The Wavering Knife: Stories

When I read Brian Evenson's Altmann's Tongue , I said that the closest I could come to describing it was to say it was like Cormac McCarthy wrote a series of Edgar Allan Poe homages, but commented that even that didn't prepare you for the psychological damage and insanity on display. The same description could easily apply to The Wavering Knife as well, but this time there's another facet to Evenson's writing I didn't expect: his bent, dark sense of humor. I'd never go so far as to call any of the stories in The Wavering Knife outright funny, but there's a dark glint to the satire in some of the stories, such as the self-righteous Promise Keepers who meet away from women for bonding time, one traveling preacher's increasingly firm efforts to bring religion to Wal-Mart, or the perversely difficult time two gravediggers have burying a body. The stories here aren't quite as abstract and disconnected as those in Altmann; Evenson seems to have moved slightly (but not entirely) away from that tendency to strip a horrific moment of all context. Instead, here he seems preoccupied with language, something that shows up best in an effort to analyze a deeply flawed and surreal mistranslation of a travel guide, or with an artist's attempt to set up a horrific art installation. Evenson writes horror for those who like their reading literate and intelligent, and his stories end up feeling like a David Lynch film, leaving you uncomfortable even if you don't entirely grasp the meaning of it all. He's a unique talent, and when he's at the top of his game - "The Installation," "Body," "The Prophets," and especially "Virtual" are all knockouts, even in the midst of tons of great stories - his work is unsettling, intense, and profound.

Great collection of short stories. Read it straight through. Yummy stuff.

Book was in horrible condition. No way is this worth $10. Discolored pages, battered copy. Very disappointed.

Half of these stories are brutal, relentless, and cold. The others present a lighter fare. The latter and lighter group are about silly men and the dumb things they do and say -- from the Promisekeeper group that meets in a bar to the guy who tries to set up a church in Walmart, to the pair of redneck gravediggers who have so much trouble getting their corpse into a shallow hole in hard packed dirt that they chop him up, pee on him, eviscerate him, stomp on him, and eventually throw what's left of him into a ravine and pretend to cover up the grave. What happens next? The family and minister come over the hill, with the coffin he was supposed to go in, asking to "dig up" the body. These stories are smart and wry. The other half of the book, however, is priceless. Evenson's great accomplishment, his genius, lies in these other stories: "The Ex-Father," "The Intricacies of Post-Shooting Etiquette," "The Wavering Knife," "Virtual," "One Over Twelve," "The Progenitor," and my favorite, though it isn't the showiest story in the book, "House Rules." "House Rules" affected me the most, though it is quiet and drab, and the image of the velvet rope across the stairway will stick with me for sure. Maybe these stories are evolved Kafka, or maybe they're perfect scifi. This is a fiery imagination kept rigidly contained in exacting boxes, let out in discreet units, each one perfect and with a strange serenity. These stories take you in utterly, and then truly reward you, like magic tricks that really work. I can't really give you any plot nuggets or summaries for these, because they don't work except in their own context, provided by the stern, rigorous language and the limitations of the prose. They're so strange and explosive in the ideas that drive them that they need Evenson's specific containers to make them conceivable. Story after story I would finish and then say, "That was so WEIRD. And FABULOUS." Then I'd hungrily go on to the next. It's not surrealism -- everything is true within its own law. It's maybe alterealism. Whatever it is, it was enormously engaging and challenging to read and halfway through I was already thinking in my head of people I know who would love a book like this. Definitely read it. A small black rendering on a blank tablet, of something truly different, is more intriguing than a dense and colorful mural, six blocks long, of something we already know.

With this new collection from the author of the masterful ALTMANN'S TONGUE, Evenson brings his readers face to face with the same beauty and terror of his uniquely constructed universe that we've seen in CONTAGION and THE DIN OF CELESTIAL BIRDS. Only, with this book, Evenson has gone further into the emotional and phenomenological landscape of his characters, and this somehow makes his fiction even more powerful, more e/affective, more vicious. I feel that this is an improvement upon the work begun in ALTMANN'S TONGUE, that we are witnessing, with THE WAVERING KNIFE, a moment of astonishing growth. This from a writer whose talents were already quite formidable to begin with. Brian Evenson is on his way to becoming the most powerful and original voice in contemporary American fiction.

So many people focus on how morbid Evinson's writing is, but his style is what makes this worth reading. He's got a brilliant, yet subtle sense of humour which is all his own. Brautigan is the only author i know of to come close to such underhanded witticisms.