A story full of obsessive images like a nightmare that just keeps returning. The title story A Collapse of Horses is absolutely one of the most malignantly disturbing stories I have ever read. Now to talk a little of the stories contained in this tome. Or maybe in the interest of your mental health you really shouldn’t. To see what I mean, try this little experiment, read A Collapse of Horses while listening to Haino’s album So, Black is Myself. And it is somehow even more powerful for it. Everything is stripped down to its essential elements and what is left is this non human abstraction of horror. I think Brian Evenson is to Weird Horror what Japanese Noise is to music. What is left is a void of mystery and dread. It’s almost like there was emotion there, which for some unknown reason, has been removed. Now notice I did not say lack of emotion, I said drained. Another thing about these stories is how drained of emotion they are. He takes familiar tropes, then reassembles them in such a way where you still recognize them, but know there is something just not right. He seems to be more influenced by Demons by Daylight era Ramsey Campbell then by the usual suspects Lovecraft and Ligotti.

While I would almost say he is a bit experimental in his writing, it is an experiment in mood and theme more than say, how a Cisco or a Burroughs would experiment with form and prose style. Each story in this collection is a hymn to confusion and uncertainty. There is something indefinite and not human about Brian Evenson's stories in A Collapse of Horses. There has been a major author in the field that somehow I missed. So I read up on what collections he has available and settled in on A Collapse of Horses. After having read first Brian Evenson’s story Glasses in Ellen Datlow’s anthology Children of Lovecraft, then reading his story A Seaside Town in The Year’s Best Weird Horror volume 3, I realized there maybe a great writer who I have been overlooking. I have just read a fantastic horror collection and am excited to tell you about it.

A collapse of horses stories