Brian Evenson received an O. Henry Award for his story "Two Brothers" and has twice received O. Henry honorable mentions. In 1995 he received an NEA Fellowship; that same year he was told by Brigham Young University that if he continued to write fiction in the same vein as his first book, he would be fired. Instead, Evenson chose to leave of his own free will to teach at Oklahoma State University. He now teaches in the creative writing program at Brown University.
Genres: Horror, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Mystery
New Books
Novels
Father of Lies (1998)
Dark Property (2002)
Open Curtain (2006)
Last Days (2009)
Immobility (2012)
The Deaths of Henry King (2016) (with Jesse Ball)
Dark Property (2002)
Open Curtain (2006)
Last Days (2009)
Immobility (2012)
The Deaths of Henry King (2016) (with Jesse Ball)
Collections
Altmann's Tongue (1994)
The Din of Celestial Birds (1997)
Contagion (2000)
The Wavering Knife (2004)
Fugue State (2009)
Windeye (2012)
A Collapse of Horses (2016)
Future Dreams (2018) (with Bradley Beaulieu, Gwyneth Jones, Laurie Penny, David Tallerman and Rob Ziegler)
Whose Future Is It? (2018) (with Steven Barnes, Alex de Campi, Tananarive Due, Porpentine Charity Heartscape, Richard Larson, Sarah Pinsker, Shweta Taneja and David Wellington)
Song for the Unraveling of the World (2019)
The Nightside Codex (2020) (with Nadia Bulkin, Justin A Burnett, Selene dePackh, Philip Fracassi, Stephen Jones, Jessica McHugh, Christine Morgan, K A Opperman and Richard Thomas)
Oculus Sinister (2020) (with Rebecca J Allred, Sean Padraic Birnie, M R Cosby, Selene dePackh, Rhonda Eikamp, Douglas Ford, Elena Gomel, Timothy Granville, LC von Hessen, Mark Howard Jones, John Langan, J A W McCarthy, Christopher K Miller, James Pate, Sam Richard, Shannon Scott, Steve Rasnic Tem and Charles Wilkinson)
The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell (2021)
Hymns of Abomination (2021) (with Justin A Burnett, Gemma Files, Cody Goodfellow, Scott R Jones, John Langan, S P Miskowski, Christine Morgan, Jon Padgett, Jonathan Raab, Betty Rocksteady, Sean M Thompson and B R Yeager)
Pluto in Furs 2 (2022) (with Mike Allen, Liniana Carstea, Sara Century, Victoria Dalpe, Ashley Dioses, Rhys Hughes, Livia Llewellyn, Hysop Mulero, Perry Ruhland, Anne-Sylvie Salsman, Max D Stanton, K H Vaughan and Brendan Vidito)
The Din of Celestial Birds (1997)
Contagion (2000)
The Wavering Knife (2004)
Fugue State (2009)
Windeye (2012)
A Collapse of Horses (2016)
Future Dreams (2018) (with Bradley Beaulieu, Gwyneth Jones, Laurie Penny, David Tallerman and Rob Ziegler)
Whose Future Is It? (2018) (with Steven Barnes, Alex de Campi, Tananarive Due, Porpentine Charity Heartscape, Richard Larson, Sarah Pinsker, Shweta Taneja and David Wellington)
Song for the Unraveling of the World (2019)
The Nightside Codex (2020) (with Nadia Bulkin, Justin A Burnett, Selene dePackh, Philip Fracassi, Stephen Jones, Jessica McHugh, Christine Morgan, K A Opperman and Richard Thomas)
Oculus Sinister (2020) (with Rebecca J Allred, Sean Padraic Birnie, M R Cosby, Selene dePackh, Rhonda Eikamp, Douglas Ford, Elena Gomel, Timothy Granville, LC von Hessen, Mark Howard Jones, John Langan, J A W McCarthy, Christopher K Miller, James Pate, Sam Richard, Shannon Scott, Steve Rasnic Tem and Charles Wilkinson)
The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell (2021)
Hymns of Abomination (2021) (with Justin A Burnett, Gemma Files, Cody Goodfellow, Scott R Jones, John Langan, S P Miskowski, Christine Morgan, Jon Padgett, Jonathan Raab, Betty Rocksteady, Sean M Thompson and B R Yeager)
Pluto in Furs 2 (2022) (with Mike Allen, Liniana Carstea, Sara Century, Victoria Dalpe, Ashley Dioses, Rhys Hughes, Livia Llewellyn, Hysop Mulero, Perry Ruhland, Anne-Sylvie Salsman, Max D Stanton, K H Vaughan and Brendan Vidito)
Graphic Novels
Novellas
Series contributed to
HALO Collections (with Tobias S Buckell, B K Evenson, Jonathan Goff, Kevin Grace, Tessa Kum, Fred Van Lente, Robt McLees, Eric Nylund, Frank O'Connor, Eric Raab, Karen Traviss and Jeff VanderMeer)
Evolutions (2009)
Evolutions (2009)
Some of the Best from Tor.com (with Charlie Jane Anders, G V Anderson, Gregory Norman Bossert, Jeremy Packert Burke, Katharine Duckett, Carolyn Ives Gilman, Maria Dahvana Headley, Naomi James, Stephen Graham Jones, Justin C Key, Naomi Kritzer, Rich Larson, Yoon Ha Lee, S. Qiouyi Lu, Maureen F McHugh, Usman T Malik, Melissa Marr, Tamsyn Muir, Sarah Pinsker, C L Polk, Matthew Pridham, M Rickert, Zin E Rocklyn, Rachel Swirsky, Lavie Tidhar, Carrie Vaughn, Fran Wilde and Claire Wrenwood)
Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2020 Edition (2021)
Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2020 Edition (2021)
Come Join Us By The Fire
The Cabin (2021)
Come Join Us By the Fire Season 2 (2021) (with Laird Barron, Indrapramit Das, Craig L Gidney, Camilla Grudova, Shaun Hamill, Gabino Iglesias, Daniel M Lavery and Sunny Moraine)
The Cabin (2021)
Come Join Us By the Fire Season 2 (2021) (with Laird Barron, Indrapramit Das, Craig L Gidney, Camilla Grudova, Shaun Hamill, Gabino Iglesias, Daniel M Lavery and Sunny Moraine)
Black Cat Weekly (with Michael Bracken, Hal Charles, Ralph Milne Farley, Erle Stanley Gardner, James Holding, Harry Stephen Keeler, Keith Laumer, Frank Lowell Nelson and Mack Reynolds)
1. Black Cat Weekly #1 (2021)
1. Black Cat Weekly #1 (2021)
Diablo (with Courtney Alameda, Delilah S Dawson, Adam Foshko, Matt Kirby, Barry Lyga and Catherynne M Valente)
Diablo: Tales from the Horadric Library (2022)
Diablo: Tales from the Horadric Library (2022)
Anthologies edited
Conjunctions 62 - Exile (2014) (with John Ashbery, Martine Bellen, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Mary Caponegro and Bradford Morrow)
Anthologies containing stories by Brian Evenson
Short stories
Hebe Kills Jerry (1994) |
Brian Evenson recommends

