I only recently got introduced to Brian Evenson. I started with a collection of his short stories that frustrated me because, while well written, they seemed to dance around a story, at its edges, instead of actually telling a story. It's as if he made a choice to write about what happens in that tangential space beside or before the real story. And that choice of his can be powerful if used sparingly, but it also seemed that every story in the collection did the same thing. Overused, it became the opposite: impotent instead of potent.

That's my opinion anyway, and of course, opinions vary. I've read the opposite opinions of many a reviewer online. But me, personally? I love a well thought-out, inventive story. He had so many fantastic ideas, but he seemed to just tease me with them. I would argue that any story in that collection could have been fleshed out into a full-bodied novel, had he the time and/or interest in doing so.

Don't get me wrong, they were amazing, those stories, by themselves. The first one I read, I said to myself, "My God, this guy is an excellent writer!" However, by the end of the collection I found myself wondering if he was just a one-trick pony. An excellent trick, to be sure, but if that's all he has, he's a side show in the circus, not the main attraction.

(I've pushed that metaphor too far. Let's drop it.)

So I wanted to see what one of his novels looked like. Given more space and time, would he dive into the story fully instead of skirting alongside of it? I picked this one because it was the only novel of his for sale in my local bookstore. No other thought was put into it. I tore through it in 2 days.

I absolutely loved it. My former complaint about him not diving completely into a story only sort of applies here. He started with a story (probably best described as a "novella" due to its length) he'd written years earlier called The Brotherhood of Mutilation. Full of fascinating ideas and horrific imagery, it told the tale of a man who gets pulled into a cult based around the idea of self-mutilation as a form of forced spiritual enlightenment. But like so many of his stories, it ended just before the plot could progress towards any sort of conclusion. Evenson likes to leave us hanging, requiring us to fill in our own blanks.

That was written in 2003. In 2009 he decided to write a sequel (or rather a continuation) starting literally where Brotherhood ended and moving the plot along. The second half, called Last Days (thus the title of the novel) introduces its own complementary ideas about this cult, including an offshoot, and a number of new characters, and moves the plot along at a more deliberate and rapid pace than the first half.

Combined, they make almost the perfect novel for me. I say "almost" because I found a few things lacking. Any back story about, quite frankly, any of the characters, among them. And the combination of noir-ish elements and Beckett-esque dialogue didn't work quite as well for me as either of them would have landed on their own. But these are minor quibbles. I've got a couple more Evenson novels on my TBR stack now, and I look forward to plowing through them soon.

Postscript

After thinking about it a bit longer, I can see that he still danced around a larger story. We have almost no sense of the world outside of this cult. We hardly meet any characters not already immersed. We have only a fleeting idea of what happened to the main character, Kline, before the events of this novel. So the question of "what sort of world is it where this kind of cult exists" is never asked or answered. And, yes, maybe that is a larger story that my brain (with its need for answers and gaps filled) would love to read one day. But goddammit at least in this novel he takes a character through a story arc to some sort of conclusion. I'll take my wins where I can get them.

Post-postscript

Did I say these questions are never asked? Color me embarrassed. I remembered the last line of the novel:

Where now? he wondered, at first walking, then loping, then breaking into a run. What next?

I stand corrected. He did ask a couple of the main questions still lingering in my mind. ( )

Publisher describes this as intense and deeply unsettling. I could not agree more. Our protagonist, a detective that had just gone through a traumatic experience - indeed an intense and deeply unsettling one, is co-opted, corrupted and lampooned when he gets involved in a religious cult that takes bodily penance, self-flagellation and the like to its extreme. The cult’s credo is the more body parts a member can chop off, cut off, the better. Ears, fingers, eyes, limbs -anything goes. Self-flagellation? No, Sir. That simply won’t do.
Our protagonist is disgusted, and rightly so, since he himself just lost his hand to a hatchet. And he did not volunteer - goes without saying. Soon our detective realizes that there is much more at stake than solve if a murder mystery for a cult of plum-mad religious fanatics. But read for yourself - if you got the stomach. ( )

One of the most relentlessly violent novels I have read, and I love it for that. ( )

This is a punch up of Evenson's "Brotherhood of Mutilation" an almost perfect short story. The second half, which pads the original out to novel length, really does feel like a shoddy sequel. Oh well ( )

I love this fucking book, no two stumps about it.