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[title]By Brian Evenson. Coffee House Press, $16.
Fairly or unfairly, the horror label carries heavy connotations of amateurishness and genre hackdom. It would be a great disservice to stuff Brian Evenson into this particular zombie pigeonhole. Nevertheless, each of the stories in his latest collection, Windeye, is imbued with such disorienting menace that it’s hard to approach the book otherwise. Demon horses, sentient, limb-collecting robots and disappearing siblings all haunt these pages. Most of the stories are brief, but Evenson doesn’t require much space to reload so he can splatter the walls of our psyche with fresh terror.
Pseudoreality prevails in “The Drownable Species,” a story about a man looking for a brother whose existence is doubtful. Unnamed interlocutors question the protagonist’s judgment regarding his potentially fictive sibling and he’s quickly pulled into a Kafkaesque vortex of murder. He’s fortunate, though, compared with a boy named Bernt in “Grottor.” When his father dies and his mother is committed to an insane asylum, Bernt is sent to live with his grandmother, whom he has never met. She’s not exactly the friendly, mothball-scented Werther’s Original type—things get dark fast. But like most of Evenson’s characters, Bernt is unable to extricate himself.
A previous collection by the author is called Fugue State, and that sense of disassociation applies to most of the characters in Windeye, too. Evenson creates a new mythology within the first few paragraphs of each story, upending conventional ideas about how the world works. (In these tales, two plus two almost never equals four.) There are ancient, inexplicable evils lurking in Windeye’s abyss; Evenson reports this twisted madness with a disturbingly matter-of-fact clarity and repose, like a crack journalist calmly filing stories from hell.