![]() Who can say? The world is monstrous, is made that way, and in the end consumes us all.”Terror through the eyes of the young is especially harrowing, and Evenson commandingly quarries the rich material of childhood fears. These are disturbing stories where dissociative states are the norm, and where, as one of Evenson’s troubled characters reflects, “Anything can happen: anything. These are stories about childhood terrors and fragmented families, about mental breakdowns and post-apocalyptic upheavals, about dissolution, devolution, and paralysis. ![]() ![]() In these strange stories, Evenson expertly navigates through the mind’s dark interstices, the gnarling strands of the troubled consciousness. And they certainly wouldn’t err in choosing any of the stories in Brian Evenson’s newest collection of short stories.įugue State is brimming with disaffected wanderers, paranoids, megalomaniacs, amnesiacs, frightened children, nameless ciphers, and, in one story, cannibals. ![]() Perhaps Slate, like most anthologies of classic short stories, just needs to broaden their scope. While the discussion was innocuous enough, what mainly came to my mind while listening was how many short stories get overshadowed by the few usual suspects. By Brian EvensonCoffee House Press, 2009 Slate recently broadcast a discussion of Cheever’s “The Swimmer” and “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” two admittedly great, but over-familiar, over-analyzed, over-anthologized short stories. ![]()
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