Penises are too blatant or something. They stop things dead. Wallowing is like generalising. It’s hard to catch yourself when you’re doing it, but catching that saves so much wasted time and brain power. ** Caesar, Hi! I’m okay, just dreading our heatwave that starts tomorrow. I’ll check to see if Ramiro Sanchiz’s work is in English. Blake Butler has a newsletter? I need to subscribe or whatever. He’s great. Yes, people were shouting here about the France match last night. I couldn’t tell from the shouts if they won or lost. I’m putting the last touches on the script for Zac’s and my new film and still organising some last screenings of ‘RT’ before it goes to streaming and BluRay. That’s mostly it for me so far. Yes, I’ll answer your Instagram message today. Thank you. I haven’t watched ‘Heated Rivalry’. I don’t watch TV shows pretty much across the board, so I only know it was a very hot topic on social media for a while. You like it? Love and a big hug back! ** Laura, Maybe R2D2 might think those machines are cuter than you? I don’t know how tarot works, but I guess I trust my friend who did the reading. He looked really shocked and scared by that reading, said he’d never seen anything like it before. But I don’t know. I’m fine with the elevation level I’m at. I just need cold air and lots of it. ** Okay. Today I’ve spotlit one of my favorite Brian Evenson novels, and there you go. See you tomorrow.