“Some of the stories here evoke Kafka, some Poe, some Beckett, some Roald Dahl, and one, a demonic teddy-bear chiller called ‘BearHeart™,’ even Stephen King, but Evenson’s deadpan style always estranges them a bit from their models: He tells his odd tales oddly, as if his mouth were dry and the words won’t come out right.”
—The New York Times Sunday Book Review
“Evenson’s fiction is equal parts obsessive, experimental, and violent. It can be soul-shaking.”
—The New Yorker
“You never realize how deep his fiction has wormed its way into your brain until hours, days, even weeks later, when you’re lying in the dark and Evenson’s images come flooding back, unbidden. A Collapse of Horses will stay with you for a long time . . . whether you want it to or not.”
—Chicago Review of Books
“The collection intensifies as recurring motifs flow through the various narratives, settings, and fictional psyches: bodily and mental disintegration, the ambiguities of human physicality and consciousness, and the permeable borders between self and other.”
—Los Angeles Review of Books
“This is Brian Evenson’s 12th collection, and reading it one soon becomes aware of being in the presence of a peculiar intelligence.”
—The Toronto Star
“Evenson is a writer with an uncommonly dark vision, and in 2016 he figures to find his biggest audience yet.”
—The Star Tribune
“Beneath the slippery, often abstruse plots lies a vast gulf of nothingness, in the purest and most unsettling sense of the word.”
—NPR
“[Evenson is] a master of literary horror”
—GQ
“Allow your reviewer to warn you: once you have read Evenson, you will want to read all of Evenson; yet beware, like most addictions, it is a dangerous pursuit and one not easy to pass through unscathed.”
—The Brooklyn Rail
“Each story says what the world does to those who drift into its claws without a lie to cling to.”
—Strange Horizons
“America’s greatest horror writer evokes the schism between perceptions and realities, and, to unsettling effect, collapses the unseen bond that so delicately bridges them.”
—The San Francisco Chronicle
“Brian Evenson is one of the most consistently vital and unnerving voices in writing today.”
—VICE
“Brian Evenson’s fiction can both bowl you over with its unpredictable narrative experimentation and chill you to the bone with its ability to unsettle and horrify.”
—Vol. 1 Brooklyn
“While they run the gamut of genres, these stories all lie in the same orbit of dark gravity: a field of dust, blood, head trauma, inert flesh, semicorporeal stuff and fear–mainly the terror of what we’re capable of.”
—The Rumpus
“[Brian Evenson] happily straddles both literature and horror in an amalgam that’s rarely so powerful and convincing as in this collection.”
—Rue Morgue
