Slant to Reality | An Interview with Brian Evenson

By Gabino Iglesias

Few things in literature that aren’t up for debate, but the fact that Brian Evenson is among the most versatile and accomplished writers of contemporary American fiction is one of them. From science fiction and horror and to mystery and that elusive thing we call literary fiction—and in novels, novellas, and short stories—Evenson consistently delivers rock-solid narratives that nevertheless place the reader on shaky ground. In an Evenson story, outright body horror might dance a grotesque ballet with uncertainty, an apparition can force the main character to question reality, or, in the span of just a few pages, an entire alien world can materialize. With the release of The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell, a truly outstanding short story collection, I wanted to talk to Evenson not only about his new work but also about fiction in general and the elements that make his writing so remarkable. Here’s what he had to say.

Gabino Iglesias: One of my favorite elements of your work is the systematic introduction of the weird and the impossible without explanation. This is at once something lovers of your work celebrate and something that those who need their fiction processed and explained—those who crave reasons for everything—strongly dislike. How do you approach the uncanny as a narrative starts taking shape in your head? Do you ever worry about suspension of disbelief?

Brian Evenson: A lot of my work begins by throwing the reader into the middle of things and asking them to catch up and let the world of the story build itself up around them, largely by implication. It’s a sink or swim sort of thing, and I think it can be really satisfying for readers who don’t mind feeling a little disoriented for a little bit. I think if you can wait it out and put aside your need for certainty for a bit, then really interesting things start to happen in terms of how you take in the piece of fiction (which can’t help but trickle down to how you apprehend the world). And it’s pretty quickly a dividing line. If you’re not the kind of reader who can tolerate that or if you’re a reader who thinks of reading as primarily a matter of processing information, much of my work might not be to your taste. Often in my fiction, the moment where I ask the reader to be willing to suspend their disbelief and just go with it happens early, sometimes even in the first sentence. A story like “Any Corpse,” for instance, begins with a shower of meat falling from the sky without any explanation: either you accept it as a given and read on to learn more or you stop reading. Some of my other stories ease into weirdness a little bit more slowly and, hopefully, bring readers in deeply enough before I demand a suspension of disbelief—that I ask the reader to trust my authority. But yes, I think about suspension of disbelief constantly and try slightly different things for different stories. But I’m also okay with knowing that some readers aren’t going to be up to my particular brand of strangeness. It requires a certain amount of playfulness and self-definition to be able to give up your need for certainty, even in a fictional setting, and that isn’t for everyone. It’s definitely for me, though. I’m writing the kinds of stories that I wish there had been more of when I was first developing as a reader.

GI: Between Altmann’s Tongue, The Wavering Knife, Fugue State, Windeye, A Collapse of Horses, Song for the Unraveling of the World, and The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell, your love for short fiction is obvious. However, you are also an accomplished novelist. Are there differences in the way you tackle short fiction and longer projects?

BE: Yes, lots of differences. I love short stories—you can do so much in such a small space, and can do a lot by implication. There’s something really liberating in fantastical fiction about creating a world that may exist only for a few pages, allowing something to happen in it, and then letting the world come to an end. I’m one of those rare writers lucky enough to have more ideas than I ever could possibly write, but working in the short story form allows me to write more of them than I’d be able to do with longer fiction. However, the trade-off is that I just touch briefly on certain ideas rather than plumbing their complexities as you might in a longer form. A friend just wrote to me this morning about a story in the latest collection, ”The Devil’s Hand,” and said, “You know, there’s a whole second half that you could have developed for that story.” He’s right, of course. Much of my short fiction leaves a lot open, which I hope means that the story continues to work in readers’ minds after they put the book down. So, yes, I could have written that second part, but I think its specifics are implied enough in what’s already there that I’d rather leave it as the ghost of the story that’s on the page, something that haunts the reader. The other thing I love about short stories is that you can be very precise with the language, do small and careful things with sound and rhythm, etc., and still expect the reader to remember them. You can demand a lot of the reader for a story, partly because it’s short.

With a novel, it’s hard to expect readers to remember what was happening with the language at the beginning by the time you reach the end. Yet a novel allows you to take an idea and really explore it in ways that sometimes open it up in new ways, in ways you couldn’t have predicted when you started out. Novels can be so much more immersive than stories are. They can also do so much to generate their own strange, peculiar worlds. I can write short stories in bursts, but a novel usually for me is a matter of sustained work over the course of a lot of consecutive days; if I don’t work on it that way, I start to lose track of what interests me about it and it’s a real effort to recover it.

I’ve come to realize that different projects dictate their form to me—that I know pretty quickly how long or short a project is going to be. That’s not to say it couldn’t be longer or shorter, only that my aesthetic and my philosophical and other interests gravitate toward certain lengths for certain ideas. I’ve had the experience of starting something that I think is going to be a fairly short story and then, after a page or two, I realize I’m on my way to a novella. I’ve learned to give in to that impulse when I feel it, partly because not giving into it leads to a piece of fiction that doesn’t quite work.

