Fugue State »

Praised by Peter Straub for going "furthest out on the sheerest, least sheltered narrative precipice," Brian Evenson is the author of eight previous books of fiction, including the Edgar Award-nominated novel The Open Curtain and the International Horror Guild Award-winning collection, The Wavering Knife. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island where he directs Brown University's Literary Arts Program. Zak Sally is the author of the graphic novel, Recidivist, nominated for two Eisner Awards and named one of SPIN magazine's "favorite things." He is also the author of Fantagraphic Books's Sammy the Mouse series, the former bassist of the band Low, and the publisher of La Mano press in Minneapolis.

Nineteen chilling tales of the terror that lurks within.

The Barnes & Noble Review

Take as your foundation stones the young and brash Ian McEwan who wrote that macabre classic, The Cement Garden. Add a superstructure of Guy de Maupassant and Franz Kafka. Roof the whole edifice with Rod Serling and paint the dwelling with Harlan Ellison day-glo. Success! You've just built yourself the lurid, stylish, gothpunk haunted house that we call Brian Evenson. Evenson's hypnotic collection Fugue State features a troupe of obsessive characters trapped in fiendish neuro-labyrinths of their own devising -- or in blandly malign and implacably insane bureaucratic mazes. But far from succumbing meekly to these traps, Evenson's protagonists exhibit immense and quintessentially human energies: they may ultimately go down to defeat, but they do so without granting easy victories to their oppressors -- even if the tormentor proves to be one's own dark doppelgänger. Like Kafka's stories, Evenson's conceal a droll sardonicism beneath each moment of horror. In "Pursuit," the haunted narrator finds himself stalked by his spectral ex-wives and thinks, "A man might be capable of standing up to one ex-wife, but two ex-wives is something no ex-husband wants to consider.." "Invisible Box" opens with this sentence: "In retrospect, it was easy for her to see that it had been a mistake to have sex with a mime." "There is, in every event, whether lived or told, always a hole or a gap, often more than one. If we allow ourselves to get caught in it, we find it opening onto a void that, once we have slipped into it, we can never escape." So observes the narrator of "Desire with Digressions." Evenson specializes in diving with mordant glee down such holes. --Paul DiFilippo

Younger 1

A Pursuit 10

Mudder Tongue 23

An Accounting 35

Desire with Digressions 46

Dread 53

Girls in Tents 60

Wander 68

In the Greenhouse 74

Ninety Over Ninety 84

Invisible Box 109

The Third Factor 113

Bauer in the Tyrol 128

Helpful 134

Life Without Father 139

Alfons Kuylers 148

Fugue State 161

Traub in the City 191

The Adjudicator 193