Chances were he’d be stuck with the life he was living now, just as it was, until the day he was either dead or not living himself.
When the time comes, I will write myself dead and gone.
But for now, I only wait, attentive, for any movement or sound, for the moment when I can creep down the stairs and into the arms of whatever awaits me.
Which version, I wonder, will I be imagining when I fall asleep tonight? And will this make any difference in what happens to me?
Everything would eventually arrive, but it would be a long time, if ever, before anything would arrive again when it was actually needed.
He had the distinct impression that he had never been anywhere but there, that he had been here, just like this, all his life. And he would be for years to come.
These sentences, even in context, are dark and murky devices. In the middle of a short story, these sentences would egregiously foul the narrative thrust. Yet these are the final lines of five different stories within Brian Evenson’s tremendously uneven collection, Windeye (Coffeehouse Press). The title is taken from the first story, about a window that consumes a man’s sister.
I’ve been a fan of Evenson’s for years, ever since I read his meta-noir/horror novel Last Days. That book was cold, clinical, written with ruthless humour, and it never wasted a word. A professor, an intellectual, a professional French translator, Evenson for me has signalled accuracy, skill, reliability, imagination. So why was Windeye such a disappointment?
There are some standout tales: Dapplegrim, a frightening fairytale about a demon-horse that destroys a kingdom; The Second Boy, an eerie tale of meta-narrative in which the teller and receiver of a frightening story just may be the story; Harmon’s Sister, a murky retelling of the myth of Orpheus; And finally Legion, a tale of metal, amputation, and artificial intelligence. These tales are in the first third of the book. It is as though Evenson put together those stories and panicked when he realized he had a booklet and not a book. But Dapplegrim and Legion might be worth the price of the book (which I bought in Chapters. When will I learn and just buy from Amazon from now on?)
The remaining stories seem more like fragments ( A page about a man who sticks bees in his throat; a page and half about a writer finds words in corpses and reproduces them in blood), or narrative experiments ( Three men meet in a tunnel as details and identities shift back and forth in Schrodinger’s-Cat-style fashion ; a private detective is assigned to investigate the death of his own client, or perhaps his own death). A constant theme in the weaker set of stories is transparent reality and identity, but in Evenson’s case it feels, for me at least, that he is releasing vital narrative building blocks and instead relying on generating an aura of cheap mystery (‘There’s always tomorrow, thought the man, confused, who no longer was certain he was Halle. And then he couldn’t manage to think even that.’). After I read the fifth story of pliable and numb reality, I could see the trick coming, again and again. I didn’t like it.
At the end of The Tunnel, Evenson unknowingly writes his readers’ complaint: ‘It was as if none of them knew what was happening: None of them understood it, yet none of them were able to stop. And then it still got worse, for all of them.’
Evenson is still a good writer; that hasn’t changed. In the afterword, he hints that he had spent a lot of time in the hospital with a collapsed lung, and that much of the writing was influenced by his health problems. I’m going to give him a pass for two-thirds of this collection and recommend it on the strength of the first third, as well as a charming story about the first lead singer of AC/DC.