Monday's Margins: A review of another Brian Evenson story.

Ed. note: Blake Butler has been reviewing stories from Brian Evenson's forthcoming story collection Fugue State (Coffee House Press, July) at his website. He agreed to let us share two of them with you here. This review is for the story "Dread."

‘Dread’ - the fifth story in the collection - is immediately different than any of the other stories thus far in this book, in that it is fully illustrated, the text and narration used to direct a black and white cartoon, drawn by artist Zak Sally, whose art also accompanies each of Fugue State’s other stories in small head plates depicting minor cavities from each text. The art adds a wonderful deepening to what is essentially a simple, if quite dreadful reckoning, much more in the mode of Edward Gorey or Poe, in contrast to the more conceptual and language-fixed terrains we have been through in the text so far. The thing about ‘Dread’ that most struck me, beyond its art, was the reflection of the matter of the story onto the act of the reading of the book itself. The piece begins, writ on pure black drop, inlaid with the story’s title and a small depiction of an open book, “I’d read once, in what book I no longer recall, a phrase that for no apparent reason came to haunt me.” We are shown the phrase on the next page, amid more abstract images of textures and webs, which as the story continues to wind from there, building as with the earlier ‘Mudder Tongue’ in a series of medical escalations, mirrored in Sally’s imagery by more and more direct images of the narrator’s surroundings, and his body. The result, as might be expected, is quite haunting for its own direct propulsion, the narrator’s inward spiral, spiraling out, but also, again, for that introductory claim that puts the reader in the mind of reading, as if from a book within a book. The rest of the story’s execution, then, takes places within the confines of that embedding, which, when applied to the reader’s own act of reading, in some way replicates that strain inflicted on the narrator as a potential fate also in Fugue State’s reader, you. As you too do read that sentence, do you not? And it is there, stuck in you doubly, given its textual terrain. Smartly, Evenson, even in his giving of the sacred sentence for the purpose of storytelling, comments: “Its original context, what I could recall of it, as nothing to incite any particular feeling whatsoever.” The benign made volatile, and eating, then, so that even in your understanding of the injection, you are left with a kind of residue that insists itself, however far along. In some hands, such a perhaps “meta” device could be overworked or done wrong, but here it is only something taken away if you ask it: a hidden door. Ah, yes. Another door in all these doors here. This Fugue State is becoming quite a little nasty box, if quite delicious, and infecting.

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Blake Butler is the author of EVER (Calamari Press, 2009) and Scorch Atlas (forthcoming from Featherproof Books). His work has been published in Ninth Letter, Fence, Unsaid, New York Tyrant, Willow Springs, etc. He lives in Atlanta. To read his other reviews of each story in Fugue State, visit his blog.

Monday's Margins: A review of a Brian Evenson story.

Ed. note: Blake Butler has been reviewing stories from Brian Evenson's forthcoming story collection Fugue State (Coffee House Press, July) at his website. He agreed to let us share two of them with you here. This review is for the story "Invisible Box."  Another story will be reviewed next Monday.

At four pages, this is the shortest text in the collection, butted up against the second longest, ‘Ninety Over Ninety.’ It is compelling, amongst a variety of reasons, in that it manages to beautifully meld Evenson’s two most primary modes: that of the cerebral noir, and that of the grotesque humor, a juncture point between the two that successfully serves as a re-transition toward the emphasis of the first half of the book.  

‘Invisible Box,’ then, coming from the previous story’s bent toward the latter mode, opens with the sentence: “In retrospect, it was easy for her to see it had been a mistake to have sex with a mime.” Clearly Evenson’s bleak guffaw gloves are on again, and hilariously, though quickly we find that this story is not meant to stay seated in the realm from which it comes.  

The humor, amazing in its small punches of what-the-fuck (the mime is described as “…naked save for his face paint and beret and white gloves.”), quickly reroutes itself to more of the internal existential of Evenson’s other mode - a mode which, herein, again works to blur and disintegrate at the protagonist’s consciousness and aura, drawing her into a pattern of awful loops. Like others in book before her, she finds herself caught in a momentary small gesture that continues to haunt her (the mime’s inexplicable miming during sex that they are in an invisible box), opening another door (by closing in).  

In four pages, then, Evenson shifts the entire trajectory of the novel back toward where it began, as if on a new leg of the same loop, around its central void.  

Also important here is how the protagonist, as she continues to be affected by the haunting presence, losing her sleep, she begins “thinking with two different parts of her head at once.” This is a common element to many of Evenson’s psychically fucked presences - people operating on two (or more) modes at once, if often so far below their own awareness that they have no idea (or seem not to). The skewing therein, which leaves, in this case, the protagonist in an irreducible quandary that even the author can not deign to resolve, is also a great source of the terror and disruption that makes so many of his characters as memorable (and perhaps identifiable) as they are even in the face of their own lack of commonality with the reader.  

That Evenson can, in such often cold and sickened twists of phrase, connect us to the blackest and most buried sections of our understanding of ourselves is yet another of his great gifts, and another reason why he is one who will be remembered in the manner of the sublime.  

Another note about his endings, also: ‘the twist,’ as in: a surprising moment that seems to change the whole landscape of a story abruptly, has been a much maligned thing in the world of fiction. Too often it seems contrived and with a specific want for direction in mind. Evenson’s shifts, though, (I can not call them twists, as to do so would be to demote them to that ill state) - they work because they mostly do not attempt to change the flow of the story to somewhere outside, but in. The funneling of the energy of the story onto itself, as here, where the doors are left wide open, results not in an obviously contrived or bent up method for the new, but instead a kind of mirror affect, a door - like holding the story up to its own reflective face and causing the replication of the strange surfaces there embedded to redouble again and again, becoming more.

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Blake Butler is the author of EVER (Calamari Press, 2009) and Scorch Atlas (forthcoming from Featherproof Books). His work has been published in Ninth Letter, Fence, Unsaid, New York Tyrant, Willow Springs, etc. He lives in Atlanta. To read his other reviews of each story in Fugue State, visit his blog.