A Collapse of Horses

‘Stark and often jaw-droppingly funny…Some of the stories here evoke Kafka, some Poe, some Beckett, some Roald Dahl…but Evenson’s deadpan style always estranges them a bit from their models.’—New York Times

‘Evenson’s fiction is equal parts obsessive, experimental and violent. It can be soul-shaking.’—New Yorker

‘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

‘Evenson is interested in philosophy and semiotics, the impossibility of ever truly knowing or naming the world, and our fundamental, helpless dependence on what our senses tell us…[His stories] are a wonderful feat of the uncanny.’—Los Angeles Review

‘You never realize how deep his fiction has wormed its way into your brain until hours, days, even weeks later, when you’re lying in the dark and Evenson’s images come flooding back, unbidden. A Collapse of Horses will stay with you for a long time…whether you want it to or not.’—Chicago Review of Books

‘One of the most consistently vital and unnerving voices in writing today.’—VICE

‘Evenson’s stories, small masterworks of literary horror, are elegantly tense. They operate in psychological territory, never relying on grossness or slasher silliness to convey their scariness…For the Stephen King fan in the house.’—Kirkus

‘A master class in unnerving storytelling; seventeen short narratives that range from horror to science fiction and from surrealism to noir. The variety is outstanding, the writing is superb, but what makes this collection deserving of attention is how Evenson manages to achieve a perfect balance between what is on the page and what is left out.’—Electric Literature

‘While they run the gamut of genres, these stories all lie in the same orbit of dark gravity: a field of dust, blood, head trauma, inert flesh, semicorporeal stuff and fear– mainly the terror of what we’re capable of.’—Rumpus

‘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.’—Sydney Morning Herald