Heady, resonant horror for readers who like their scares on the weird and speculative side. The author's word economy keeps the 20-plus stories in Glassy unnerving and engaging, with very few, if any, misses. The stories themselves are inventive yet familiar. My personal favorites were Myling Kommer, Come Up, The Devil's Hand, Elo Havel, and Haver. This was my first time reading Evenson, but it won't be the last.

4.5 to 5. Evenson is always so very good.

‘The World is a hell because we have made it so.’Horror often thrusts your gaze into the path of oncoming doom, be it a chilling end to everything or a fate that makes death seem like a mercy. And what can be more chilling then the idea that humanity itself may all succumb to a ghastly demise. Sure, every era has it’s apocalypse criers, but even paying marginal attention to the news lately has one wondering if we have already crossed the precipice of doom and just hang over our doom like that ca...

Literary horror at its most existential, visceral and wonderful. These strange stories build upon each other to create an uncanny shadow universe rich, vivid and shimmering with every kind of terror. Another brilliant collection.

Evenson’s latest collection of short stories is as weird as expected, starting and finishing with stories about a killer prosthetic leg, and containing stories of both psychological and ecological terror. It's well worth reading, but for me, it pales into insignificance when placed next to his ‘Altmann’s Tongue’ collection of 1994. It's definitely Evenson, so to be read, but I don’t feel it’s vintage Evenson.

“Yours is a holy calling,” he told her.“Or a useless one.” “Perhaps,” he said, ever the optimist. “Perhaps.” Then he embraced her again and departed. It was, the archivist suddenly realized, the last human contact she was likely to ever have.”It is hard to argue that a collection made up of stories written for a whole bunch of different sources has a single mission statement. That said Evenson was in a flow it seems with themes he wanted to explore the collection with the subtle title The Glassy...

Working on some kind of review/interview with the author for this. This one really surprised me. More soon.

It is always a very strange and a very specific pleasure to read Brian Evenson's short stories - a very own blend of latent dread, existential fears, perturbed presentation of everyday life and a good portion of chuckle humor is sure to grab and not let go until you have finished reading the last page. So, I’m more than happy to have had that pleasure again when this summer his new short story collection The Glassy Burning Floor of Hell was published.Apart from the exceptional high quality of ea...

This book is a collection of 22 short stories of "weird fiction." I love that "weird fiction" is a genre. The title is apparently from the novel Miss MacIntosh, My Darling by Marguerite Young, which means this collection is the best part of that behemoth, probably."Leg," 4/5One of her legs was not a leg at all but a separate creature that had learned to act like a leg.Very short, written in the style of a children's fairy tale."In Dreams," 1/5And his emotions had been blunted too, muted in the w...

Real Rating: 4.5* of five, rounded up because you won't find a better teacher or practitioner of the form in any genreI RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.My Review: A collection from Brian Evenson, even one with some pieces that weren't quite as welcome to me as they ordinarily are (see the whole review), will never not be greeted with warbles of delight from me. These tales are all from other homes, but they belong together. They're Family, much as a cult is.... Last D...

More notes here:https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...I'd place this on a similar exalted level as Fugue State and Windeye, and significantly higher than Evenson's last two collections. The stories are a bit more varied and less singlemindedly obsessive than what I consider the "classics" in Fugue State. Quite a few have a science fiction context, but handled in characteristically Evenson-esque ways. There's also the recurring theme of human extinction, perhaps much deserved given our callousn...

Fucking brilliant, but I expected nothing less. Evenson honestly can do no wrong and this collection is proof of the crazy scary endless depths of this man's imagination. These are creepy, unsettling, crawl up under your skin and hibernate in your brain kind of stories. The BEST kind of stories.

Exhibit A of how Indie press is turning out some of the best, most daring writing out there. This is creepy horror done well, repeatedly, in story after story. There are a few themes which are reoccurring. The author is eco-conscious, extrapolating that we human beings are scarier than anything we can conjure, and without drastic change, we face environmental disasters of our own making. Evenson creates an otherworldly atmosphere, and suffuses it with an eerie sense of isolation and despair. He

My first Evenson! I've read individual stories here and there but never before a full collection, and this one was freakin' fantastic. Some stories are eerie, some are outright terrifying, some are strange in other ways... and nearly all of them are fantastic. Even the stories that didn't hit for me were interesting and odd; can't wait to go read a thousand more of his tales.

I'm in awe of Brian Evenson, and have been for some time now. His work is unique in a way that I have never encountered before, and the slipperiness of his prose is astonishing. He is meticulous in his construction, too: each word, each sentence, builds on the next in an efficient, brutal pattern to create a vision in your mind. This is what makes it so jarring and so disorienting once he collapses the whole structure around your disbelieving eyes. Often, all it takes is something as simple as a...

Yet another astoundingly good collection of stories from Evenson. The more of his writing I read, the more of it I want to read; he is an addictively good horror writer the likes of which are few and far between nowadays. I cannot recommend this, and everything else of his I have read, enough.

The horror in Evenson's work lies in it's ambiguity. There is always something terrible that is inferred but left unsaid. Something that lurks in the places we cannot see. Inexplicable, dreadful things happen, yet Evenson does not provide us the refuge of reason or explanation. I think his work often reflects the unfamiliar fathoms of ourselves - our unspoken traumas, forgotten histories and subconscious fears.In The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell, this ambiguity does not always lend a story st...

This was my first, and will likely be my only, encounter with Brian Evenson's work. If this collection is any indication of his style, Evenson's stories can be bucketed in one of two categories; they are either incredibly off-putting science fiction, or, alternatively, retro, almost classic, horror (think The Twilight Zone). For me, the retro classics worked and the science fiction resoundingly did not. Without a doubt, my overwhelming feeling throughout my reading of this collection was that mo...

Really, really good! Kicking off a collection with a story about a murderous prosthetic leg is a bold move. Worth reading for that story alone. But my five favorite stories, probably in order, are: 1. Myling Kommer (a boy haunted by his family's dark secrets)2. Haver (a mental patient with an otherworldly artistic talent)3. A Bad Patch (invasive, mind-altering body horror)4. Come Up (slowly drowning in paranoia and guilt)5. Curator (misanthropy in the post-apocalypse) I also love that the final,...

Apparently I love literary horror these days? I loved each one of these stories.