Dark Tales of Brutal Reality and Repression That We Would Recognize in Daily Life

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. ( )

Half of these stories are brutal, relentless, and cold. The other half (and I don't mean exactly 50 percent, but *some*) present a lighter, easier 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. ( )