Man's Companion (2010)
Joanna Ruocco
"This is a marvelous sequence of linked stories deftly portraying those animals inside of us which long ago tracked down and ate our inner child. A wry book that combines the obsessive music of Lydia Davis and the stripped precision of Muriel Spark, Man's Companions is not to be missed."

Annihilation (2014)
(Southern Reach Trilogy, book 1)
Jeff VanderMeer
"The great thing about 'Annihilation' is the strange, elusive, and paranoid world that it creates . . . I can't wait for the next one."

Behold the Void (2017)
Philip Fracassi
"With carefully drawn characters, vividly constructed situations, and deft description, Behold the Void offers the perfect blend of honest-to-goodness human nastiness and true supernatural creepiness. This is horror fiction at its best."

Mormama (2017)
Kit Reed
"Through a chorus of living and dead voices, all of which know something but none of which know everything Mormama offers the story of a family trauma that has come to infect a place. A terrific story that keeps youon your toes to the very end."

In the River (2017)
Jeremy Robert Johnson
"Johnson writes with an energy that propels you through some very dark spaces indeed and into something profoundly unsettling but nonetheless human."

Sip (2017)
Brian Allen Carr
"Sip reads like what might happen if Cormac McCarthy dropped acid and then hallucinated a science fiction novel. Half post-apocalyptic disaster, half weird Western, Sip's a blood-slick trip that's nonetheless humane at its core."

The Prague Sonata (2017)
Bradford Morrow
"The Prague Sonata is a mighty, epic novel that only Bradford Morrow could have written. Moving from New York to Prague to London and beyond, it is a major and compelling work about the persistence of a smart, determined woman with a real commitment both to music and to truth."

Where the Dead Sit Talking (2018)
Brandon Hobson
"Where the Dead Sit Talking is a tender and unflinching look at shell-shocked young lives as they try in the eddies of foster care to keep their heads above water. Hobson writes with a humane authority but without giving his characters any alibis. What we have instead is a careful look at what it means to be physically and psychically scarred, abandoned by parents, Native American in a white world, haunted by death, and on the verge of becoming an adult. A wonderful, harrowing novel."

