PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksEvenson is certainly not for the faint of heart ... But in Evenson’s writing, the greatest terror comes less from the violence as it does from the instability of simply living, of following even a prescribed or predetermined path, and it still leads into the maw of hell ... On the level of language, too, Evenson injects the slightly off-key, otherworldly, and desperate nature of religious fundamentalism ... Evenson’s language, with its sense of travel from another place, time, and ideology sounds both recognizable and not; consequently, his sentences buzz. Evenson’s language often reads as if it’s been translated and that, in transit, it’s been partially body-snatched ... Evenson is like Franz Kafka meets Stephen King — Kafka because of the visceral and vulnerable way the mind flounders to make sense of crisis, the way reality slips, and the gut lyricism of rendering horror; King because, for all his concerns with the flailing mind, Evenson is also a fast-paced literary horror writer ... But Evenson takes...horror tropes and strips them of their skin, revealing the quaking mind underneath ... Dark, strange, and violent, Evenson’s work is also often funny ... In Song for the Unraveling of the World, Evenson renders the world as a place of infinite and paralyzing delusion.
