A woman falling out of sync with the world; a king's servant hypnotized by his murderous horse; a transplanted ear with a mind of its own—the characters in these stories live as interlopers in a world shaped by mysterious disappearances and unfathomable discrepancies between the real and imagined. Brian Evenson, master of literary horror, presents his most far-ranging collection to date, exploring how humans can persist in an increasingly unreal world. Haunting, gripping, and psychologically fierce, these tales illuminate a dark and unsettling side of humanity.
Praised by Peter Straub for going "furthest out on the sheerest, least sheltered narrative precipice," Brian Evenson is the author of ten books of fiction. He has been a finalist for the Edgar Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the World Fantasy Award, and the winner of the International Horror Guild Award, and the American Library Association's award for Best Horror Novel. Fugue State was named one of Time Out New York's Best Books of 2009. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and three O. Henry Prizes, including one for the title story in "Windeye," Evenson lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where he directs Brown University's Literary Arts Department.
A woman falling out of sync with the world; a king's servant hypnotized by his murderous horse; a transplanted ear with a mind of its own—the characters in these stories live as interlopers in a world shaped by mysterious disappearances and unfathomable discrepancies between the real and imagined. Brian Evenson, master of literary horror, presents his most far-ranging collection to date, exploring how humans can persist in an increasingly unreal world. Haunting, gripping, and psychologically fierce, these tales illuminate a dark and unsettling side of humanity.
Praised by Peter Straub for going "furthest out on the sheerest, least sheltered narrative precipice," Brian Evenson is the author of ten books of fiction. He has been a finalist for the Edgar Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the World Fantasy Award, and the winner of the International Horror Guild Award, and the American Library Association's award for Best Horror Novel. Fugue State was named one of Time Out New York's Best Books of 2009. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and three O. Henry Prizes, including one for the title story in "Windeye," Evenson lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where he directs Brown University's Literary Arts Department.
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Overview
A woman falling out of sync with the world; a king's servant hypnotized by his murderous horse; a transplanted ear with a mind of its own—the characters in these stories live as interlopers in a world shaped by mysterious disappearances and unfathomable discrepancies between the real and imagined. Brian Evenson, master of literary horror, presents his most far-ranging collection to date, exploring how humans can persist in an increasingly unreal world. Haunting, gripping, and psychologically fierce, these tales illuminate a dark and unsettling side of humanity.
Praised by Peter Straub for going "furthest out on the sheerest, least sheltered narrative precipice," Brian Evenson is the author of ten books of fiction. He has been a finalist for the Edgar Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the World Fantasy Award, and the winner of the International Horror Guild Award, and the American Library Association's award for Best Horror Novel. Fugue State was named one of Time Out New York's Best Books of 2009. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and three O. Henry Prizes, including one for the title story in "Windeye," Evenson lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where he directs Brown University's Literary Arts Department.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781566892988 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Coffee House Press |
| Publication date: | 04/30/2012 |
| Pages: | 176 |
| Sales rank: | 411,224 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Windeye
1
They lived, when he was growing up, in a simple house, an old bungalow with a converted attic and sides covered in cedar shake. In the back, where an oak thrust its branches over the roof, the shake was light brown, almost honey. In the front, where the sun struck it full, it had weathered to a pale gray, like a dirty bone. There, the shingles were brittle, thinned by sun and rain, and if you were careful you could slip your fingers up behind some of them. Or at least his sister could. He was older and his fingers were thicker, so he could not.
Looking back on it, many years later, he often thought it had started with that, with her carefully working her fingers up under a shingle as he waited and watched to see if it would crack. That was one of his earliest memories of his sister, if not the earliest.
His sister would turn around and smile, her hand gone to knuckles, and say, "I feel something. What am I feeling?" And then he would ask questions. Is it smooth? he might ask. Does it feel rough? Scaly? Is it cold-blooded or warm-blooded? Does it feel red? Does it feel like its claws are in or out? Can you feel its eye move? He would keep on, watching the expression on her face change as she tried to make his words into a living, breathing thing, until it started to feel too real for her and, half giggling, half screaming, she whipped her hand free.
