Stories by Brian Evenson

April 30, 2012 • 5.9 x 8.9 • 176 pages • 978-1-56689-298-8

Cormac McCarthy meets The Twilight Zone. A modern-day Hawthorne, Evenson is a writer people will claim they discovered early.

A woman falling out of sync with the world, a king’s servant hypnotized by his murderous horse, a transplanted ear with a mind of its own—the characters in these stories live as interlopers in a world shaped by mysterious disappearances and unfathomable discrepancies between the real and imagined. Evenson, master of literary horror, presents his most far-ranging collection to date, exploring how humans struggle to persist in an increasingly unreal world. Haunting, gripping, and psychologically fierce, these tales illuminate a dark and unsettling side of humanity.

About the Author

Praised by Peter Straub for going “furthest out on the sheerest, least sheltered narrative precipice,” Brian Evenson is the recipient of three O. Henry Prizes and has been a finalist for the Edgar Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the World Fantasy Award. He is also the winner of the International Horror Guild Award and the American Library Association’s award for Best Horror Novel, and his work has been named in Time Out New York’s top books.

Thanks to a 2013 ADA Access Improvement Grant administered by VSA Minnesota for the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, this title is also formatted for screen readers which make text accessible to the blind and visually impaired. To purchase this title for use with a screen reader please call (612) 338-0125 or email us at info@coffeehousepress.org.

Reviews

Time Out New York, “Best (and worst) books of 2012”

“Both smartly referential and admirably distinct in voice. . . . These are stories of madness told from the inside, and they often read like dreams.” —Publishers Weekly

“Evenson’s thrillingly unnerving books have won awards for mystery, horror, and literary fiction; this is work that’s scary on a deep level.” —Reader’s Digest

“The fact that Evenson can move from parody to paranoia and humor to horror in the span of three paragraphs is a testament to his ability as a storyteller, one that can make us laugh and shudder, moving with the same kind of erratic schizophrenia as many of his own characters.” —Brooklyn Rail

“For those whose imaginations constantly hunger for genuine nourishment, Brian Evenson’s Windeye is a feast. . . . Windeye delivers a complex and varied collection filled with contrasting flavors. Ranging from feudal to post-apocalyptic, it contains some of the best uncanny and horror writing to come out of New England since Stephen King published The Standin 1978.” —ForeWord

“In the 25 stories collected in Windeye,Evenson shows himself to be an imaginative writer first and foremost. . . . Imagine Beckett’s Murphy or Molloy lost, walking around in a Poe tale, then read these stories to find out why Jonathan Lethem calls Evenson ‘one of the treasures of American story writing.’” —Shelf Awareness

“All the stories in this collection are hard-edged, tinged with emotional or physical violence, and capped by shock or outright horror. Characterized by building suspense and dread, these tales often have a folkloric feel far removed from the commonplace.” —Booklist

“Brian Evenson writes profoundly about the prisonhouse of language precisely because he has made that place his home.” —Open Letters Monthly

“I’m pulled into this great, unresolved tension that becomes the general atmosphere in which the events of the stories take place. Which is horrifying. And delightfully so.” —Black Balloon Publishing

“One senses that Evenson drafted these stories as fuller narratives, then stripped away their surest details until only the most fragile threads were tying their events together, and anchoring them to anything fixed. The result is fiction that, for all its seeming insubstantiality, is weighty, solid, and provocative.” —Locus Magazine

“A modern master of the weird tale, Brian Evenson is also one of the genre’s most experimental. Windeye, his latest story collection, does what all good horror aspires to: reflect the tenor and fears of a given period.” —Campus Circle

“With his latest short fiction collection Windeye, Brian Evenson once again proves himself a master at creating suspenseful, literary horror.” —Largehearted Boy

“The horror of Windeye surfaces as characters are kept in endless trepidation about the evil hiding in the basement, never daring or able to grab a flashlight and go check it out for themselves.” —New Orleans Review

“Brian Evenson may be the king of genre-bending, slipstream fiction. For years now he has taken the best of genre fiction—the tension and terror or horror, the illusion and mystery of noir—and paired it with the elevated language and insightful focus of literary fiction, to write some of the most compelling stories out there.” —Emerging Writers Network

“Laughter can be an effective tool of the horror writer, and Evenson is its finest practitioner.”—Time Out Chicago

“Brian Evenson is one of the treasures of American story writing, a true successor both to the generation of Coover, Barthelme, Hawkes and Co., but also to Edgar Allan Poe.”—Jonathan Lethem

“No one—and I mean no one—is better at excavating the strangeness of our everyday lives.” —Andrew Ervin