GI: After having written so many short stories, what keeps you coming back to that form? Is there anything about it that still challenges you?

BE: I think the short story is such a wonderful, flexible form, and it continues to challenge and surprise me. All the time, I read stories that do small (or even large) things that I haven’t seen done before, and that makes me want to continue to mess around with the form. It’s a form that you can twist and rearrange and truncate and still make work. It can mimic other forms, do remarkable things with perspective, do so much with sound patterns and rhythm, and is so good at allowing you to get things across by implication. I imagine it’s something I’ll continue to find interesting and fascinating to the very end of my career.

At the same time, I think my preferred form, the one I admire most, is the novella, partly because I think the best novellas possess the best qualities of short stories as well as the best qualities of novels. It’s such a remarkable, dynamic form.

GI: Few contemporary authors blend genres as seamlessly as you. The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell, like other collections before it, contains horror, mystery, and science fiction, to name a few. To me, this means you’re either not thinking about genre at all and that each comes naturally to you, or that you’re perpetually aware of the elements of each genre you like best and how you can bring them together in new ways. Staring at a gun, I’d say the latter, but I’d love to hear your thoughts on how genre influences—or not!—your work.

BE: The answer you’d give while staring at a gun strikes me as the correct one. As people who have had me as a teacher know, I’m constantly thinking about genre, how genre works, how different genres relate, how form and genre coincide or don’t. These concerns are always playing out in my work. It’s not that I think, “I’m going to sit down and investigate this genre element from SF in this story.” It’s more that I start writing; I usually don’t know where I’m going when I start writing, especially when I’m writing a short story, which may be one of the other reasons I love that form. Then something comes up and it makes me think about the way this idea or trope or element has been used differently by other writers in various genres. And then I begin to explore the idea in a way that’s in active conversation with the explorations that have come before. I read a lot, and read widely, and think about the stuff I read (even if I don’t always remember it perfectly). You don’t have to know about those earlier explorations to read mine, but, if you do, you might find additional resonances. I’ve long thought that someone with strictly a literary background has a very different experience with my work than someone who has a certain amount of background reading genre fiction.

GI: Speaking of elements: between other worlds, the mysteries of what happens when we lose consciousness, mutilation, aliens, disappearances, and the plethora of other recurring elements in your work, it’s clear we should talk about the Evenson Mythos. For example, “Curator” reminded me of the devastated world and suits of Immobility. Is creating a cohesive body of work something you set out to do or something that occurred organically?

BE: To the degree that it’s occurred, it’s occurred organically. There are definitely echoes of Immobility in “Curator,” even though the world and its circumstances are different. But there’s a kind of ethos that seems to be similar—the main character in the world of “Curator” has reached conclusions similar to the character called Rikte in Immobility. But each character comes at it from a different position and even a different way of being in the world. Rikte is not exactly human, whereas the curator very much is. I think there are certain ideas that I can’t help but circle back to, either because they fascinate me or because they terrify me or both. I think those connections, ultimately, feel more like a web that loosely holds a body of work together than something systematic or cohesive. That happens within books, too. There are lots of thematic (and other sorts of) connections across The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell, but it’s less that they all add up to one thing and more that the book as a whole, with a mesh of connections between different stories, starts to feel like an intentional object. At least I hope so.

GI: Despite all the horror and weirdnes featured in your work it is, first and foremost, about exploring and understanding the human condition. The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell is no different. For example, in several of these stories, characters try to help or save each other. Several lose their spouses and parents. As the real world becomes more like an Evenson story, how do you manage to write fiction that is simultaneously wildly imaginative and so deeply humane?

BE: This is a hard question to answer. Yes, I do think that my work is about understanding what it means to be human, sometimes by contrasting it to the inhuman or the posthuman, or by showing humans as more inhuman than those who are not. I’d like to think that there’s an ethical thread through my work, one that involves just looking honestly and ruthlessly at people, paying attention, and trying to understand. It’s definitely true that as the real world has become stranger, as reality seems more contingent and manipulable, it’s sometimes hard not to turn your fiction into an essay on what’s wrong with the world. I’ve resisted that, partly because I think fiction can be exceptionally good at understanding the world in a way that feels slant to reality, that comments on reality as we know it but, first and foremost, is about creating a world and allowing that world to play out with its own logic. One reader told me that The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell felt like a book written during the pandemic. They even pointed out evidence of it—moments that she saw as taken from our moment. But because of the lag time in publishing the book, of course it was completely written and edited a month or two before the pandemic started. Yet there was something about the moment that much of the book was written in that could be extrapolated, in a slant fashion, into the stories in my book, and that also was a kind of natural continuation into what the last year and a half have been for us. I see fiction as developing from reality, but I don’t see it as beholden to reality. I see it as predictive and creative rather than mimetic. For me, fiction that reproduces reality is too often boring and too often belated. It tells us little about the moment we’re living through since it’s too chained to a past moment. Fiction should create a reality, not replicate it.