There were other things they did, other ways they tortured each other, things they both loved and feared. Their mother didn't know anything about it, or if she did she didn't care. One of them would shut the other inside the toy chest and pretend to leave the room, waiting there silently until the one in the chest couldn't stand it any longer and started to yell. That was a hard game for him because he was afraid of the dark, but he tried not to show that to his sister. Or one of them would wrap the other tight in blankets, and then the trapped one would have to break free. Why they had liked it, why they had done it, he had a hard time remembering later, once he was grown. But they had liked it, or at least he had liked it — there was no denying that — and he had done it. No denying that either.
So at first those games, if they were games, and then, later, something else, something worse, something decisive. What was it again? Why was it hard, now that he was grown, to remember? What was it called? Oh, yes, Windeye.
* * * 2 * * *
How had it begun? And when? A few years later, when the house started to change for him, when he went from thinking about each bit and piece of it as a separate thing and started thinking of it as a house. His sister was still coming up close, entranced by the gap between shingle and wall, intrigued by the twist and curve of a crack in the concrete steps. It was not that she didn't know there was a house, only that the smaller bits were more important than the whole. For him, though, it had begun to be the reverse.
So he began to step back, to move back in the yard far enough away to take the whole house in at once. His sister would give him a quizzical look and try to coax him in closer, to get him involved in something small. For a while, he'd play to her level, narrate to her what the surface she was touching or the shadow she was glimpsing might mean, so she could pretend. But over time he drifted out again. There was something about the house, the house as a whole, that troubled him. But why? Wasn't it just like any house?
His sister, he saw, was standing beside him, staring at him. He tried to explain it to her, tried to put a finger on what fascinated him. This house, he told her. It's a little different. There's something about it ... But he saw, from the way she looked at him, that she thought it was a game, that he was making it up.
"What are you seeing?" she asked, with a grin.
Why not? he thought. Why not make it a game?
"What are you seeing?" he asked her.
Her grin faltered a little but she stopped staring at him and stared at the house.
"I see a house," she said.
"Is there something wrong with it?" he prompted.
She nodded, then looked to him for approval.
"What's wrong?" he asked.
Her brow tightened like a fist. "I don't know," she finally said. "The window?"
"What about the window?"
"I want you to do it," she said. "It's more fun."
He sighed, and then pretended to think. "Something wrong with the window," he said. "Or not the window exactly but the number of windows." She was smiling, waiting. "The problem is the number of windows. There's one more window on the outside than on the inside."
He covered his mouth with his hand. She was smiling and nodding, but he couldn't go on with the game. Because, yes, that was exactly the problem, there was one more window on the outside than on the inside. That, he knew, was what he'd been trying to see all along.
* * * 3 * * *
But he had to make sure. He had his sister move from room to room in the house, waving to him from each window. The ground floor was all right, he saw her each time. But in the converted attic, just shy of the corner, there was a window at which she never appeared.
It was small and round, probably only a foot and a half in diameter. The glass was dark and wavery. It was held in place by a strip of metal about as thick as his finger, giving the whole of the circumference a dull, leaden rim.
He went inside and climbed the stairs, looking for the window himself, but it simply wasn't there. But when he went back outside, there it was.
For a time, it felt like he had brought the problem to life himself by stating it, that if he hadn't said anything the half-window wouldn't be there. Was that possible? He didn't think so, that wasn't the way the world worked. But even later, once he was grown, he still found himself wondering sometimes if it was his fault, if it was something he had done. Or rather, said.
Staring up at the half-window, he remembered a story his grandmother had told him, back when he was very young, just three or four, just after his father had left and just before his sister was born. Well, he didn't remember it exactly, but he remembered it had to do with windows. Where she came from, his grandmother said, they used to be called not windows but something else. He couldn't remember the word, but remembered that it started with a v. She had said the word and then had asked, Do you know what this means? He shook his head. She repeated the word, slower this time.
