Karsten, like Rawley in “Black Bark,” traverses into the cruel, barren wilderness alone, singeing his hair and blistering his fingers when he accidentally falls asleep by the fire.

“The Blood Drip” depicts two male protagonists as well, with Karsten leaving his friend Nils for dead after Nils is hit in the head with a stone, skull showing through his peeling scalp, reminiscent in its gore of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Upon Sugg’s mysterious return, there is a distinctly malevolent shift to his nature, though to name this malevolence specifically would give away the ending. At a certain point, Sugg vanishes, leaving Rawley, the other main character, alone in the forest. Sugg, one of the protagonists, limps as his leg weeps blood, the two men trudging through the mountain wilderness. In the first story, “Black Bark,” a pair of outlaws flees from a group of unidentified assailants. The first and last pieces in the collection, for instance, immediately create an atmosphere of Cormac McCarthy-esque violence and carnage. In A Collapse of Horses, Evenson’s stories, either vaguely or directly, contain homages to some of horror’s most well-known writers.

This collection is his 15th full-length work of fiction, in addition to two books of nonfiction and numerous works of translation. I imagine the slip perhaps resulting from the proliferation of different aesthetics and styles of horror that Brian Evenson so skillfully weaves together in his newest short story collection.īrian Evenson is one of the most eclectic authors in the contemporary landscape-he shifts between literary minimalism, horror, sci-fi, noir, and dark humor with ease, and depending on the book, he is equally likely to be invoking continental philosophy as he is to be writing the novelization of the video game Halo (though his works that lie firmly in the realm of genre tend to be written under his pseudonym BK Evenson).

I have, on occasion, referred to this book by the wrong title, A Collapse of Horrors rather than A Collapse of Horses.

A collapse of horses stories