A Collapse of Horses (ePub)

A stuffed bear beats with the rhythm of a dead baby's heart; a crew on a space mission are dying of exposure to alien dust and at the hands of a killer among them; and a town keeps receding to the east as a man travels back to the father who drove him away.

In these stories, Brian Evenson unsettles us with the everyday and the extraordinary—the terror of living with the knowledge of all we cannot know.
Brian Evenson is the author of a dozen works of fiction. He has been a finalist for the Edgar Award and the Shirley Jackson Award, and has won an International Horror Guild Award and American Library Association's award for Best Horror Novel. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches at CalArts.
'Evenson's fiction is stark and often jaw-droppingly funny...Some of the stories here evoke Kafka, some Poe, some Beckett, some Roald Dahl, and one, a demonic teddy-bear chiller called "BearHeart™" even Stephen King, but Evenson's deadpan style always estranges them a bit from their models: He tells his odd tales oddly, as if his mouth were dry and the words won't come out right.' New York Times
'There is not a more intense, prolific or apocalyptic writer of fiction in America than Brian Evenson.' George Saunders
'Evenson's fiction is equal parts obsessive, experimental and violent. It can be soul-shaking.' New Yorker'A collection of 17 powerful and sometimes very weird stories, some of which will send a shiver up the spine of the most well-balanced reader. Brian Evenson has a genuinely original imagination and a strong stomach.' Sydney Morning Herald


'Brian Evenson is one of the treasures of American story writing, a true successor both to the generation of Coover, Barthelme, Hawkes and Co., but also to Edgar Allan Poe.' Jonathan Lethem
'One of the most provocative, inventive and talented writers we have working today.' Believer