3.75

Another excellent collection of unsettling horror stories from Brian Evenson. "Song for the Unraveling of the World" is a little more mainstream and less literary in feel than earlier collections such as "Windeye" or "A Collapse of Horses". It also pushes a little more into genre, especially science fiction, but it's still full of his trademarks: Minimalist writing, unusually named characters, ambiguity, obsessions, psychological horror, the unexplainable, experimental techniques, breakdowns in reality, transformations.

Evenson uses his minimalist techniques (characters and settings are described as little as possible) to keep the reader off-balance. Sometimes you will be halfway through a story, or more, before you understand what is going on. Sometimes you will finish the story and not really know what is going on. Sometimes he deliberately lets your imagination fill in the horror, and that's most effective of all. Often a character will notice something is not quite right, and Evenson uses this to make the reader uneasy. Is it nothing? Is the character going mad? Or is reality itself out of whack? Any combination of these is possible in these stories. My favorite line in the book, which feels a little like Evenson breaking the fourth wall, is "But this is not that kind of story, the kind meant to explain things. It simply tells things as they are, and as you know there is no explanation for how things are, at least none that would make any difference and allow them to be something else."

Stories that stood out to me in particular: "Leaking Out", a Stephen-King like story in which a traveler ends up regretting taking shelter in an abandoned mansion, "Shirts and Skins" in which a man trapped in an abusive relationship seeks refuge in an unusual art exhibit, "The Tower", a post-apocalyptic story of transformation, "The Disappearance", a Poe-like murder mystery with nothing supernatural at all, and "Wanderlust", in which a man's paranoia of being watched has a most unusual explanation. A couple stories didn't work for me very well - "Cardiacs" was too short and confusing (I even read it twice), and "Trigger Warnings" was mean to be funny but felt a little juvenile - but all the other stories were good to excellent.