Windeye
Stories
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Haunting, gripping, and psychologically fierce tales that illuminate an unsettling side of humanity from “one of the treasures of American story writing” (Jonathan Lethem). Featuring the O. Henry Prize–winning short story “Windeye,” this collection of Brian Evenson’s masterful stories “involve impossible scenarios and alternative realities” that are “always surprising” (Bookforum). A woman falling out of sync with the world; a king’s servant hypnotized by his murderous horse; a transplanted ear with a mind of its own—the characters in these twenty-five stories live as interlopers in a world shaped by mysterious disappearances and unfathomable discrepancies between the real and imagined, revealing the breadth and depth of Evenson’s uncanny vision.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Both smartly referential and admirably distinct in voice, this collection of literary horror stories is also plagued by unevenness. The shades of Poe, Lovecraft, and the brothers Grimm are palpable, inflecting stories like "Dapplegrim," about a boy and the supernaturally powerful horse he inherits, or "Tapadera," a gruesomely literal "Tell-Tale Heart." Chilling imagery from the mysterious, possibly malevolent house in the title story to the pagan cave world of "Grottor" bores under the skin and stays there. These are stories of madness told from the inside, and they often read like dreams; logic and time dissolve as the world distorts and narrows. The collection's distracting inconsistency is forgivable, maybe even preferable, when it brings shifts in tone, from gothic to Hitchcockian, or fairy-tale to ghost story. But there are too often bewildering leaps and too many stories of lesser quality, such as the baffling "Bon Scott: The Choir Years," in which a music journalist discovers the AC/DC singer's Mormon leanings.
