This book contains what I consider the creepiest damn story I have ever read. No matter how many times I return to it, "The Wavering Knife" genuinely spooks me. It is masterful, disturbing, and eerie; probably the best example of literary horror since "The Yellow Wallpaper." I also loved "Moran's Mexico" just for its glancing moments of real derangement. "One Over Twelve" makes the hallucination scene in Trainspotting look like a kids' movie. And hell if I can actually understand it, but "The Pr...

some incredible, some mediocre stories in here. very macabre. the occasional mockery of southernness and religious fundamentalism is a bit tired, but the more surreal stories ("The Ex-Father" esp.) are rocking. True story: I was reading this on the Metro in DC when a woman barfed all over me; my copy has the vomit stains to prove it.

I wish I had written this book. Dark, methodical, these stories wiggle their way into your brain and stay there for a long, long time like little cerebro-literary worms.

"44) Brian Evenson —- The Wavering Knife (contains “Barcode Jesus,” one of the finest American short stories of the last sixty years)" --Samuel R. Delany, his 50 literary pillars http://bigother.com/2012/07/30/for-bi...

The typeface in this book is the ugliest shit I've ever seen. Yes, that impeded my enjoyment. I did like about six of these nineteen stories, but that's not a very good ratio. I got a pretty heavy Paul Auster vibe off this guy (granted I've only read the New York Trilogy but I feel like that's enough to get an Auster vibe off another author) in that these aren't really stories, they're more like ideas of stories. I'm reminded of what Dave Kehr said about A Woman is a Woman: "Godard's idea of a m...

Having read Brian Evenson's 2016 novella, 'The Warren' and his latest story collection, 'A Collapse of Horses", and being totally floored by both, I next went to his 2004 collection, 'The Wavering Knife.' The verdict? This is another must-read, oozing with black humor, intelligence, and reveals Evenson's willingness to troll the murky depths of humanity for stories that at times recall masters of horror such as Poe, and other times (reminds me, anyway) of "literary, southern gothic" writers, esp...

"And then, as if suddenly, their mother was dead by her own hand, the two young girls inherited by the ex-husband, their father, the ex-father."The precision and brilliance of craft of that sentence (particularly, "as if suddenly") is typical of Evenson's work as a whole. Reading an Evenson story is like being temporarily blinded by darkness, grasping an object between thumb and forefinger, and rolling it over your fingers until the shape of the thing you are holding slowly becomes clear. I pref...

Though the first couple of stories in this collection didn't wholly win me over, their humor and dark tendencies set enough hooks in my flesh to keep reading. The collection opens up after that into a world of rural religious zealots dwelling in moral ambiguity (you can almost see the Trump signs in the background), obsessed narrators, twisted psychological dramas, bizarre vignettes of violence, and torture tales that recall Kafka's 'In the Penal Colony' but ratcheted up about tenfold. The title...

I am unsure how to quantify my appreciation of this book. THE WAVERING KNIFE is a short story collection, so there were stories that were intriguing and mind-bending in a way only Brian Evenson is capable of. There was no bad story to speak of here, but there are some I didn't understand. Stories like MORAN'S MEXICO : A REFUTATION, BY C. STELZMANN or BODY for example. But some of these stories, man. They're special. WHITE SQUARE is as much of a challenge to the reader than it is to its protagoni...

The Wavering Knife by Brian Evenson Among the writers we read there are some who entertain us, some we can appreciate but don’t feel any particular affinity with, some we intensely dislike, and some we admire so much we’d like to be them. And then, there is a small category that transcends all the categories above: the writers we are simply in awe of. I had such a feeling when I read Th. Mann, or Maurice Blanchot. And now—reading Brian Evenson’s The Wavering Knife.I should say that I didn’t “lik...

