paperback, 240 pages
Published June 11, 2019 by Coffee House Press.
A newborn’s absent face appears on the back of someone else’s head, a filmmaker goes to gruesome lengths to achieve the silence he’s after for his final scene, and a therapist begins, impossibly, to appear in a troubled patient's room late at night. In these stories of doubt, delusion, and paranoia, no belief, no claim to objectivity, is immune to the distortions of human perception. Here, self-deception is a means of justifying our most inhuman impulses―whether we know it or not.
Yet another dreadfully wonderful dark collection of stories from Brian Evenson. This is likely my favorite so far.
I've read a few single-author short story collections now, but this is one of the harder ones to review because of the wide range of... I don't wanna say 'quality' because they were all well-written from a grammatical standpoint and there was nothing wrong with any of the 22 stories, but I guess there was a great variance in how much a given story was holding my attention. There were some entries that I just sort of let wash over me indifferently, and others that were really damn good and had me gripped. So taking the collection as a whole, I think it's safe to just split the difference and acknowledge that a few stories were doing the bulk of the heavy lifting for me.
Also, was not expecting so much sci-fi going into this. The majority of the works were set in normal, contemporary settings, but every so often …
I've read a few single-author short story collections now, but this is one of the harder ones to review because of the wide range of... I don't wanna say 'quality' because they were all well-written from a grammatical standpoint and there was nothing wrong with any of the 22 stories, but I guess there was a great variance in how much a given story was holding my attention. There were some entries that I just sort of let wash over me indifferently, and others that were really damn good and had me gripped. So taking the collection as a whole, I think it's safe to just split the difference and acknowledge that a few stories were doing the bulk of the heavy lifting for me.
Also, was not expecting so much sci-fi going into this. The majority of the works were set in normal, contemporary settings, but every so often we'd be on a ship in deep space, or on a literal alien planet, and the hard genre shifts were throwing me off. Science fiction and horror are absolutely two genres that can mesh well together, but it's not my personal cup of tea. Other stories kind of fell into that zone of fiction that kind of feels like demonizing people with obvious mental conditions, which I also didn't much care for.
My favorites were "Leaking Out" (homeless guys picks the wrong abandoned building to spend the night in), "The Cardiacs" (Literally only a page of text and it was the best story in the book), "The Glistening World" (woman loses her friend while they're out bar-hopping together), and "Glasses" (old lady get a pair of reading glasses and starts seeing things that shouldn't be there).
There are a few recurring patterns in this collection. Very broadly, the further a story got from our world the better it tended to work for me.
I enjoyed "The Tower", "The Hole", "Glasses", and "Smear" quite a bit. The title story, "Shirts and Skins", and "A Disappearance" were not up my alley at all. Most of the others didn't hit me too strongly one way or the other.
And then there was "Trigger Warnings", which felt like someone wanted to write a "get off my lawn" rant after listening to Radiohead's "Fitter Happier". Worth a shock chuckle or two but what a bizarre fit.
This was kind of meh and samey. I enjoyed The Hole. Also Smear and Lord of the Vats because space horror gets me!
