THE GLASSY, BURNING FLOOR OF HELL: Stories
BRIAN EVENSON
Coffee House Press
$16.95 trade paper, available now
Rating: 4.5* of five
The Publisher Says: "Here is how monstrous humans are."
A sentient, murderous prosthetic leg; shadowy creatures lurking behind a shimmering wall; brutal barrow men: of all the terrors that populate The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell, perhaps the most alarming are the beings who decimated the habitable Earth: humans. In this new short story collection, Brian Evenson envisions a chilling future beyond the Anthropocene that forces excruciating decisions about survival and self-sacrifice in the face of toxic air and a natural world torn between revenge and regeneration. Combining psychological and ecological horror, each tale thrums with Evenson's award-winning literary craftsmanship, dark humor, and thrilling suspense.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: A collection from Brian Evenson, even one with some pieces that weren't quite as welcome to me as they ordinarily are (see below), will never not be greeted with warbles of delight from me. These tales are all from other homes, but they belong together. They're Family, much as a cult is.... Last Days, a pair of odd and deeply disturbing novellas linked by one hugely upsetting premise...and this premise is the *only* one I've ever encountered whereunder I am simply delighted to be called a "one"...made me think and shiver in 2014, and still does today. His short fiction tends to be very, very short (see my review of Windeye from 2013). This can render me almost mute, considering how very unreasonable the demands of reviewing collections, as opposed to anthologies of multiple writers, of short stories are. What's one meant to say? How to capture the gestalt of the collection? Is there a gestalt? If not, what the heck?! I get all verklempt and deeply verschmeckeled. But this is Brian Evenson. The peace is kept. These stories will take you, quickly, to places you're not at all sure you'd like to go.
I got a bit of a foretaste of the unease Author Evenson had in store for me when I kept thinking I should know that title, such a resonant phrase and so elegantly crafted! Is it a quote? A line from some famous poem by Milton, or permaybehaps Swinburne...turns out the author attributes it to Marguerite Young from Miss Mackintosh, My Darling! That monster hasn't been mined as thoroughly for titles as I'd've expected. I don't have any notion of where in the book it occurs, nor does he vouchsafe the information, but the sense of that exact phrase *belonging* somewhere has been answered and laid to rest. Unlike, it must be said, the science-fictional treatments of Otherness, the spooky treatments of cruelty and neglect, and the other many-sided polygons of storytelling he gets up to here. I agree that the planet's had it with us, and can even understand the more, um, arcane ways Author Evenson's come up with for it to shuffle us off. But they are as one expects from him: Unsettling, open-ended, and prettily told even when they aren't at all pretty.
With my usual éclat, I'll employ the Bryce Method of short impressions but no distinct individual ratings (no need; four fives, the rest but one four-and-a-halfs) for the stories so as to organize my thoughts and feelings, while hopefully allowing you to reach your own conclusions.
Leg is Hekla's, well, leg...only it isn't exactly a leg, and it's only hers until it doesn't want to be anymore. Then, well...you know who wrote it, you know what's likely to happen: Nothing you expect or predict. It's a quick, bitter hit of Evensonism.
In Dreams leads us to the sadly messed-about brain of a man whose very sense of himself is...flat, affectless. Much like, he muses, a psychopath's mind. But he has a familiar, a technological thing in his head, something that uses the parts of his brain that long-ago science said we, that is humanity, do not use...let us have it, they asked him, and he said yes.
That strange, almost fluttering sensation from deep within his mind, a sort of mental arrhythmia. It rose, it rose.
I could simulate dreams for you, it offered.
You've been listening in.
Of course I have, it said. I always am.
You always are, he acknowledged.
I could simulate them for you, it said again. They would be very well done. You wouldn't know the difference.
That was what frightened him, that perhaps he wouldn't know the difference.
I had a roommate when I was in the goofy garage who was schizophrenic. He was eerily like this character. Something else was in him, the C.I.A. was beaming imagery into his mind...it's a frightening thought, to be not-alone in your own head, and one that isn't obviously untrue sometimes....
Myling Kommer explains the unbearable burdens of family when Wrong is done to one of your own by one of your own. It is chilling and unfair; Jussi does not understand, can't possibly, the degree of hatred a child can feel for a selfish and terrible parent. Lucky boy, yet the future he inherits might not be quite so lucky.
Come Up for what, air? What good is air when you can't breathe? Breathing never got you anything good, never rewarded your life-long need to be seen or found to be important...but what do you do about it? You make sure you're never forgotten. Never. Even if it means making sure there isn't time to forget....
There was just a hole, a void where his wife had been. You couldn't feel anything about a void. All you could do was try desperately to keep it from swallowing you.
Good luck with that....
