The Wavering Knife: Stories (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

Review

Praise for Evenson's Altmann's Tongue:

"Despite the horror present in each story, Evenson's blend of wit and shock, which plunges readers into the minds of his often demented protagonists, serves to create acceptance even as it generates repulsion." -Publishers Weekly

"I admire Evenson's writing and respect his courage." -Andrew Vachss
-- Review

Review

"These tales by a modern Poe occur under an immense pressure of language, insight, and observation. Harrowing (Evenson makes us want to check the word's literal meaning) as they are, they take place just beyond the numbed moment where cruelty and craziness grow banal." -Samuel R. Delany, author of The Mad Man

Praise for Evenson's Altmann's Tongue:

"Despite the horror present in each story, Evenson's blend of wit and shock, which plunges readers into the minds of his often demented protagonists, serves to create acceptance even as it generates repulsion." -Publishers Weekly

"I admire Evenson's writing and respect his courage." -Andrew Vachss

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 205 pages
• Publisher: Fiction Collective 2; 1 edition (March 15, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1573661139
• ISBN-13: 978-1573661133
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.3 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #307,210 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Brutal and Funny, January 15, 2005

By	Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

A few stories miss their mark, but otherwise THE WAVERING KNIFE impresses with its multiplicity of narrators and the astounding predicaments they get themselves into. He has the invention of Wodehouse, but a grimmer state of mind, though one story combines both modes of writing, the tale of the "Promisekeepers," a coterie of heterosexual rednecks who meet at a tavern with a man's name on it (so women won't distract them) to jaw over their problems with the opposite sex. When one of them confesses a shocking secret, the others react in amusing ways and the scene ends with a frightening shivaree. Though many of the stories are in the first person, he is often able to make these voices sort of different from one another. You wind up finishing the book with a great deal of respect for Brian Everson, as a writer and as a thinker--for there are some tales which ask to be judged on their teleology alone.

THE WAVERING KNIFE is a book so good it makes you wonder what kind of person Everson is. For more inspiration I turned to the jacket copy. Hey, he looks good all cleaned up. The line of darkness turning his nose aquiline, that cloudy mass of backlit hair in the photo on the back cover reminds us of Clarence Bull's photos of Joan Crawford, Garbo, and other MGM goddesses of the 30s. (I can't find the name of the photographer to credit, but he or she is darn good.)

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Dark Tales of Brutal Reality and Repression That We Would Recognize in Daily Life, August 17, 2007

By	Wildness (Colorado Plateau) - See all my reviews

Brian Evenson, ex-communicated from the Mormon Church and his teaching position at BYU for his writing, is a literary portal into the dark corners of everyday life. In some of these stories he takes direct aim at his former church and its followers; a great example is "The Prophets", a tale of simple men empowered with a vision from god that includes the use of a shovel and the restoration of the dead prophets of olden days. But, in others, he finds an ample target in "The Promisekeepers", where a male bonding group under the banner of the title's namesake meets in a bar and shares moments of truth and honesty - which, when one member of the group reveals a little too much information, leads to a horrific outcome. Other stories such as "The Gravediggers" are interspersed for comic relief; in this laugh-out-loud funny story, two lazy gravediggers create their own misadventures and more work than they bargained for after deciding the dirt wass just too hard to dig a large enough grave for the latest subject of the effort.

Many of the stories in this volume take direct aim at our superstitions and religious beliefs; not in a direct frontal assault, but by association with the subjects of Evenson's brutal, but entertaining musings. I say musings, because even in their brutality, these stories take an amusing look at the darker side of ourselves.

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A Guide to my Book Rating System:

1 star = The wood pulp would have been better utilized as toilet paper.
2 stars = Don't bother, clean your bathroom instead.
3 stars = Wasn't a waste of time, but it was time wasted.
4 stars = Good book, but not life altering.
5 stars = This book changed my world in at least some small way.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Staggeringly Great, January 7, 2007

By	Lydia M. Netzer "lostcheerio" (USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Half of these stories are brutal, relentless, and cold. The others present a lighter fare. The latter and lighter group are about silly men and the dumb things they do and say -- from the Promisekeeper group that meets in a bar to the guy who tries to set up a church in Walmart, to the pair of redneck gravediggers who have so much trouble getting their corpse into a shallow hole in hard packed dirt that they chop him up, pee on him, eviscerate him, stomp on him, and eventually throw what's left of him into a ravine and pretend to cover up the grave. What happens next? The family and minister come over the hill, with the coffin he was supposed to go in, asking to "dig up" the body.

These stories are smart and wry. The other half of the book, however, is priceless. Evenson's great accomplishment, his genius, lies in these other stories: "The Ex-Father," "The Intricacies of Post-Shooting Etiquette," "The Wavering Knife," "Virtual," "One Over Twelve," "The Progenitor," and my favorite, though it isn't the showiest story in the book, "House Rules." "House Rules" affected me the most, though it is quiet and drab, and the image of the velvet rope across the stairway will stick with me for sure.

Maybe these stories are evolved Kafka, or maybe they're perfect scifi. This is a fiery imagination kept rigidly contained in exacting boxes, let out in discreet units, each one perfect and with a strange serenity. These stories take you in utterly, and then truly reward you, like magic tricks that really work. I can't really give you any plot nuggets or summaries for these, because they don't work except in their own context, provided by the stern, rigorous language and the limitations of the prose. They're so strange and explosive in the ideas that drive them that they need Evenson's specific containers to make them conceivable. Story after story I would finish and then say, "That was so WEIRD. And FABULOUS." Then I'd hungrily go on to the next.

It's not surrealism -- everything is true within its own law. It's maybe alterealism. Whatever it is, it was enormously engaging and challenging to read and halfway through I was already thinking in my head of people I know who would love a book like this. Definitely read it. A small black rendering on a blank tablet, of something truly different, is more intriguing than a dense and colorful mural, six blocks long, of something we already know.