This "review" first appeared in issue 6.2 of The Cincinnati Review. It's maybe the most fun I've had thinking about a book.Regarding Fleshknives1. This is the paragraph in which I overlay the subject of this review―the finest book I have read in the past twelve months, Brian Evenson’s The Wavering Knife, and, yes, less review of than documentation of experience with or through―with doilies crocheted by other-than-fictionists. By historians, say. Or musicologists. Or phenomenologists: Husserl or

The first story in this collection blew me away it was so imaginative, conceptual and metaphorical. But then none of the ensuing tales hit that high mark. The second last called "The Installation" came closest, a husband and his dying wife collaborate on making a work of art out oh her condition. And yes there's a lot about insurgent bodies, bodies in distress and captivity in this book. But none quite gripped or amazed me. There's a couple of tales that recalled Bolano's literary games, while t...

Evenson's stories are superbly constructed, but I felt this collection grow a little repetitive. When you grow accustomed to the grotesque, it ceases to be shocking. There's a lot more going on here, of course, but towards the end of the collection I started to find it tiresome. The characters are pretty much al religious nuts or regular nuts.

(this review originally appeared in Art Voice)Brian Evenson observes violence. He is the man behind the counter selling pins to boys who will push them through butterfly brains. But it's not so much "Does the butterfly die?" Or, "Why does the butterfly die?" Or even, "How does the butterfly die?" Evenson is all about dissecting the painstakingly generic transactions that brought the pin to the butterfly brain. He is also about why, in the end, the boy and the butterfly are exactly the same. Or t...

An excellent collection of short stories dealing with themes of obsession, horror and other miscellaneous oddities, tied together by Brian Evenson's malignant preoccupation with the theme of human distortion. Just like the title suggests, Brian Evenson loves creating a wavering effect between the grit of humanity and the illusions that often come to define us. He gives us chaos, and characters thrown into that chaos on some kind of quest to uncover the truth. Characters become art, objects or un...

Along with Dan Chaon and George Saunders, Brian Evenson rounds out the contemporary trio of short-story authors treading the genre lines between horror, comedy and the literary. Compared to Chaon and Saunders though, Evenson overpowers the reader with stories heavy with bleakness, no matter how suggestive they read at times; and his scenarios where characters pass over into landscapes (both cerebral and tangible) and barely come back the same are as uniquely bizarre as they are carefully constru...

Evenson made his name with his short fiction, but until I completed "The Wavering Knife," I'd only encountered him in long form: the (great) novels "The Open Curtain" and "Immobility," and the (great) novella "The Brotherhood of Mutilation." And while nothing in this collection hit me as hard as "Brotherhood" (that would be saying a lot, because "Brotherhood" is one of the most haunting things I've ever read), you can see here why Evenson seems to prefer this mode, which allows him a level of cr...

What a strange, dark, original, little collection. Surreal at times, all-too-real at others (see what I did there?). I don't remember exactly where I first came across Evenson's name but he comes with much acclaim. Everyone seems to agree that the story 'Promise Keepers' is far and away the best (and one of the most disturbing) of the collection. It's also pretty darn funny.Some other noteworthy stories are 'White Squares', 'The Intricacies of Post-Shooting Etiqutte', 'Virtual', 'Barcode Jesus',...

I think Evenson is quite brilliant. I only gave the book 4 stars but perhaps I will return to this collection and try again at a later date. I think some of the darkness and violence and uncertainty in these stories unnerved me at a bit. Yet they are very well written, unusual, original, and interesting. I loved the Intricacies of Post-Shooting Etiquette and Promisekeepers. I think there was a lightness of tone and a sense of humor in these stories that helped with the sombre nature of the subje...

This is one of the best collections I've ever read. Evenson's strengths and range are showcased here. This is certainly a less accessible collection than Fugue State, so if that's your first exposure be warned. But there is a brilliant mix here of satire, meta-whimsy, twisted visions, bizarre surrealism, brutality, minimalism, Lovecraftian fantasyscapes, and overdoses of the human condition that should satisfy even the more jaded readers of fringe lit. "House Rules" will break your brain. "The I...