Song for the Unraveling of the World

Product Description

A newborn’s absent face appears on the back of someone else’s head, a filmmaker goes to gruesome lengths to achieve the silence he’s after for his final scene, and a therapist begins, impossibly, to appear in a troubled patient’s room late at night. In these stories of doubt, delusion, and paranoia, no belief, no claim to objectivity, is immune to the distortions of human perception. Here, self-deception is a means of justifying our most inhuman impulses―whether we know it or not.

Review

Finalist for the 2019 Los Angeles Times Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Speculative Fiction

Finalist for the 2019 Big Other Book Award for Fiction
New York Times, “Best Horror Fiction”
Washington Post, “ Best Horror Fiction of the Year”
NPR, “Best Books of 2019”
Entropy,“Best of 2019”
“These stories are carefully calibrated exercises in ambiguity in which Evenson (Windeye) leaves it unclear how much of the off-kilterness exists outside of the deep-seated pathologies that motivate his characters.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Evenson’s little nightmares are deftly crafted, stylistically daring, and surprisingly emotional.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Missing persons, paranoia and psychosis . . . the kind of writer who leads you into the labyrinth, then abandons you there. It’s hard to believe a guy can be so frightening, so consistently.” —The New York Times
“Evenson is one of our best living writers—regardless of genre . . . Song is a skillfully crafted, cleverly executed, and extremely entertaining collection.” —NPR
“Evenson renders the world as a place of infinite and paralyzing delusion. . . . In an Evenson story, a house isn’t inescapable because of its lack of doors and windows; it’s inescapable because it was built by an impressionable mind.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
“To read Evenson is to be privy to a precise, vivid, brilliant unpicking of the everyday—and its others.” —China Miéville 
“You’ve heard of ‘postmodern’ stories—well, Evenson’s stories are post-everything. They are post-human, post-reason, post-apocalyptic. . . . in an Evenson story, there are two horrible things that can happen to you. You can either fail to survive, or survive.” —The New York Times
“[A] collection of short stories that deal with art, paranoia and the dark urges that haunt even the most normal people.” —Los Angeles Times
“Brian Evenson is one of my favorite living horror writers, and this collection is him at his eerie and disquieting best.” —Carmen Maria Machado 
“Evenson . . . lures readers into each twisted tale by starting not at the beginning, but . . . somewhere else, creating a sense of disorientation and unease. As each tale unspools and each surreal world clarifies into a malformed sort of logic, the creeps set firmly in. . . . Readers of literary horror will not want to miss this one.” —Library Journal
“Evenson’s uncanny but accessible fiction can remind you of Edgar Allan Poe or ‘The Twilight Zone’ . . . an inspired, thoroughly entertaining book.” —Star Tribune
“I’m not convinced Brian Evenson is entirely human. His literary horror fiction is just too good, too immersive, and too alien for a mere mortal. This book has everything one comes to expect from Evenson—brief glimpses of dark worlds where no one is completely sure where they are, who they are, or what is real.” —The A. V. Club
“Evenson at his most intense and discomfiting . . . he makes our skin rise and crawl with the intimation that all, although outwardly normal, is certainly not. Why else are we paying attention so closely?” —Los Angeles Review of Books
“Evenson is our most impressive explorer of the cracks in things that let in not the light, as Leonard Cohen would have it, but fever, chaos, and darkness.” —Vulture
“Song puts Evenson’s staggering ventriloquism on display, incorporating elements of science fiction, horror, fantasy, translation, poetry, and myth, often within a single story.” —Epiphany
“[Evenson’s] latest collection offer