Book Review : Brian Evenson - The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell (2021)
The fiction of Brian Evenson is both instantly recognizable and impossible to describe. It’s unconventional, but accessible. Familiar, but not conventionally satisfying. That’s why he’s been so loved by a fiercely loyal audience for so many years without ever getting to Stephen King levels of fame. If horror was Goth music, he would be Bahaus and not Marilyn Manson. His latest collection The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell would be a weird, ambient contemporary project meant for completists and completists only.
The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell is made up of a whopping twenty-two that obliterate the notion of genre, while all loosely being horror. If you’re already a fan of Brian Evenson, almost none of them will surprise you, but they do feel slightly different. To Breathe the Air is a lengthier science fiction endeavour that can both work as an anti-capitalist manifesto and a Christian metaphor. There is very little violence and the dread is quite subdued, but the visual universe Evenson created for it is unsettling.
While I thought the story didn’t quite work on the surface, it was filled with powerful detail that made it hard to forget. This whole collection is, really. Although, boundaries have always been a thematic playing field for Brian Evenson, he really lets loose in his exploration here. Boundaries is a very abstract term in a vacuum and it can mean almost anything in the worlds of The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell. The boundaries between life and death, body and environment, reality and dream, etc.
The latter is explored in my favourite story in the collection His Haunting, where a man is trying to figure out with his therapist if the presence he feels at night is real or not. Grauer in the Snow challenges the very notion of a reality in a whiteout where the world seems like its deleting itself. Justle is a metafictional, Lovecraftian tale of the boundaries between reality and folklore slipping away. The notion of what you know to be real and what you know not to be is always challenged and never resolved.
That’s why many Brian Evenson stories don’t really have a beginning and an ending. They have a texture, like lengthy, experimental songs. In Myling Kommer, everything seems preordained and the interest of the story is just to understand this along the character. It eschews conventional structure. It’s like you’re reading the last ten pages of a novel. The Shimmering Wall is another good example of what I’m talking about. It is based on exploring the nuances and variations around one idea.
So, is The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell worth your time and love the same way classics like Lasts Days and The Open Curtain are? It feels a lot less aggressive and a lot more abstract than these two. It definitely doesn’t exist to convert non fans. It is very much a laboratory where a grandmaster bends and twists form and themes only to see what is going to happen. I’m glad it exists, but I doubt I’ll return to it often. The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell is the length to where Brian Evenson can go. For now, at least.
