Brian Evenson’s fiction can be oddly comforting in such uncertain times as these, for in his typically grim, unsettling stories we see that circumstances could always be much more dire and desperate than whatever crisis we’re facing at a given moment. Certainly this is the case with the title story in this collection, which aptly reveals a pandemic-afflicted setting over time. This story showcases Evenson at his best, in my opinion: hypnotic, menacing, vaguely dystopic and/or apocalyptic, and ma...

Wow! This author's writing caught me from the first paragraph. Naturally, some stories were better than others, but the strong writing always carried me along. The earlier stories were better than the later ones but the book managed to maintain an utterly compelling atmosphere throughout, with some surprisingly dark humour thrown in.My favourite ones were, in no particular order: 1) A Pursuit 2) An Accounting 3) Mudder Tongue 4) Ninety Over Ninety. Will definitely be reading more of Brian Evenso...

Kafkaesque assembly of stories covering the usual categories of the horror genre but generally done from so unique a perspective that you almost don't realize exactly that a particular story belongs to a sub-genre. You end up saying: "I guess that was a ghost story, or I guess this is a zombie story.". It doesn't really matter because each story is so fresh and unique that categories and genres don't apply.Evenson's prose is spare in a way that reminds me of Ligotti or sometimes Hemingway. The l...

Evenson has this thing he does... no one else really does it like him. Every collection of stories I read by him changes me as a person and as a writer.

As my first taste of Brian Evenson's short stories, I am impressed and eager for more. I finished this days ago and did not have time to write any type of review. I returned to the book to snag some of the titles to be mentioned here and ended up reading over half of the book again, simply because it was too easy to become lost, even in stories I already knew the ending of. This is a book I will return to. Fugue State includes a variety of stories, dabbling in different genres. There are, I thin...

Another utterly fantastic collection of Evenson’s stories. He has a way of setting such an unsettling, downright hallucinatory mood that sets him a head above almost every other contemporary horror writer. His post-apocalyptic stories here, especially Fugue State and The Adjudicator, are particularly excellent.

I greatly enjoyed this thematic collection. Brian Evenson writes with the precision of a surgeon's hand to draw us into the trippy pathways that lead to madness. It's really impressive how he can do so much with so little.

The first time I remember hearing the term "fugue state" was in association with the David Lynch film Lost Highway, in which a character detaches psychologically from life he knows, loses his very self. He drifts on through life, encountering strangers who are vaguely familiar, and tripping over circumstances which seem tenuously related to the life and self-hood he knew before.I don't know how much Brian Evenson was inspired by Lynch's film, if at all. The characters in Fugue State encounter my...

Brian Evenson is great in small doses. Take the short story "Altmann's Tongue." It might seem like I'm damning him with faint praise by declaring his best piece a paragraph-long microstory, but that paragraph has beguiled me since 17. If the nonetheless-true "quality over quantity" cliche isn't enough to placate you, this collection's title story is magnificent in its creepiness, and there are a number of other good ones around here, too, from "Pursuit's" implied comeuppance to the eerie display...

I was blown away when read Evenson's collection "Windeye" a little over a year ago. That collection was published about three years after this one and I think the stories in "Windeye" are more accomplished and show a more matured style.That said there's still a lot of great work here. "Alfons Kuylers," "The Adjudicator," "Girls in Tents," "Fugue State," and "Ninety Over Ninety" are all excellent stories. "The Third Factor," "In the Greenhouse," "Bauer in the Tyrol," and "Younger" are quite good

I've been a fan of Brian Evenson's fiction for several years now, and as much as I thoroughly enjoyed his earlier collections of short stories, Fugue State strikes me as being the single best assembly of his output to date. Evenson has always trafficked in themes dark, morbid, and surreal, and all of those elements are present in these new stories. But there is a softening in the contents of Fugue State that allows these stories to rely less on shock value and more on character development, albe...

Another incredible collection. Ranks up there with Wavering Knife.

Brian Evenson is a modern day Edgar Allen Poe and one of my favorite authors today.Table of Contents:Younger, 5*A Pursuit, 5*Mudder Tongue, 3*An Accounting, 5*Desire with Digressions, 4.5Dread, 3.75Girls in Tents, 3.75Wander, 2.5In the Greenhouse, 4Ninety Over Ninety, 2.5Invisible Box, 3.5The Third Factor, 4.5Bauer in the Tyrol, 3Helpful, 3.5Life Without Father, 4Alfons Kuylers, 5Fugue State, 5Traub in the City, 3The Adjudicator, 5

Evenson writes from an extreme distance, which works with the post-apocalyptic settings and the paranoia/schizophrenia mindset of some of the stories--it's compelling (while reading, but not terribly memorable) stuff, chilling, very well written. But that same distance results in a lack of vividness for me (all the stories merge into one another, into a sort of grey streak) and a complete lack of characterization. Not a fault really, as it's certainly intentional, but the result is that the stuf...

Some stories are really great and haunting. But in some stories there was a lack of psychological depth. What i mean by this is that the psychology was just too simplified and not realistic to me. And also after reading some stories i detected a kind of gimmickry in his writing that bothered me. But overal i give it 4 stars as i did enjoyed the dark and surreal stories and some concepts even inspired me.

I found this book named on a list of books to read if you want something like season one of True Detective. Unfortunately, it seems all those lists seem to have been written with existential philosophy being the goal of someone wanting to read similar stories. Personally, I was looking for dark, nuanced thriller with tinges of horror. This collection seems to be more about existentialism than true horror or thriller. And the stories were just all over the place. Half of them I didn't quite "get"...

Each story akin to sliding just very slightly to one side and catching a glimpse into another world that operates on rules similar to but unlike our own. Fantastical in all the best ways.

Brian Evenson introduces his short story, "Girls in Tents":"When I was a kid, one of my favorite things to do was to build blanket tents. My sister and I would take as many blankets as we could find, rearrange the furniture in the living room, and then start spreading blankets from piano to couch, couch to chair and chair to banister, holding everything precariously in place with volumes from our family encyclopedia. Then we would get inside and make up stories and enjoy the way the light lit ea...

"Mudder Tongue" is a striking piece, and there are a couple other blood diamonds you can unearth yourself. Unfortunately for my preferences, Evenson leans more toward the "spine-chilling" than the thought provoking, and the former just doesn't move me. My hairs don't raise, though my eyes do roll. Too many stories tried too brashly to cultivate a sense of menace or dread and ultimately ambled into a foreseeable, clunky, quasi-Borgesian reversal, ala "it was him the whole time!" The prose is pres...

I liked this book/really liked a few of the stories in this book. I liked how the book would go from something like "Girls in Tents" (a story about two girls who make blanket tents and wait for their father ultimately learning a little something about life) to "Wander" (a story set in a post-apocalyptic world about an eyeball monster who melts flesh). Brian Evenson is a legitimately versatile writer who is able to morph his style to fit the plethora of moods and vibes in this bitch. My favorite