Song for the Unraveling of the World

From a modern master of the form, a new short story collection that dexterously walks the tightrope between literary fiction, sci-fi, and horror.

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.

Publication date: June 11, 2019

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 5.5 x 8.25

Page count: 240 pages

ISBN: 9781566895484

Brian Evenson is the recipient of the 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.

Winner of the 2019 Shirley Jackson Award for a single-author collection

Winner of the Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy & Speculative Fiction

Finalist for the 2019 Big Other Book Award for Fiction

A New York Times Best Horror Fiction of 2019

A Washington Post Best Horror Fiction of 2019

An NPR Best Book of 2019

An Entropy Best Book of 2019

“These stories are carefully calibrated exercises in ambiguity in which Evenson (Windeye) leaves it unclear how much of the off-kilterness exists outside of the deep-seated pathologies that motivate his characters.”

—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Missing persons, paranoia and psychosis . . . the kind of writer who leads you into the labyrinth, then abandons you there. It’s hard to believe a guy can be so frightening, so consistently.”

—The New York Times

“Evenson is one of our best living writers—regardless of genre.”

—NPR

“Enigmatic, superbly rendered slices of fear, uncertainty and paranoia.” 

—The Washington Post

“Evenson renders the world as a place of infinite and paralyzing delusion. . . . In an Evenson story, a house isn’t inescapable because of its lack of doors and windows; it’s inescapable because it was built by an impressionable mind.”

— Los Angeles Review of Books

“Brian Evenson is one of my favorite living horror writers, and this collection is him at his eerie and disquieting best.” 

—Carmen Maria Machado

“Evenson is our most impressive explorer of the cracks in things that let in not the light, as Leonard Cohen would have it, but fever, chaos, and darkness.”

—Vulture

"[A] collection of short stories that deal with art, paranoia and the dark urges that haunt even the most normal people."

—The Los Angeles Times

“[Brian Evenson's] literary horror fiction is just too good, too immersive, and too alien for a mere mortal.”

—The A. V. Club

“[Evenson’s] latest collection offers readers a fantastic overview of his strengths as a writer, from tales of bizarre obsessions to forays into nightmarish bodies and worlds.”

—Vol. 1 Brooklyn

“Evenson recalls Poe, as he finds the most frightening way to open another box of horrors.”

—The Brooklyn Rail

“To read Evenson is to be privy to a precise, vivid, brilliant unpicking of the everyday—and its others.”

—China Miéville

“Song for the Unraveling of the World is a map of our paranoia- and anxiety-riddled, existentially challenged, pre-apocalyptic times.”

—Paul Tremblay