Brian Evenson’s first book, a story collection titled Altmann’s Tongue, came out in 1994. It was not widely reviewed. The few notices the book did receive in the media ranged from the curious, to the baffled, to the outright disturbed. “In a capsule review, the Los Angeles Times nervously conceded that ‘there is a talent here,’ albeit, ‘an eldritch one,’” noted Ben Ehrenreich in an essay about Evenson’s work that appeared in The Believer. One reviewer, though, an anonymous one, was unequivocal in their dismay over the book’s violent content, which included dismemberment, mutilation, insects placed in the mouths of corpses, and defenestration, among other indignities. “I feel like someone who has eaten something poisonous and is desperate to get rid of it,” wrote the nameless critic.
This particular review would prove enormously consequential for Evenson’s career—indeed, for his life. It did not appear in a journal or a newspaper. It was not even published, technically. Rather, it was sent to Evenson’s employer, a university, triggering an inquiry that would lead to his dismissal.
The nameless critic was a student at Brigham Young University, the flagship institution of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, located in Provo, Utah, where Evenson taught for the good reason that he was a devout Mormon, raised in the faith his whole life. The student wrote to the university out of concern that a violent, disturbing book like Altmann’s Tongue was not the sort of literary work that good Mormon professors should be pursuing. Over the course of the long and involved inquiry process, Evenson was presented with a choice. If he wished to continue working at BYU, he would have to stop writing books like that. If he didn’t stop, he would have to leave.
Evenson chose the latter. At his request, he was formally excommunicated from the Church. He found other teaching work, eventually at Brown and then Cal Arts, and he continued writing strange, visceral, disturbing books. He means what he says, having sacrificed for his right to say it.
But what does he mean to say? Does he wish to turn the reader’s stomach with his tales of blood and guts, as the nameless critic averred? Not exactly. If Evenson simply wanted to gross you out, his work would pack less of a punch. Rather, he wants to wake you up, to the frightening possibilities of what your mind can imagine, all at the suggestion of nothing more than simple words.
Evenson’s latest book is a novel called Phantom Limb. It is his first full-length novel in more than a decade. That’s not to say he hasn’t been busy: He produces short fiction at a voluminous pace, rolling out a new collection every other year or so. But a new novel offers a welcome occasion to consider his career as a whole, especially when the novel in question takes up material he’s tapped into before.
Phantom Limb tells the story of Klein, a former detective who, at the start of the story, is in prison. Klein was involved in the investigation of a bizarre cult called the Brotherhood of Mutilation. The Brotherhood is, in a sense, engaged in an extreme form of biblical literalism. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus tells his followers, “If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell.” The Brotherhood takes this to mean that cutting off one’s limbs makes one holier in the eyes of God, and so they set about cutting off their own fingers, arms, legs, ears, noses. Klein lost his own arm during the course of an earlier investigation, and the Brotherhood believes this makes him a messianic figure. Klein rebuts their offer, though, and eventually burns down the Brotherhood’s compound. Afterwards, he ends up in jail on other charges, believing that the Brotherhood can’t find him. But when prisoners missing various limbs start tracking him down in the chow line, Klein has to make his way out of prison and finish what he started, before the Brotherhood finishes him.
Phantom Limb is a sequel to an earlier book, Last Days. That one introduced us to Klein and the Brotherhood, and Phantom Limb picks up where it left off. One could read Phantom Limb without having read Last Days and still make perfect sense of the story, but it is best to read them both to experience the full effect of getting torn apart. Phantom Limb is something of a noir story, with the grizzled detective compelled to solve the mystery at hand, even if it results in his own destruction. The tools of the trade when it comes to noir—shaking down secretaries for information, bodies found in empty houses, phone calls with breathy fanatics—are honed to their essences here. Or perhaps we could say they are sharpened, to the point where they wound.
One aspect that makes Phantom Limb so compelling is that Klein’s quest to uncover the mystery of the Brotherhood mirrors the experience of reading Evenson. Klein is embroiled in a shifting conspiracy of murder and religious schism, and frequently wonders if he shouldn’t just run off, forget the Brotherhood, forgo the mystery and live out his days in anonymity. Yet he always veers back, compelled to delve into the horrors, to see what’s on the other side of the locked door.
Is this not the plight and the pleasure of being a reader? Wanting to know what happens next, no matter how horrifying? An act that makes one feel thrillingly and upsettingly complicit. Evenson knows this, and weaponizes it. “In life, violence happens to you. In literature, you make the choice to pick up the book and read, and to continue reading,” he said in an interview. Open the door; turn the page; pick up the knife.
Generally, you will find Evenson’s books in the horror section of your local bookstore, alongside the vampires and the werewolves. His stories appear in journals and anthologies that flaunt wonderfully lurid covers of viscera and bizarre creatures. Dude knows Fangoria and Joe Bob Briggs, is what I’m saying. But he is also highly erudite, conversant with theory and philosophy. “Unlike some writers whose work depends heavily on the visceral shock of ultraviolence… Evenson is an intellectual, even conceptual, writer who is ready and willing to theorize,” writes Maggie Nelson in The Art of Cruelty, her masterful study of button-pushing art and literature. Given that background, one can read Evenson’s histories of violence and come to see that he stands as one of the last heirs of Modernism.
