Fugue State [Paperback]

Brian Evenson (Author), Zak Sally (Illustrator)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 2009

“Brilliant...Evenson manages to capture madness with a masterful tone. The specific genius of Fugue State rests in subtlety, in Evenson’s ability to maintain suspense, dread and paranoia through utter linguistic control.”—Time Out New York

“19 satisfying and surreal stories...packed with subtly hilarious sentences.”—Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Brian Evenson is one of the treasures of American story writing, a true successor both to the generation of Coover, Barthelme, Hawkes and Co., but also to Edgar Allan Poe.”—Jonathan Lethem

"The stories in this collection will thrill, unsettle, and captivate. Like lanterns in dark rooms, paper boats carried down on subterranean waters, they lead the reader into mysterious and perilous territory. Read at your own risk."—Kelly Link

Illustrated by graphic novelist Zak Sally, Brian Evenson’s hallucinatory and darkly comic stories of paranoia, pursuit, sensory deprivation, amnesia, and retribution rattle the cages of the psyche and peer into the gaping moral chasm that opens when we become estranged from ourselves. From sadistic bosses with secret fears to a woman trapped in a mime’s imaginary box, and from a post-apocalyptic misidentified Messiah to unwitting portraitists of the dead, the mind-bending world of this modern-day Edgar Allan Poe exposes the horror contained within our daily lives.

Brian Evenson is the author of the Edgar and International Horror Guild award-nominated novel The Open Curtain. Visit his website at www.brianevenson.com.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Evenson (The Open Curtain) accesses dark, unusual facets of human frailty, powerlessness and fear in this collection, haunted by themes of amnesia, aphasia and creeping infirmity. Hecker, the protagonist of O'Henry Prize–winner Mudder Tongue, can't control which words he says and is incapable of expressing even the nature of the problem to his daughter, who thinks he just needs to get out more. A similar terror informs the title story, in which a plague of amnesia afflicts the area where Arnaud lives. The stricken forget their own names, bleed from the eyes and mouth, then lapse into unconsciousness and death. Arnaud catches the illness, and as he makes his way through a landscape of quarantined apartments, looters and corpses, he interacts with the dead and soon-to-be-dead in an effort to try to remember what he is trying to accomplish. Other ailments make cameos—blindness in Helpful, insomnia in Dread—and the thematic anxiety is heightened by graphic novelist Sally's foreboding black and white line illustrations. This intense, nightmarish collection captures the fear of night terrors, when one wakes in the middle of the night, unable to move. (July)
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About the Author

Praised by Peter Straub for going "furthest out on the sheerest, least sheltered narrative precipice," Brian Evenson is the author of eight previous books of fiction, including the Edgar Award-nominated novel The Open Curtain and the International Horror Guild Award-winning collection, The Wavering Knife. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island where he directs Brown University's Literary Arts Program. Zak Sally is the author of the graphic novel, Recidivist, nominated for two Eisner Awards and named one of SPIN magazine's "favorite things." He is also the author of Fantagraphic Books's Sammy the Mouse series, the former bassist of the band Low, and the publisher of La Mano press in Minneapolis.

Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: Coffee House Press; First Edition edition (July 1, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1566892252
• ISBN-13: 978-1566892254
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #251,838 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars among his best, July 30, 2010

By 

C. Manucy "babilary" - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Fugue State (Paperback)

Ever since I read "Mudder Tongue" in McSweeney's quarterly, which is included in this collection, Brian Evenson has been one of my favorite authors. I've since read the story collection Altman's Tongue, and two of his novels, The Open Curtain, and Last Days.

His stories are often grim or violent, yet not gratuitous, and leavened by a quirky sense of humor. From the first sentence, he can grab the reader and pull them into a hypnotic world--which lingers after the story is done. Evenson has an amazing ability to take a very good story and turn it into a great story within a paragraph at the end, as he does in "The Accounting". His collection, Fugue State, is highly recommended.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A literate, fascinating, unsettling, and eerie successor to Edgar Allan Poe, November 9, 2011

By 

Joshua Mauthe (Nashville, TN) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Fugue State (Kindle Edition)

I've been a fan of Evenson's work ever since reading the surreal, nightmarish Last Days, and Fugue State is just another reminder why that fandom is justified. Describing Evenson's beautiful and oddly unsettling prose is hard to do - it's like some fusion of Cormac McCarthy and Edgar Allan Poe, with emphasis on Poe's unreliably fractured narration and the psychological turning of the screws he so enjoyed. Fugue State is, in some ways, the "easiest" of Evenson's collections I've read; the stories are generally more straightforward, but even so, reality is hard to come by in Evenson's work, and sanity even harder. The stories here take on everything from a reluctant post-apocalyptic cult leader (the pitch-black religious satire "An Accounting") to a plague of amnesia (the unsettling and surreal "Fugue State"), and whatever the subject, Evenson has a way of provoking responses from the reader you'll never expect. Look, for example, as "Invisible Box," a story about a woman whose one-night stand with a mime leaves her convinced that he's left his invisible box at her house. The story sounds like it should be funny (and, to be fair, parts of it made me laugh out loud), but Evenson manages to take the situation and craft a story of a woman losing her mind out of it, ending on a creepily ambiguous note that sucks all the whimsy from the situation. Others, like "Alfons Kuylers," feel like a Poe story he never wrote, all the way to the chilling slow burn as both the reader and the character start to understand exactly what's going on. With his perfect prose, psychological games, and unsettling imagery, Evenson is a literary horror writer like no other, and it saddens me that so much of his work goes without notice right now. It's unlikely you'll ever read much like Evenson; if you haven't started, jump in now.

5.0 out of 5 stars Great bunch of short stories, November 15, 2011

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Paul A. Duval - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Fugue State (Paperback)

I found this book to be dark and interesting. Themes of paranoia, amnesia, and loss abound. Lots of fun. Also, the short stories provide a lot of flexibility if you don't have a ton of time to read, while maintaining a constant theme throughout.