"This first part," she had said, "it means 'wind.' This second part, it means 'eye.'" She looked it him with her own pale, steady eye. "It is important to know that a window can be instead a windeye."
So he and his sister called it that, windeye. It was, he told her, how the wind looked into the house and so was not a window at all. So of course they couldn't look out of it; it was not a window at all, but a windeye.
He was worried she was going to ask questions, but she didn't. And then they went into the house to look again, to make sure it wasn't a window after all. But it still wasn't there on the inside.
Then they decided to get a closer look. They had figured out which window was nearest to it and opened that and leaned out of it. There it was. If they leaned far enough, they could see it and almost touch it.
"I could reach it," his sister said. "If I stand on the sill and you hold my legs, I could lean out and touch it."
"No," he started to say, but, fearless, she had already clambered onto the sill and was leaning out. He wrapped his arms around her legs to keep her from falling. He was just about to pull her back inside when she leaned farther and he saw her finger touch the windeye. And then it was as if she had dissolved into smoke and been sucked into the windeye. She was gone.
* * * 4 * * *
It took him a long time to find his mother. She was not inside the house, nor was she outside in the yard. He tried the house next door, the Jorgensens, and then the Allreds, then the Dunfords. She wasn't anywhere. So he ran back home, breathless, and somehow his mother was there now, lying on the couch, reading.
"What's wrong?" she asked.
He tried to explain it best he could. Who? she asked at first and then said Slow down and tell it again, and then, But who do you mean? And then, once he'd explained again, with an odd smile:
"But you don't have a sister."
But of course he had a sister. How could his mother have forgotten? What was wrong? He tried to describe her, to explain what she looked like, but his mother just kept shaking her head.
"No," she said firmly. "You don't have a sister. You never had one. Stop pretending. What's this really about?" Which made him feel that he should hold himself very still, that he should be very careful about what he said, that if he breathed wrong more parts of the world would disappear.
After talking and talking, he tried to get his mother to come out and look at the windeye.
"Window, you mean," she said, voice rising.
"No," he said, beginning to grow hysterical as well. "Not window. Windeye." And then he had her by the hand and was tugging her to the door. But no, that was wrong too, because no matter which window he pointed at she could tell him where it was in the house. The windeye, just like his sister, was no longer there.
But he kept insisting it had been there, kept insisting too that he had a sister.
And that was when the trouble really started.
* * * 5 * * *
Over the years there were moments when he was almost convinced, moments when he almost began to think — and perhaps even did think for weeks or months at a time — that he never had a sister. It would have been easier to think this than to think she had been alive and then, perhaps partly because of him, not alive. Being not alive wasn't like being dead, he felt: it was much, much worse. There were years too when he simply didn't choose, when he saw her as both real and make-believe and sometimes neither of those things. But in the end what made him keep believing in her — despite the line of doctors that visited him as a child, despite the rift it made between him and his mother, despite years of forced treatment and various drugs that made him feel like his head had been filled with wet sand, despite years of having to pretend to be cured — was simply this: he was the only one who believed his sister was real. If he stopped believing, what hope would there be for her?
Thus he found himself, even when his mother was dead and gone and he himself was old and alone, brooding on his sister, wondering what had become of her. He wondered too if one day she would simply reappear, young as ever, ready to continue with the games they had played. Maybe she would simply suddenly be there again, her tiny fingers worked up behind a cedar shingle, staring expectantly at him, waiting for him to tell her what she was feeling, to make up words for what was pressed there between the house and its skin, lying in wait.
"What is it?" he would say in a hoarse voice, leaning on his cane.
"I feel something," she would say. "What am I feeling?"
And he would set about describing it. Does it feel red? Does it feel warm-blooded or cold? Is it round? Is it smooth like glass? All the while, he knew, he would be thinking not about what he was saying but about the wind at his back. If he turned around, he would be wondering, would he find the wind's strange, baleful eye staring at him?