James Joyce famously fit the entire world into a single novel and called it Ulysses. A generation later, his fellow Irishman Samuel Beckett pulled that trick in reverse, writing fiction and drama that effectively erased the outside world, leaving characters inhabiting a blighted void. Vladimir and Estragon await the coming of Godot, who will never arrive. The Unnameable, a novel, records the inner monologue of a character who has been deposited in a jar down a Parisian alley after losing all of his limbs in an unspecified accident—a distinctly Evensonian condition.
Indeed, Evenson had a formative encounter with Beckett’s work, thanks to the Mormon church. Young people raised in the faith are expected to serve on a mission trip in their late adolescence, the better to cement their beliefs and their ties to the Mormon community at the local and global levels. Evenson did just that, traveling to France as a young man and living in Marseilles. He even learned French for the venture, as any good missionary would. Missionary activity didn’t suit him, however, and he quickly abandoned his responsibilities in favor of hanging out at the library, reading Beckett in the original French and discovering Antonin Artraud’s concept of “the theater of cruelty.” His shirking did not go unnoticed. “Eventually I took several unauthorized trips, including one to Paris, which led to my being sent home early under the Mormon equivalent of a dishonorable discharge,” Evenson wrote in an afterword to a later edition of Altmann’s Tongue.
American authors of horror and mystery have drawn on the heady French tradition for centuries, from Edgar Allan Poe to Paul Auster. Evenson makes space for himself on that shelf, drawing on the violence of the American West and the precision of the Parisian salon to create work that is simultaneously visceral and cerebral.
Evenson’s oeuvre is vast, comprising more than thirty books at this point. He shows no signs of stopping, either. Where to start? Where to continue? The bulk of his body of work consists of short stories, which have been collected into many volumes over the years. Evenson is one of the best short-story writers working today. The best working in the horror genre, in my opinion. The melding of literary technique with genre elements also puts him in league with authors like George Saunders, Kelly Link, and Carmen Maria Machado. Even among bold writers like those, the intensity of Evenson’s work still stands out.
His 2019 collection, Song for the Unraveling of the World, showcases his recent forays into science fiction, finding further opportunity for depicting the intensities of mental breakdowns in the depths of space. It also features one of the purest distillations of his style. “No Matter Which Way We Turned” runs for two pages, shorter than some Instagram posts. The adherents of some sect examine a girl who is all back. You see the back of her head, her shoulders, but when you try to turn her around, all you see is her back, again. A trick of perspective? Some impossible defect? It is a simple and highly effective demonstration of setting the reader at unease.
Among his older collections, one of my favorites is The Wavering Knife. The comic side of Evenson’s sensibility shines here, the laughter that is borne out of absurdity. (Beckett’s preferred form of humor, too.) “House Rules” finds a character named Horst trapped in a house. Names play a distinct role in Evenson’s work—he often selects clipped ones that embody vagueness itself. The names of faces you pass in the street without a second glance. This Horst is trapped in a house, only it’s not locked or blocked in any way. Rather, the “house rules” prohibit Horst from leaving, or even from ascending the staircase of the second floor. Who made the house rules? And how did Horst get there, in the first place? Questions that lead to more questions with no answers.
The one book that is perhaps most central to understanding Evenson’s origin and trajectory is a novel, The Open Curtain. It is also the book that delves most deeply into Mormon history. Rudd, a lonely teenage boy, lives in rural Utah, raised in the Mormon faith. An encounter with another boy who may or may not be his half-brother leads him to become obsessed with a vicious crime from Mormon history. In 1902, William Hooper Young, the grandson of Brigham Young, was accused of killing a young woman. The reasons for him doing so involved the doctrine of the early Mormon church known as “blood atonement,” which is what it sounds like. Murdering someone to cleanse their sins. Rudd becomes obsessed with the case, to the point where reality starts to break down around him, and he commits a spectacular act of violence himself.
Blood atonement was also the motivation behind the double murder committed by Ron and Dan Lafferty in 1984, in Utah. Jon Krakauer chronicled the murders, along with the origins of Mormonism, in his book Under the Banner of Heaven. Evenson himself was a young man when the murders occurred, living in much the same kind of community, and he was deeply unsettled by the case.
Language, and the violence that is committed in its name. Violence, and the way it can become even more discomfiting when contained in language. This is Evenson’s theme, and it is a peculiarly American one. Klein encounters it in Phantom Limb, bearing witness to violence so strange that he cannot believe his eyes. A rival sect practices an extreme form of mutilation, freezing the bodies of victims and then sawing them in half like sides of beef. This form of mutilation produces ghostly apparitions, wherein the missing halves of bodies appear as floating forms emitting a soft blue light. Spirits, perhaps? Doubles, from the other side of the veil? I’ll leave that mystery up to the curious reader. Suffice to say that this is the space where Evenson has carved out his home: where the blunt brutalities inflicted upon the human body pale before the conjuring powers of the human mind.
