In “The Punish,” two childhood friends reunite as adults to resume a dangerous-and perhaps deadly-game. “Past Reno,” for instance, follows a young man on a road-trip back to Utah to settle the estate of his estranged father, a fastidious and brutal rancher whose inheritance may be more of a curse. Some of these moments are contained within a particular narrative, often experienced via the protagonist himself. Moreover, he foregrounds moments of repetition, revisitation, and reiteration throughout the collection, triggering a sense of déjà vu for new and old readers alike. At once prospective and retrospective, A Collapse of Horses serves equally well as an introduction to his work and a reinvigoration of it.Įvenson not only echoes themes from his earlier work, but also references a number of other fictions, including William Godwin’s Lives of the Necromancers (1834) and the 1981 film Outland. It is fitting, then, that Coffee House Press’s publication of A Collapse of Horses coincides with the rerelease of three of his earlier novels- Father of Lies (1998), The Open Curtain (2006), and Last Days (2009). Indeed, the collection finds Evenson in his element, framing broad questions about truth, authority, phenomenology, and aesthetic form within otherwise local conflicts. None of this, of course, will be new to fans of Evenson’s work, which has pushed generic boundaries and forged its own brand of literary horror for decades. The true horror of the collection ultimately stands outside of any one story, any one character-and in doing so implicates the reader, above all. Despite this eclecticism, the stories cohere, building a vague but contagious sense of dread. Yet it also delves into science fiction, western, mystery, domestic drama, philosophy, religion, and metafiction. Certainly, the collection is not without its ghosts, its psychoses, its carnage. In fact, horror takes so many forms in Evenson’s stories that the collection paradoxically defies the horror genre, at least in the narrowest sense of that term. It grows amidst bureaucracy and violence, loss and illness, denial and ignorance. It emerges in the isolation of a cell, on the operating room table, at a seaside hotel, and in the nursery of a stillborn child. In Brian Evenson’s newest short story collection, A Collapse of Horses, it is at turns a glowing apparition, a suffocating dust, a juvenile game, and an unnerving smile.

A collapse of horses