Brian BK Evenson Books in Order

Violent rural encounters, unexplained murders, and a transformed version of the biblical Job story fill this collection of stories and a novella. Its characters move through spare, unsettling worlds where brutality often resists any reassuring explanation.

In uncertain landscapes haunted by poverty, tyranny, and ghosts, the boundary between life and death becomes unstable. These early stories follow figures including a scientist trying to defeat mortality and a man who hears birds calling his name.

Provost Eldon Fochs's disturbing behavior raises questions for his therapist about criminality, delusion, and spiritual evil. As suspicions of abuse grow, the church's determination to protect its reputation exposes the danger of institutional power and unquestioning obedience.

These stories explore an unsettling world of violence, apocalypse, and grotesque encounters, including the tale of two brothers. Precise exchanges and psychological undercurrents expose the tensions beneath experiences that refuse to settle into familiar explanations or genres.

A woman carries a dying infant across a desolate landscape toward a fortress occupied by a resurrection cult. Scavengers threaten her journey, a bounty hunter follows, and the promise of sanctuary conceals an unsettling form of religious fanaticism.

Brian Evenson examines Robert Coover's short stories and novels, tracing the overlapping modes that shape his fiction. This study explores how a major writer of postmodern metafiction moves between different approaches to storytelling and literary experiment.

Obsessive minds, isolated writers, and unsettling acts of representation shape these stories of fractured reality. Characters pass beyond ordinary human limits as language and thought become paths toward violence, madness, and mysteries that resist a clear solution.

Teenager Rudd Theurer discovers newspaper accounts of a murder linked to Mormon blood sacrifice while researching a school project. With his newly found half-brother Lael, he becomes increasingly absorbed in a violent history that destabilizes the present.

Nineteen stories follow characters caught in paranoia, amnesia, pursuit, and strange forms of retribution. From a woman confined by a mime's imaginary box to a mistaken messiah after an apocalypse, ordinary fears become bewildering threats to identity.

After losing a hand, detective Kline is forcibly recruited to investigate a murder within a secret religious society. The cult's devotion to self-mutilation creates a dangerous maze of deception and threats through which he must navigate to survive.

Geophysicist Michael Altman investigates an alien artifact discovered beneath the Yucatan peninsula. Set centuries before the Dead Space games, this prequel explores the Black Marker and the events surrounding the emergence of the religion known as Unitology.

Mysterious disappearances and disturbances blur the line between imagination and reality in these stories. A woman loses step with the world, a servant falls under a horse's influence, and an independently minded transplanted ear unsettles its recipient.

Jensi follows his troubled brother Istvan to an offworld high-security prison, hoping to keep him safe. Their bond is tested by a hidden horror connected to the Black Marker, whose technology threatens to transform humanity's future.

Josef Horkai awakens with missing memories and paralysis in a world devastated by catastrophe. Told he must recover a stolen object, he is carried across the ruins by two men whose nature and mission remain disturbingly uncertain.

Recovering addict and radio DJ Heidi Hawthorne receives an anonymous record from a band called The Lords. Playing its strange music unleashes disturbing events in Salem, where inherited bloodlines and a history of witchcraft threaten her fragile stability.

Brian Evenson traces Chester Brown's Yummy Fur from its small-press beginnings to the graphic novels it produced. Examining discarded material, Gospel adaptations, and serialized storytelling, he considers the relationship between religious themes, absurdity, and the experience of reading comics.

Everyday objects and impossible landscapes become sources of uncertainty in these stories. A stuffed bear carries an uncanny heartbeat, a city keeps slipping out of reach, and relentless dust threatens a distant mine as doubt turns into terror.

X lives inside the Warren with unreliable memories and personalities imprinted within him. Discovering someone above ground forces him to question his own humanity, while the survival of two species depends on what he learns beyond his shelter.

Three years after a pathogen kills most men and transforms survivors into violent ferals, Allie Hilts lives in a guarded women's encampment. Changes in the creatures' movements suggest an approaching threat that could overwhelm their isolated refuge.

A filmmaker pursues an impossible silence, a therapist appears in a patient's bedroom, and a newborn's missing face surfaces elsewhere. These stories examine how distorted perception and self-deception allow ordinary people to justify disturbing impulses and actions.

A prepared trap threatens those who encounter the cabin in this short horror story. Published as part of Nightfire's Come Join Us by the Fire anthology, the tale centers on the terror waiting for unsuspecting arrivals.

These horror stories explore damaged environments, uncanny beings, and difficult choices about survival after humanity's destruction of the Earth. A murderous prosthetic leg and creatures behind a shimmering wall appear among tales combining psychological dread with ecological disaster.

Long after biological life has disappeared, a civilization of synthetic beings remains preoccupied with children. Their efforts to understand that vanished relationship lead them to question what life can mean in a world inhabited by artificial successors.

Twenty stories explore fear, loss, and the uncertain return of people thought gone. Characters face threats including a stalker they believed dead, while longing for absent loved ones draws them toward unsettling encounters with what remains beyond understanding.

Artificial beings, displaced twins, and strange maternal relationships inhabit these stories about intelligence and life beyond humanity. Feelings of isolation and ecological dread take unfamiliar forms as questions of care, identity, and responsibility unfold near the edge of apocalypse.

After destroying a cult's headquarters, battered investigator Kline waits in a holding cell. An ex-cop offers help with his sentence, but the bargain draws him into a cult schism and another investigation involving ritual murder and dismemberment.