That wasn't much, but it was the best he could hope for. Chances were he wouldn't get even that. Chances were there would be no sister, no wind. Chances were that he'd be stuck with the life he was living now, just as it was, until the day when he was either dead or not living himself.
The Second Boy
Akind of darkness had swept up very quickly to catch them unaware. The wind rose with it, crusting the snow into ice, the cold become now crisp and hard. As they walked, snow began to fall again until soon Leppin could no longer see the trail. He could hardly see Dierk either, except as a dim shape on its way to being lost.
"Hadn't we better stop?" Leppin asked.
But Dierk apparently could not make up his mind to do so. He shook his head. There must still be some trace of the trail, and perhaps they were still on it or not too far from it or would find it soon. Or perhaps they would soon see a light and be able to make for it.
In the wind, Leppin caught only scraps of what the fellow was saying. He trudged on, just behind. The wind rose further and he could feel his fingers growing numb. He kept walking until he could no longer feel them at all.
"It's very cold," he finally said. "We have to stop."
At first Dierk didn't hear him over the wind. Leppin had to hurry his steps and wrap an arm round Dierk's shoulders and shout into his ear. Even after this, there was a moment in which Dierk gave no response. Then came a short, curt nod that made Leppin believe he had given in.
But no, after Leppin released him Dierk just kept walking. After a moment Leppin, not knowing what else to do, followed.
The drifts were deep enough that sometimes when the crust of ice broke Leppin sank to his thigh, the snow underneath powdery and clinging to everything. He could feel the bones ache in his feet, and then that passed too and he couldn't feel his feet at all. It was hard for him even to remember where he was, or who he was.
Dierk was a little ahead, back stiff, marching resolutely forward, a vague, withdrawn figure. And then little more than a shadow. And then, as the snow thickened in the air, he was suddenly gone. Leppin called out once, but Dierk didn't hear. Or if he did, he didn't stop.
Leppin waited, stamping his feet, wondering if Dierk would notice he was gone and double back. When Dierk didn't, he tried to follow.
The storm was still growing. In the darkness and cold, he couldn't find Dierk's tracks. He wasn't even sure he was moving in the right direction. He was surprised to notice his body seemed comfortably warm. His face, too, seemed like it might be warm, though he couldn't feel it exactly. Why not just dig out a place for himself in the snow, make a little cave, a little hole, and wait for the storm to pass?
Instead he lurched onward, kept moving. It was as if someone else was walking, not him: a body moving bluntly forward, rudderless, under its own power. He let it go, just trying to stay vaguely connected to it.
It went on like that for a while, with Leppin less and less aware of what was happening around him, until he walked into a tree limb, sending a cascade of snow down onto his head. A branch had torn into the side of his neck. Not that he could feel his neck exactly, but there was a wetness there that was different from the other wetness, and a faint smell too. Unless it was something he was only imagining or making up as he went, since it was too dark to see and his hands and face were too numb to feel.
There were around him other trees as well, he soon found, encountering one and then another and then a third. He struggled his lighter out of his pocket and watched his gloved fingers try to flick it alight, was surprised that they finally managed. He cupped the flame with one hand and saw below him nearly bare ground, almost no snow: a matrix of pine needles and dead vegetation and mud spidered through with veins of frost.
He prodded the ground with the toe of his boot. Some places it remained hard, like a single consistent organism. In others it came slowly apart, the ice not strong enough to hold the dead leaves and other matter together.
He kept at it until he found a large spot that was loose and mostly dry, the leaves and needles such that he could push them together into a heap with his boot. From there it was little enough to bring the lighter down among the needles and leaves until they smoldered and, crackling, caught flame. He kept uprooting needles and leaves and adding them to the fire until the flames were high enough for him to start stripping bark off the nearest trees.
The underside of the bark was threaded with worm trails. It was also studded with black blotches that, as the bark caught fire, began to unfurl and move, becoming small black vermin that spun madly about before sizzling away. Unless it was just that he was seeing things, parts of his brain going dim and dying from the cold. He tried not to think about this, carefully feeding bigger and bigger chunks of wood onto the fire until he had a roaring blaze.