GI: I’m very curious about your process when it comes to deciding what is a short story and what is a novella or novel. For example, the backstory, separate world/cities/societies, and everything that’s left off the page in “To Breathe the Air” made me want to read a novella version in which we’re given all of it. How do you decide which ideas get 3,000 words and which ones get a whole book?

BE: I think of “To Breathe the Air” as a novelette—a term that gets used in science fiction and fantasy but very few other places—something halfway between a story and a novella, with its own strengths and concerns. With a story like that, that felt like the right length for it, this decision being largely intuitive. But I like that world quite a bit and could see revisiting it or trying to recast it as a novella. I think that could work, and I like that story enough that I might be tempted to go back to it. It actually began as a response to a single image by the artist and illustrator Jeffrey Alan Love (to whom the story is dedicated), and when I started it I had no idea how long it would be. At first I thought it’d only be a half dozen pages, but that story quickly took on steam. Once I was a few pages in, I knew it’d be in the novelette range. It’s one that I do feel could potentially be longer, if I can figure out a way to make it longer without ruining the surprise/twist.

In terms of how I know which ideas get 3,000 words and which ones get a whole book, again, and in all honesty, it’s largely intuitive. I write by hand, and by the time I’ve written just a few pages of a piece of fiction I almost always know whether it will be a short short, a short story, a novelette, a novella, or a novel. Every once in a while, that will change, but not all that often. When I wrote “The Brotherhood of Mutilation,” for example, I thought that I was done, that it was a novella and that was that. But that story kept nagging me until I went back and made it into a novel, Last Days. And it’s still nagging me, so much so that I’m working on a sequel. There’s something about that world and its circumstances that’s calling me back in.

GI: Besides writing, you do a lot: teach, parent, read voraciously, etc. How do you find the time to be as prolific as you are with everything else going on in your life?

BE: I’ve gotten very good at using what time I have, partly because I had kids when I was pretty young and so just had to do that if I was going to get anything done at all. I’m pretty good at jumping right into a project rather than checking my email or looking at cat videos first—it’s easy to spend a good part of your writing time with things like that if you’re not careful. There’s always something that wants to take you away from writing time, and some of those things are good (family) and others bad (administrative emails from school, busy work). I also don’t sleep much, and that helps in terms of giving me time. Still, it’s a struggle sometimes, especially so during the pandemic. My son Max has been at home taking second grade remotely and my wife Kristen Tracy (who is also a writer) and I have had to take turns helping him. He’s just started back to in-person school, so we’re hoping we’ll both have more time to write soon.

GI: Saying you read voraciously is kind of an understatement. In fact, you are one of the few people out there whose recommendations immediately go in my “get this ASAP” list. Could you tell us about some recent reads you think everyone should check out as soon as they’re done reading The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell?

BE: Yes, I love to read—it’s almost a compulsion. In terms of stuff I’ve read this year, Agustina Bazterrica’s Tender is the Fles was remarkable. I also loved a 1972 John Brunner science-fiction novel entitled The Sheep Look Up. It feels relevant to our moment. Antoine Volodine’s Solo Viola is great, as is Catherine Lacey’s Pew. I loved Brandon Hobson’s The Removed—all of Hobson’s books are great. Rikki Ducornet’s Trafic is really surrealistic science fiction and a fun, quick, crazy read. J. S. Breukelaar’s The Bridge is good speculative work, and Kay Chronister’s Thin Places is one of the best debut collections I’ve read in a while. I also loved Tom Lin’s The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu. There are a bunch of others I read when I was a judge for the World Fantasy Award that I don’t feel like I can mention until the winner is announced, but if you look at the finalist list for that competition, you’ll see a lot that I liked.

GI: I honestly loathe the “What are you working on now?” question, but sometimes we must give in to things we hate because they bring us things we love. In any case, I will rephrase that question here. Is it true that there might be a new Evenson novel coming soon? Maybe a new collection? Another Coffee House Press re-release?

BE: I’ve got about half a collection’s worth of stories done that I feel are solid and should be in the next book. I’ve also got about a third of a novel completed—a sequel to Last Days called Phantom Limb. And I have an idea for a kind of supernatural Western that I’d love to do. It might be a short story, or it might be a novella. I’m not sure which I’ll finish first, but one of those anyway . . .

Gabino Iglesias is a writer, professor, and book reviewer living in Austin, Texas. He is the author of Zero Saints and Coyote Songs and the editor of Both Sides: Stories from the Border. You can find him on Twitter @Gabino_Iglesias.

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