PHANTOM LIMB, Last Days #2...back to teaching us needed lessons

PHANTOM LIMB (Last Days #2)
BRIAN EVENSON
Coffee House Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.00 all editions, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: After destroying the headquarters of an underground amputation cult, a burned and battered Kline finds himself in a holding cell. When he enlists the help of an ex-cop to commute his prison sentence, Kline inadvertently tangles with a schism of the very cult he sought to destroy. Can Kline investigate the sect’s ritualistic murder spree without getting lured into their ranks?

Frigid and precise, Phantom Limb interrogates our notions of wholeness, fate, and the lengths we are willing to go to connect with a higher power.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Kline's back! Oh joy. The christian lunatics, the "Brotherhood of Mutilation" (follow the link, I'm not going through *that* again), are serious about getting Kline the ex-cop who damn near destroyed the entire cult. And so it goes....

This is barely not a novella. It's short; it's not a "Calgon, take me away" read. Or, if it is, I'm very worried about you. There is a lot of body horror, a lot of symbolic anti-religious messaging in that body horror as well as conceptually anti-religious messaging in the entire witness protection element of the story. As we all know, their gawd, like organized crime, finds everybody in the end.

After five years of relative safety in prison that he serves on bullshit charges under a fake name, Kline isn't out five seconds before the schismatic from the Brotherhood of Mutilation cult who call themselves Paul (that bit of quiet calling-out was *chef's kiss*, Author Brian!) find Kline to finish the destruction he began in Last Days. It was not for nothing he served that sentence and hoped his trail went cold. Yet, like all things religious, you're never ever free of the pollution.

In returning to the mutilates doing their infighting in October 2026, it's my interpretation of Author Brian's purpose in piling up the bodies, causing harm with abandon, enshittifying the world to show the gore-seeking reader the real damage done by True Believers. It's not important what their zeal is directed towards, in support of, because it results in irreparable harms caused—including death—regardless of to whom the harms are caused. Zealotry has this way of overshooting any boundaries one thinks to set.

So here's Kline amid a welter of gore as always, trying to expunge a nightmarish hate group. It works, it doesn't, it causes harm on the way and creates new zealots if not today or tomorrow then soon. People love hate, rage, and being Right about stuff more than food and sex combined. This is human nature, visible in cultures throughout time in archaeology, then in writing, now in images. I see no reason to think there was ever a past of peaceful coexistence after there were enough people alive to form persistent families. It's why our cultural heritage is replete with myths, folktales, parables that show in grim, graphic detail the perils of transgressing The Order of Things℠...the selfish urge to do that is overwhelming at times. We all feel it, but the consequences after are the point of these kins of stories. Is this really the world you want? If yes, be ready for the coalition of the harmed to exact revenge.

And so it goes.