A Collapse of Horses
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
A provocative collection of literary horror stories by one of America’s most acclaimed and inventive writers whose unique prose “can be soul-shaking” (New Yorker). “Preoccupied with the uncanny, the unsettling, and the unknowable” (The Los Angeles Review), Evenson’s seventeen stories in this collection “evoke Kafka, some Poe, some Beckett, some Roald Dahl, and . . . Stephen King” (The New York Times Sunday Book Review). Whether it’s a stuffed bear’s heart that beats with the rhythm of a dead baby, or the city of Reno that keeps receding to the east no matter how far you drive, or a mine on another planet where the dust won’t stop seeping in, the astonishing stories in A Collapse of Horses range from horror to science fiction to noir and all the weird, edgy places in between. Wherever Evenson takes you in his minimalist horror, he “doesn’t shy away from blood, murder, apparitions, surrealism, dreams, torture, and weirdness, but he also refrains from letting those elements take over” (Electric Lit).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Admirers of Evenson (Windeye; Altmann's Tongue) applaud the edge he maintains between the unexplained and the intimate. This latest collection continues to explore that line, and for how much is left obscured, an eerie emotional echo remains. In the title story, a man who has suffered a head injury perceives, among other surreal developments, a pile of listless horses. Unable to tell if they are dead or alive, the man is further disturbed by a fellow he sees filling the horses' trough, as if he either hasn't yet noticed the state of the horses or has gone mad with denial. In "BearHeart," the strongest story, Lisa and Michael are expecting a baby. But after Lisa miscarries late in her pregnancy, a teddy bear equipped with a recording of what had been the baby's heartbeat haunts the couple. "Black Bark" presents two old outlaws, riding stolen horses through unforgiving terrain, wondering which one will die first. Sometimes, however, how much Evenson withholds is less successful. In "The Dust," the collection's longest story, men with Viking-sounding names, like Grimur and Orvar, work in a kind of intergalactic outpost factory, isolated and at the mercy of their machinery. When things start to go very badly for the men, their lack of backstory or context detracts from the suspense rather than adding to it. Overall, though, Evenson's journey along the boundaries of short fiction make for an eye-opening dissection of the form.
