Post-Fear Horror
Brian Evenson belatedly considered.
Note: This piece is posted at a friend’s suggestion. It is a review of a 2021 collection of Brian Evenson stories written for a print publication but which got sucked into a vortex created by an editor’s departure. I post it as it was filed. I don’t count myself among the cult of critics and writers with a more pronounced intensity of understanding of Evenson’s work (I first encountered him in Maggie Nelson’s excellent The Art of Cruelty) so this may read very schematically for the familiarized. But I liked the book and it seems seasonally fitting. Take it for what it’s worth.
In “Curator,” one of the stories collected in Brian Evenson’s The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell, a manmade toxic cloud roams across the planet, stripping “the flesh off any creature, living or dead.” Having killed most of the human population, those that remain are escaping into space, while leaving behind “archivists” to “preserve a record of humanity in the face of its imminent extinction, so that whoever or whatever discovered the records might, through careful study, come to understand what humanity had been.”
The archivist of the story gets a different idea about her task. “Earth was, so the archivist increasingly felt, the place where humans had done their best to destroy themselves. … Here is how monstrous humans are, she felt the record should say. Humans are what they did to this world, their home. Here is why, once humans are extinct, they should never be brought back to life.”
She sets about destroying all the DNA samples left with her and any photographic images of peace, leaving only images of war: “mutilated Civil War dead fallen on the field of battle, a mushroom cloud, the firebombing of Dresden. Smoke billowing from factory chimneys. A huge pile of dead passenger pigeons, tens of thousands of them, a man standing atop the heap. … The dark face of a boy ravaged by hunger, a dying gaunt polar bear on a rapidly melting chunk of ice, children in cages, a wall of skulls …,“ and so on. The archivist has become a curator, a final authority on what her species stood for; and when she is done, the only sensible thing to do is to open the hatch of the bunker and let the cloud do what we had designed it to do. A Canticle for Leibowitz this is not.
The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell is comprised of 22 stories that, while various in terms of narrative devices and tropes, are all more or less presented in this way. You can say that they are double-layered. The topside theme being the strange phenomena and worlds Evenson creates; the underside theme being how the human (or humanoid) characters react to them or live within them—often they do so badly and to the point that the topside theme becomes overshadowed.
Fabulist speculative fiction in which Man is the true monster is not new. Indeed, despite America’s perceived optimism, its citizens have never refused an opportunity to imbibe dark narrative moralism when presented to them, as if it was a guilty pleasure, the only real one they have left. It is only a matter of how that moralism contours itself to the contemporary attitudes and sources of anxiety.
Anxiety is an appropriate term in this case. That and other mid-level emotions (dread, annoyance) are found more readily in his characters’ responses to what they see than straightforward fear. “Myling Kommer” and “His Haunting” are less about the entities that follow their characters and still less about the multigenerational familial baggage that passes them on than they are about how the characters rationalize them or put them out of their minds. A man in “A Bad Patch” wears his dead wife’s leggings and housedresses—“which, by now, I’d begun to think of as my housedresses”—rather than see a doctor to deal with abdominal swelling, which turns out to be a gestating creature. “The Devil’s Hand,” perhaps the most conventional story (having a twist-ending and borrowing the finger-chopping high-stakes of Roald Dahl’s “Man from the South”), is more about the tedious hazards of mass transit. In “Come Up,” a woman disappears into a lake, leaving her philandering husband to worry if he’ll be accused of her murder.
Evenson’s stories depict what might be called “post-fear” horror, in which otherworldly phenomena that once sought to terrify is now more akin to bad weather. Where fear does appear, it is mostly as an emanation, like a gaseous byproduct, or something that happens to someone else. In “Evo Havel,” a dystopian society dispenses with its elderly population by leaving them in a forest to “commune with nature,” which, they discover, means being mauled by a monstrous “amalgam of dead forest and city refuse.” When the titular narrator, one of the “delegates” in charge of this custom, gets dispensed himself, he is ever the stoic. “I could hear the others shouting and weeping around me. I did my best to block this out. … Here I am, I thought, there is nothing I can do about it. I will soon be dead. There is no point in being afraid.” But the monster spares him for no clear reason and he returns to the city “transformed,” a barely visible outsider. “I understand better with each passing day that this is no longer the place for me, that I do not belong. The forest beckons. I belong to it now.”
Evenson finds comedy in resistance. A man tries to escape a mass grave made by an alien invader in “The Barrow-Men.” When he is caught and “dangling from the forelimb of the barrow-man” he claims he is a ghost. So the barrow-men dig him his own grave:
Ghost, the neck-box said, please hold still.
“But you’re burying me,” said Arnar.
Said the neck-box, We are putting you to rest.
Another shower of dirt, and he was buried up to his chest. “It will kill me!” he said.
It cannot, the neck-box explained. You are already dead. The barrow-man reached out and lightly tapped his forehead. We are honored to participate in this ritual of yours, this burial. We are honored to help you rest.
Evenson’s prose sticks consistently to a deadpan that echoes the drolly sinister timbre perfected by Ambrose Bierce. “Perhaps if I were to remove your gag you would have questions for me,” ponders the narrator of “The Extrication” to his silent captive. “Perhaps, instead, you would just shriek and scream.”
But the screams in the past have been too shrill to be anything but a distraction, and the questions asked are always the wrong ones. The silence I find even worse. Whatever you choose to do, it will only make me think less of you.
But where Bierce was a misanthropic author, it may be better to say that Evenson is an author whose subject is misanthropy. The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell is made up of characters who are plainly unhappy in a world that can’t possibly get any weirder. And if it does, then so what? In other words, it reflects a decent swath of 2021’s reading public.
I was almost ready to take a story like “Curator” at face-value. Even if it complements the antiheroic nihilism that flourishes in most of our prestige entertainment and discourse, its nihilism feels doubled-edged. We’ve long ago established the hubris of our world-destructive capabilities. That the only sensible rebuttal to cynical self-immolation is merely to echo that hubris, not to correct it. It recalls the same dark humanist message of The Twilight Zone, itself buoyed by short story writers, in which a strange universe could not compete against a psychologically and morally stubborn humanity.