Brian Evenson

Brian Evenson (b. 12 August 1966) was born in Ames, Iowa, and raised in a Mormon family. He taught at Brigham Young University until his first book’s violent content prompted a confrontation with Church authorities that led to his departure from BYU and eventually from the LDS Church. He earned a PhD in critical theory from the University of Washington and has taught at Brown University and CalArts.

Life and Career

Altmann’s Tongue (1994) — a story collection of extreme violence and minimalist prose — provoked the BYU controversy. The Open Curtain (2006) and Last Days (2009) are his most sustained novels. His story collections — Fugue State (2009), A Collapse of Horses (2016), Song for the Unraveling of the World (2019) — have established him as one of the great American short story writers.

Major Works and Themes

Evenson writes about the unreliability of perception, the body’s vulnerability, and the thin membrane between sanity and dissolution. His prose is clinical, which makes the violence and strangeness of his scenarios more disturbing. His work is influenced by Beckett, Kafka, and Gordon Lish — and by the philosophical traditions of phenomenology and deconstruction that he studied at the University of Washington.

What distinguishes Evenson from other horror writers is the philosophical rigour behind the terror. His stories do not merely depict violence or madness — they interrogate the conditions under which reality becomes uncertain. In “Windeye,” a child discovers a window in his house that no one else can see; in “A Collapse of Horses,” a man recovering from a head injury cannot determine whether his memories are real. These premises are rendered in prose so controlled and precise that the reader’s own certainty is undermined.

The BYU controversy is central to understanding his work. Altmann’s Tongue — stories about violence rendered in flat, affectless prose — was not gratuitously provocative; it was an attempt to depict violence without the cathartic framing that makes it aesthetically palatable. When BYU’s administration pressured him to renounce the book, his refusal and subsequent departure from the LDS Church became a defining moment — the collision between institutional authority and artistic freedom that has shaped everything he has written since.

Critical Reception and Legacy

Evenson is the most important American writer working at the intersection of literary fiction and horror. His influence on contemporary weird fiction — on writers like Jeff VanderMeer, Carmen Maria Machado, and Laura van den Berg — is significant. He has won the Shirley Jackson Award multiple times, the International Horror Guild Award, and an O. Henry Prize. He is one of the most respected short story writers in America, despite — or because of — his refusal to work within comfortable genre boundaries.

Key Works

• Altmann’s Tongue (1994)
• Father of Lies (1998)
• The Open Curtain (2006)
• Fugue State (2009)
• Last Days (2009)
• A Collapse of Horses (2016)
• Song for the Unraveling of the World (2019) — Shirley Jackson Award

Collecting Evenson

Altmann’s Tongue (1994, Alfred A. Knopf) — his debut, published by a major house before Evenson’s full turn toward horror — is scarce. Fine first editions bring $80–$250.

His subsequent work has been published by a range of presses — Coffee House Press, FC2, Graywolf, Tor — with modest print runs that make first editions less common than they might otherwise be. The Open Curtain (2006, Coffee House Press) brings $30–$80. The story collections from Coffee House Press and Graywolf bring $20–$60.

Evenson signs at events and university readings. He is not a convention-circuit author, so signed copies are less available than for genre horror writers. Small-press limited editions exist for some titles.