An hour later he had built a shelter just big enough for him to crawl inside. In the glow of the fire he could see the trees all around him but could not tell where the forest ended or where he had come from. He had removed his boots and gloves and they lay there beside the fire, slowly steaming. Feeling had begun to creep back into his hands and feet, his fingers and toes feeling as though they were being bitten repeatedly by flies. His face throbbed; it felt as though his eyes were scraping against their sockets as they moved. He heaped more fuel onto the fire and then slowly lay back in the shelter, staring at the flames until, almost without knowing, he had fallen asleep.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Windeye"
by .
Copyright © 2012 Brian Evenson.
Excerpted by permission of COFFEE HOUSE PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Windeye,
The Second Boy,
The Process,
A History of the Human Voice,
Dapplegrim,
Angel of Death,
The Dismal Mirror,
Legion,
The Moldau Case,
The Sladen Suit,
Hurlock's Law,
Discrepancy,
Knowledge,
Baby or Doll,
The Tunnel,
South of the Beast,
The Absent Eye,
Bon Scott: The Choir Years,
Tapadera,
The Other Ear,
They,
The Oxygen Protocol,
The Drownable Species,
Grottor,
Anskan House,
What People are Saying About This
Time Out New York, mention in "Best (and worst) books of 2012"
HTML Giant, Included in "Holiday Shopping Guide: Fiction Recommendations"
"Both smartly referential and admirably distinct in voice . . . these are stories of madness told from the inside, and they often read like dreams." —Publishers Weekly
"This book is proof of a master writer working at his best."—NewPages
"All the stories in this collection are hard-edged, tinged with emotional or physical violence and capped by shock or outright horror. Characterized by building suspense and dread, these tales often have a folkloric feel far removed from the commonplace." —Booklist
"For those whose imaginations constantly hunger for genuine nourishment, Brian Evenson's Windeye is a feast. . . . Windeye delivers a complex and varied collection filled with contrasting flavors. Ranging from feudal to post-apocalyptic, it contains some of the best uncanny and horror writing to come out of New England since Stephen King published The Stand in 1978." —ForeWard
"The fact that Evenson can move from parody to paranoia and humor to horror in the span of three paragraphs is a testament to his ability as a storyteller, on that can make us laugh and shudder, moving with the same kind of erratic schizophrenia as many of his own characters." —Brooklyn Rail
"In the 25 stories collected in Windeye, Evenson shows himself to an imaginative writer first and foremost. . . . Imagine Beckett's Murphy or Molloy lost, walking around in a Poe tale, then read these stories to find out why Jonathan Lethem calls Evenson 'one of the treasures of American story writing.'" —Shelf Awareness
"No one—and I mean no one—is better at excavating the strangeness of our everyday lives." —Andrew Ervin
"Brian Evenson writes profoundly about the prisonhouse of language precisely because he has made that place his home." —Open Letters Monthly
"I'm pulled into this great, unresolved tension that becomes the general atmosphere in which the events of the stories take place. Which is horrifying. And delightfully so." —Black Balloon Publishing
"One senses that Evenson drafted these stories as fuller narratives, then stripped away their surest details until only the most fragile threads were tying their events together, and anchoring them to anything fixed. The result is fiction that, for all its seeming insubstantiality, is weighty, solid, and provocative." -Locus Magazine
"A modern master of the weird tale, Brian Evenson is also one of the genres most experimental. Windeye, his latest story collection, does what all good horror aspires to: reflect the tenor and fears of a given period."—Campus Circle, "Scary Stories: Halloween Book List"
"With his latest short fiction collection Windeye, Brian Evenson once again proves himself a master at creating suspenseful, literary horror."—Largehearted Boy, "Favorite Short Story Collections of 2012"
"The horror of Windeye surfaces as characters are kept in endless trepidation about the evil hiding in the basement, never daring or able to grab a flashflight and go check it out for themselves."—New Orleans Review