In the House in the Dark of the Woods (2018)
Laird Hunt
"A wonderful, luminous, sly tale that orbits around a very grim core, growing darker and darker as it goes."

In the Night Wood (2018)
Dale Bailey
"Elegantly written, In the Night Wood paints a moody portrait of a marriage threatened by betrayal and loss over the backdrop of a strange wood, mysteriously vanishing children, the legend of a horned king, and a children’s story that might be more than just a story. Bailey builds his world with great care, slowly and carefully drawing both you and the characters in, revealing some pieces of the puzzle only gradually. By the time you realize where the story is going, he’s already hooked you: you couldn’t escape even if you wanted to."

Jesus and John (2020)
Adam McOmber
"Beautifully written, heretical, and profoundly humane, this is a book about destabilizing one's entire sense of reality and revealing the unreal lurking within."

Night of the Mannequins (2020)
Stephen Graham Jones
"Stephen Graham Jones's range and his understanding of horror in fiction and film is staggering. In this novella he juggles--sometimes in very sly ways--slasher stories, coming of age horror, traditions of madness and unreliability, and Kaiju to create an amazingly speedy, voice-driven read that's tons of fun. Each new book of his gives his own take on a different facet of horror, and together they all add up to something really expansive and original."

The Sightless City (2021)
(Slickdust Trilogy, book 1)
Noah Lemelson
"With one foot in the seemingly magical and the other in SF, The Sightless City hits that same sweet spot that Tamsyn Muir mines so successfully in Gideon the Ninth. Lemelson revives and updates the gestures of science fantasy to make it a truly 21st century form. Funny, dark, irreverent, and endlessly entertaining, The Sightless City is a rustpunk wonder and a first-rate debut."

Nothing But Blackened Teeth (2021)
Cassandra Khaw
"A deft and creepy haunted house story, written in a lyrical style that heightens the disorienting, phantasmagoric nature of the tale. Nothing But Blackened Teeth is the kind of story you lose sleep over."

This Thing Between Us (2021)
Gus Moreno
"This Thing Between Us brings the very real horrors of living in the world into blazing contact with a supernatural strangeness that refuses to be subsumed into any pattern we can categorize, dissect, and exorcize. In Gus Moreno’s strong, original first novel, reality floats over a void, always threatening to seep out and engulf us."

Shadowselves (2022)
Jason Ockert
"There are writers who are experts at perfecting the well-known story, and writers who strike out on their own, who innovate the form. What's remarkable about Ockert is that he is one of the few writers who manages simultaneously to do both: these are beautifully crafted and necessary stories that nevertheless take real narrative risks. They are surprising and alarming, but also deeply familiar and satisfying."

The Splendid City (2022)
Karen Heuler
"A sly and wild and funny book which uses witches, talking robotic heads, water shortages, the internet, a revolution, and a cat who used to be human (and who is now pretending to be a human with a skin condition) to cheerfully dissect the travails of what it is like to live in contemporary America. Satirical, and yet somehow more than just a satire, the joy of The Splendid City lies in the quirky and all-embracing exuberance of Heuler's imagination."

The Devil Takes You Home (2022)
Gabino Iglesias
"The line between noir and horror not only gets blurred in Iglesias's The Devil Takes You Home; it gets obliterated. His barrio noir is a new kind of fiction, profoundly moving, despairing and scary all at once."

Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke And Other Misfortunes (2022)
Eric LaRocca
"There's something inevitable about these stories, the way before you know it they tighten around your mind like a trap. LaRocca writes startling and gorgeous portraits of damage, and the way it spreads from body to body. Indeed, LaRocca's stories are shocking precisely because, as strange as they are, they seem like they're occurring just down the street."

The Black Maybe (2022)
Attila Veres
"Every decade or so, a writer comes along who reconfigures the way we think about the Weird. First Thomas Ligotti, then Laird Barron, and now Attila Veres. An astonishing collection, really unlike anything out there, which suggests a new way forward."

Desert Creatures (2022)
Kay Chronister
"Existing at the sweet spot where A Canticle for Leibowitz and Blood Meridian meet, Chronister's Desert Creatures is a vivid investigation of faith, perseverance, and human violence as they exist at the end of the world. A scintillating first novel."

A Different Darkness and Other Abominations (2022)
Luigi Musolino
"The pleasure of these stories lies in the writing itself, in Musolino's deft ability to find horror where we least expect. He embraces strangeness, and does so through an agile narrative style that keeps us on our toes ... Musolino has a strong and original voice, and uses it to get to some uniquely dark places. Rather than blood or gore, he's ultimately interested in what's truly terrifying: the vertiginous darkness that threatens to open up and swallow us."
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