Palisade got built because someone, who remembers who, knew there was something that needed to be kept...in? out? hardly matters...and here you come, galumphing goofball that you are, head near empty and heart chock-full of nasty! Any wonder that the world around you gets angry? It's how angry that counts. One of the most persuasive arguments here for NetPriAppPeaDis to open up their vault and splash eight figures out on an all-Evenson anthology à la LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS.
Curator gives new meaning to the words "Mission Drift":
Here is how monstrous humans are, she felt the record should say. Humans are what they did to this world, their home. Here is why, once humans are extinct, they should never be brought back to life.
The Curator is absolutely correct. Wisdom comes at last, and too late.
To Breathe the Air is a master class in the beauty of launching the reader into a story in medias res. Simply superb science-fictional tale of two cities, and the horrors of Others being in control...exercising dominion over...those that do not consent and cannot benefit from it. Please, NetPriAppPeaDis, please make this an animated film!
The Barrow-Men makes you glad you don't live in Author Evenson's head. When Arnar claims an identity that isn't his, just to save himself, the barrow-men treat him to special, super-deluxe accommodations. Poor bastard.
The Shimmering Wall meditates on the power of love to make a person do what they believe they cannot and act as they swore they would not. It's also a bitter, angry denunciation of greed and selfishness and the disfiguring results of Institutional Superiority. And never once does it sound as strident as my reductive synopsis does.
Grauer in the Snow oh, how very much Grauer wishes he wasn't where he is! There but for the want of the presence of a ticket...he's quite sure his would've been punched; I wonder if anything in liminal space is ever for sure. Angels? An angel? If you like....
Justle makes a strong case for never pursuing family secrets! And Capgras syndrome? Maybe we don't really want to poke too deeply into it. No way to be sure there won't be a can of worms the size of Australia come poppin' up. Earth's revenge for our clever-clever uses and abuses, permaybehaps. Honestly, if this world's headed the way of Justle's Earth (assuming it is Earth), I'm not going to make book against this story coming to literal...life....
The Devil's Hand reminded me of an Aickman story, one about a weather house, that I read some time ago...the cruelty of the deprivations, the sheer indifference to bodily autonomy and integrity...just awful!
It was delicious.
Nameless Citizen or just "Nameless Person" in the end. No one lives through The End. The few clones of whatever is left aren't going to make it much past a few days apiece...by design? Or is this just another knock-on effect of the disaster that ends us?
Did I dream? I would say no—I never dream, at least not dreams I remember. I have not dreamt since the disaster changed me, as if the exchange for surviving the conflagration was to surrender my ability to dream.
Would that be a price you'd be willing to pay? Would there be a point to...continuing...if it cost you your dreams, your soul, along with your future?
The Coldness of His Eye reminds you, the reader, that no crime is perfect. Nothing on this Earth stays hidden forever...just hope that you're not interesting enough to be sought out for the wickedness you do without squaring it with the Universe. Because, rest assured, you will eventually pay the price, and the interest is a killer.
Daylight Come for the Eater of Darkness, the woman who can do what the men who think they need to know the future she might be able to tell them can't; so can it not actually come? The thing about power, true power, is that those who need it can never have enough and those who have it can never give enough.
Elo Havel is a take on that classic tale, The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, crossed with The Lottery, told by a character from an Edwardian Saki story. Short, to the point, not a wasted syllable.
His Haunting left me wondering how, in the end, inheritance works...your father to you, then you (a childless gay man) to...? Props to Author Evenson for mundanely, unspectacularly, introducing a gay guy into his fiction.
Haver brings the brutality of the shrink Haver trying to confine artist Festus to one measly lifetime, one lousy timeline, and to trap them there with chemical cocktails. Can anyone believe this is a full and complete life? I'd say Festus has some ideas about it. Maybe some Other does, and uses Festus? One thing I'll say for Haver: he knows his fate's condign.
The Extrication makes Dr. Mengele seem like your kid's pediatrician!
A Bad Patch recalls the chest-burster scene in Alien all too vividly and revoltingly...and it's not just one...and you're Sigourney Weaver strapped to a Vogon Poetry Appreciation chair.
Hospice is the story that I like the least. Distasteful to me to spend any time with this, this incel or just plain asshole, whatever he's meant to be. Thank goodness it's a short-short.
The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell returns Hekla to us! Yes, Hekla from "Leg" and this is an earlier stage of her, um, partnership? with Leg. A trip to a yoga-ish retreat, where Hekla's just about the least valued and most ignored person there, arriving after everyone's asleep and helping herself to a room. Turns out it's the only room she can have...and the fat man (jarring note, making a villainous person fat) who's guru-ing this jamboree she doesn't want to be at is the Real Deal at Guruing. Only, and this is not particularly subtle, he's doing it out of greed. So, like, big not-cool points for fat-shaming and equating heaviness with greed.
This isn't enough to ruin the read for me, but YMMV of course.
