...a celebration of weirdness ... while the collection has a surprising sense of cohesion, the variety of genres, topics, and styles prove that Evenson is one of our best living writers — regardless of genre ... The level of attention to detail present here reinforces the idea that this is a whole instead of a collection ... The beauty of Song for the Unraveling of the World is that nothing in its pages is accidental. From the order of the stories to the rhythm with which the unifying elements appear, Evenson is always in control ... a skillfully crafted, cleverly executed, and extremely entertaining collection ... Evenson has carved out a space between the weirdness of Jeff VanderMeer and the short-form brilliance of Diane Williams by writing fiction for adults that tickles the backs of our necks.
Song for the Unraveling of the World is Evenson’s latest collection, and it’s a perfect introduction to Evenson’s work for those who are looking to experience it for the first time. For longtime Evenson readers, there are also plenty of delights here, ranging in tone from the philosophical to the visceral ... All told, Song for the Unraveling of the World is a succinct exploration of Brian Evenson’s strengths as a writer: some of the concepts and images here aren’t likely to leave my head any time soon, and the evenness of his tone and precision of his language only accentuates these stories’ moods. There’s also a sense of Evenson pushing out and trying new things, keeping things interesting for those who have been reading Evenson for a while now. Evenson knows how to meticulously construct a story, but he also knows the primal terror that can come from a darkened space or something just out of view. In these stories, he demonstrates just how effective those traits can be combined.
I’ve long thought of Evenson as the kind of writer who leads you into the labyrinth, then abandons you there. I have never read a story of his that hasn’t messed with me ... Finishing this collection, I came to the conclusion that it’s better not to fight, but to give yourself over to a mind that works in alien ways.
SciFi materials turn up often in Unraveling, setting it apart not just from Lovecraft, but also from Evenson's previous work ... Insofar as the setting is new, it allows the author more room for his sense of humor. Sisters slays me in part because of its nutty misinterpretations of the mundane ... As usual, Evenson reins in his style, even in the lone piece you'd call 'experimental' ... The endings—unravelings?—reveal the same light touch ... terrific.
Horror takes root in extension, in following an idea to its unraveling conclusion. Such is the pattern set throughout these twenty-two stories that range from two to fourteen pages in length, unrelated in plot even as...specific themes and details recur to haunt the usually doomed characters ... Evenson’s refrains in this volume take the form of skin constantly shed, obsessions with tiny indistinct forms, and surfaces polished clean, 'as if licked.' These bizarre motifs take on tone and substance as you read, circling back to earlier stories while shaping what’s to come. They become uncomfortably ours, familiar and burrowing ... dread flows to fill the void that balloons from even the simplest nagging thought ... That many of these stories were previously published makes the actual form of this collection remarkable for its unified sense of unnerving anxiety. While roughly half of the stories begin in a recognizably mundane world, the most daring open on concisely realized science fiction settings ...the brutal economy and imagination of this latest batch of nightmares nevertheless join Evenson with predecessors like Crane who thrive in minimalist discomfort. What looks simple will waver and slip, trailed by so much strangeness seeping in through the cracks.
Evenson 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.
Where other horror authors tend to lush descriptions of characters, setting, and events to build a world for the reader to temporarily inhabit, the beauty of Evenson's work is that it requires so much of the reader that you become complicit in the events. This is a fine line for an author to walk, yet Evenson is able to ... Evenson walks the literary vs genre tightrope, uses minimalist prose to great effect, and has a sharp eye for application of conventions ... Song For The Unraveling Of The World, becomes more than the sum of its parts and goes from interesting literary technique into haunting stories that stick with the reader long after reading. Despite the perceived simplicity, each one of these stories is disturbing to the core and in its own unique way ... each one is a gem. This is where the real magic happens and the reason that I am constantly recommending Evenson to horror readers and always recommending him to writers of every stripe.
... puts Evenson’s staggering ventriloquism on display, incorporating elements of science fiction, horror, fantasy, translation, poetry, and myth, often within a single story ... The collection’s title story is its longest and strongest tale ... [Evenson] can even make his characters’ dreams compelling, dreams which sometimes span multiple pages, to the point where you lose track of where the dream ends and where the story returns, a trick that underscores the sense of sleeplessness underpinning the tone of Evenson’s writing ... proves Evenson’s mastery of the short story form. I would go as far as to say that Song… gives Ted Chiang’s new collection Exhalation a run for its money. The comparison is apt because, like Chiang, Evenson is often categorized as a 'genre' writer, despite the fact that his stories are often more than stories; they are philosophical meditations on what it means to be alive.
