A collapse of horses stories5/21/2023 The true horror of the collection ultimately stands outside of any one story, any one character-and in doing so implicates the reader, above all. Despite this eclecticism, the stories cohere, building a vague but contagious sense of dread. Yet it also delves into science fiction, western, mystery, domestic drama, philosophy, religion, and metafiction. Certainly, the collection is not without its ghosts, its psychoses, its carnage. In fact, horror takes so many forms in Evenson’s stories that the collection paradoxically defies the horror genre, at least in the narrowest sense of that term. It grows amidst bureaucracy and violence, loss and illness, denial and ignorance. It emerges in the isolation of a cell, on the operating room table, at a seaside hotel, and in the nursery of a stillborn child. In Brian Evenson’s newest short story collection, A Collapse of Horses, it is at turns a glowing apparition, a suffocating dust, a juvenile game, and an unnerving smile.
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