...eerie yet captivating stories ... Like its satisfying predecessors, his latest story collection is often unabashedly bizarre ... Although this isn’t for everyone, Evenson’s uncanny but accessible fiction can remind you of Edgar Allan Poe or The Twilight Zone. Readers who appreciate the unusual will find this to be an inspired, thoroughly entertaining book ... Some of Evenson’s finest stories are about everyday people who lose control in disturbing fashion. In Room Tone, a filmmaker wants to do an extra day of filming in a suburban house, but when the homeowner resists, there’s a stunning confrontation. In A Disappearance, a woman vanishes from a beach, leaving her husband and closest friend at odds, suspicious and reckless. The book’s title story, meanwhile, is a splendid work of misdirection; it features a father, his missing daughter and a series of harrowing revelations ... From certain angles, [Evenson's] fictional universes seem livable, but once you’re inside, following apace with his accursed characters, you see the landscape looks very different.
These are stories to tell in the dark for adults, ones that creep up your spine in the middle of the night, urging you to turn the light on again just one more time, lest something be watching you. Evenson’s writing would be frightening for any age demographic, but the collection’s themes tend to hit home even harder for an adult reader ... Evenson ... is not only in the business of scaring his audience―he also wants them to think. In several stories throughout Unraveling, that thought can be more frightening than the content of his writing itself ... However bizarre or improbable, Unraveling highlights the darkest corners of the human mind, those parts of our psyche that are buried deep, waiting to be coaxed out. Throughout the collection, these questions are often what enhances the existing horror narrative, coloring Evenson’s stories with an uneasy sense of reality. The unstable relationship many people have with their own identities is echoed in many of these narratives, all with an unsettling twist. Evenson is a master of weaving traditional horror tropes with an almost psychoanalytic approach to worldbuilding ...That is the brilliance of Unraveling—it does not hand over a perfectly built 'scary story,' but instead reveals the horror that already exists all around us.
... it can be difficult to assign labels to an author whose playlist seems equally comfortable with Kafka, Raymond Carver, or Cormac McCarthy on the one hand, and Lovecraft, Matheson, and Dead Space on the other ... As eclectic as these stories may be, there are enough recurrent preoccupations that the collection as a whole provides a solid overview of Evenson’s unique imagination ... Horror is the genre most allied with Evenson’s sensibility, but at the same time it would be misleading to imply that horror can contain him. If I were asked to describe the overall range of Evenson’s darkly comic imagination in one word, it would be 'uncontainable.' Sometimes the risks he takes don’t quite pay off, and sometimes they pay off in familiar ways, but often they take us into intriguing if uncomfortable spaces where we’ve never been. Evenson’s stories can’t quite be said to occupy the genres that they play with, but genres occupy the stories, and he ties them into elegant little knots.
The most effective stories in Song are those that lead us to trust the narrator ... Song’s careful prose gives his work a dry, somewhat academic tone, possibly the toll of Evenson’s years at teaching university-level creative writing. The flattened, emotionally blunted voice is effective, though. A bland acceptance of all the wrong things, married with Evenson’s mastery of detail, lulls you into the protagonist’s skewed world. Then, before you know it, the back of your neck is prickling.
Evenson lures readers into each twisted tale ... As each tale unspools and each surreal world clarifies into a malformed sort of logic, the creeps set firmly in ... Readers of literary horror will not want to miss this one.
Most of these stories are carefully calibrated exercises in ambiguity in which Evenson leaves it unclear how much of the off-kilterness exists outside of the deep-seated pathologies that motivate his characters. His work will hold great appeal for fans of subtly unnerving dark fantasy.
... equal parts Poe, Lovecraft, King, and Twilight Zone ... Although Evenson’s mimicry of gothic terrors from the past is first-rate, he also has a chameleonic ability to dart between eras and styles ... It seems that no matter where Evenson turns his attention, he conjures a remarkable sense of paranoia, anxiety, and dread. While terrors abound here, Evenson can occasionally summon some humor, too ... Evenson’s little nightmares are deftly crafted, stylistically daring, and surprisingly emotional.
Whether delving into purely psychological horror or chronicling invasions into reality by alien forces, Evenson’s precise and spare prose effortlessly creates pervasive and intimate forms of dread ... As comfortable plunging into the depths of the human psyche as he is into the cosmic abysses, Evenson continues to be one of the most talented and stylistically enthralling horror writers around.
