Windeye

by Brian Evenson

"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 A woman falling out of sync with the world; a king's servant hypnotized by his murderous horse; a transplanted ear with a mind of its own—the characters in these stories live as interlopers in a world shaped by mysterious disappearances and unfathomable discrepancies between the real and imagined. Brian Evenson, master of literary horror, presents his most far-ranging collection to date, exploring how humans can persist in an increasingly unreal world. Haunting, gripping, and psychologically fierce, these tales illuminate a dark and unsettling side of humanity. Praised by Peter Straub for going "furthest out on the sheerest, least sheltered narrative precipice," Brian Evenson is the author of ten books of fiction. He has been a finalist for the Edgar Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the World Fantasy Award, and the winner of the International Horror Guild Award, and the American Library Association's award for Best Horror Novel. Fugue State was named one of Time Out New York 's Best Books of 2009. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and three O. Henry Prizes, including one for the title story in "Windeye," Evenson lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where he directs Brown University's Literary Arts Department.

Genres: Horror, Short Stories, Fiction, Weird Fiction, Fantasy, Dark, Collections

176 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Brian Evenson is an American academic and writer of both literary fiction and popular fiction, some of the latter being published under B. K. Evenson.

Reviews

[Richard Derus · Rating 4 out of 5]

***UPDATE: this title was a finalist for a 2012 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Single Author Collection***

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A woman falling out of sync with the world; a king's servant hypnotized by his murderous horse; a transplanted ear with a mind of its own--the characters in these stories live as interlopers in a world shaped by mysterious disappearances and unfathomable discrepancies between the real and imagined.

Brian Evenson, master of literary horror, presents his most far-ranging collection to date, exploring how humans can persist in an increasingly unreal world. Haunting, gripping, and psychologically fierce, these tales illuminate a dark and unsettling side of humanity.

Praised by Peter Straub for going "furthest out on the sheerest, least sheltered narrative precipice," Brian Evenson is the author of ten books of fiction. He has been a finalist for the Edgar Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the World Fantasy Award, and the winner of the International Horror Guild Award, and the American Library Association's award for Best Horror Novel.

Fugue State was named one of Time Out New York's Best Books of 2009. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and three O. Henry Prizes, including one for the title story in "Windeye," Evenson lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where he directs Brown University's Literary Arts Department.

My Review: Since there are 25 stories in this book's 188pp, I will not be utilizing the Bryce Method (named for the illustrious blogger/reviewer/Goodreader Bryce, of revered memory for his excellent and frequent reviews before the twins were born) as the reviews of each story would be as long as the stories themselves are. For such is the nature of Evenson's writing. It's a challenge to make his storytelling anything other than real-time without spoilering or simply regurgitating his words.

It's not that his writing is Lovecraftian in its ornament, or Kingly in its wallop. His eerie and atmospheric stories are concise, and have their own unadorned grandeur. If his prose was architecture, I'd call it Art Deco with Fascist Monumental leanings.

So here's a species of compromise on Bryce Method reviewing...stories grouped by stars!

5 of 5
“Windeye”
“Discrepancy”
“The Process”

4 of 5
“The Second Boy”
“Angel of Death”
“The Dismal Mirror”
“Legion”
“Hurlock's Law”
“The Tunnel”
“South of the Beast” (maybe this gets 4.5....)
“The Absent Eye”
“Tapadera”
“They”
“The Oxygen Protocol”
“The Drownable Species”

All of the others are three stars...good, solid stories, but not for whatever reason outstanding compared to their peers in this collection.

I'm not sure I'd call any of them “horror” stories. I'd call them all, one and all, atmospheric evocations of unsettling and unsettled mood, of disturbed and disturbing malfunctions of perception. I'd call them all quietly unnervingly accurate night-scopes on the rifles your inner demons bring to bear at the back of your neck on windy, rainy nights when the power goes out and the flashlight batteries are dead.

If that kind of reading has no appeal, horseman, pass on.

One bleat of dissatisfaction: This book has the UGLIEST cover...a dark, blood-mixed-with-poo colored block set off by a ragged edge of trailing bloody red on a white background. Y.U.C.K. Drop-out type for the advert on the back reinforces the low-budget look, as does the Preparation-H-hued type they set the title in. In a store, I'd pass it up with a wrinkled nose and a scoff. This reaction is not to put y'all off! The stories make up for the dismal disappointment of the cover. Really, honestly, they do.

[Karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

How to tell if you are reading a Brian Evenson story:

1. Are the characters often nameless?
2. If the characters have names, are they often Scandinavian or Eastern European or otherwise non-American-seeming?
3. Is the story quite short?
4. Does the story involve a horrifying conceit, cf. bees inserted into throats, people without faces, cave Chthulhus?
5. Is it extremely difficult to summarize the content, nature, and impact of the story?
6. But do you nevertheless feel satisfied, cf. Yes, that was a story?
7. And do you also feel unnerved?
8. After reading the story, do you feel less comfortable in your own body?
9. Do you find yourself imagining the possibility of, if your ear were surgically reattached to your head, simply pulling it off like a pop top?
10. What if it's not your ear?
11. But it is your head?
12. Do you find yourself thinking of H.P. Lovecraft or Terrence Holt (the writer, not the football player) while you read?
13. Do you find yourself thinking, "This can't end well."?


If you answered yes to all of the above, congratulations. You are reading a Brian Evenson story! Enjoy not sleeping tonight.

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is it, the one with which to begin, the entry point for Evenson initiates unwilling to commit a novel-sized space in their reading world but willing to invest in a small dip. Evenson might be the literary lovechild of Lovecraft and Poe and yet I believe at times his works outshine even those masters. He writes with such an unfortunate intimacy to pain and loss the reader can feel the push of those specters on the author’s wrist as he scratches away the words that become these haunting stories.

If you won’t read more than a couple of stories, start with the title story, the first in the bunch, and then flip to the end to read “Grottor” and “Anskan House”. If you find that you’ve enjoyed those, re-read “Windeye” and then shuffle the pages back a few to read Evenson’s book dedication and get the sweet heebie jeebies as I did.

[Gregor Xane · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the best collections I've read in quite some time.

All stories are good to great.

Highly recommended!

[Adam Nevill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Incredible imagination at work in these stories - ever weird and strange. I literally cannot second guess where his storytelling will take me.

[Phillip Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm bumping this up to 5 stars for the simple fact that "Grottor" might be the most evil little horror story I've read since Joe R. Lansdale's "The Night They Missed the Horror Show." Just a nasty little nugget that I will never forget.

But seriously. This collection is undeniably good. I am not saying every story is a hit as there was a period in the middle where I just became a little tired with Evenson's vague story experiments (basically the four stories from "Hurlock's Law" to "Baby or Doll"); however, the last half just felt like each story was better than the one before, ending with the satisfying conclusion of "Anskan House."

Standouts for me include: "Windeye," "The Second Boy," "Dapplegrim," "The Dismal Mirror," "Legion," "The Sladen Suit," "Tapadera," "The Other Ear," "The Oxygen Protocol," "Grottor," and "Anskan House." So yeah, pretty much most of them affected me as a reader but also felt like a learning experience for the writer in me.

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

Evenson is the master of what I'm now calling the paranoid/weird tale. As in, did that really happen? man, that's messed up.. In lesser hands the playing with reality and perception can get tiresome, but Evenson always manages to be thematically spot on and genuinely creepy or uncanny. Besides, do you really need an excuse to read a short story collection with a story about Bon Scott being recruited and then possibly murdered by Mormons? No, you don't.

[Andrew Schultheis · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 rounded up to 5

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Against the far wall, beside the one entrance to a tunnel, was a figure. Bernt went toward it, shining his flashlight. It was a body: an old woman, slight of frame, wearing old and frayed clothes. She had been dead a long time. Her skin had been eaten away, her eyes were gone.
"Who is it?" Bernt asked.
"Who's what?" asked Grottor. "That? Don't worry about that, that's nothing."
"How can a body be nothing?"
"When it no longer holds a person," said Grottor flatly. "Then it's nothing."

Uncharacteristically I was listening to music as I read this second-to-last story in Evenson's collection Windeye. I find that reading while listening to music is usually ill-advised but on rare occasions literature and music do intersect in my consciousness to great success. In this case the band Ritual Howls happened to fit Evenson's tale 'Grottor' like a tight black glove. As I slowly meted out my last few minutes with Windeye I allowed myself to sink even deeper into its word tank with the aid of this aural darkness surrounding me.

Evenson's warped deadpan visions lure me down into a sort of catacomb where I am strapped down to a battered stainless steel table reeking of unidentified chemicals. There, as the fiend deftly stretches open my eyelids and sutures them to my face, I recline in this uncomfortable position while some shadowy being that may or may not have a face begins whispering stories of creeping dread into my ear. The hypnotic singsong tone eases me into narcosis. At some point I wake to find myself, head bleeding, slumped against a filthy concrete wall dripping with condensation. Is this better than the table, I wonder. I struggle to my feet and stumble through the dark clammy tunnels, stopping every few feet to point my dried-out eyes toward Evenson's arcane word sculptures scrawled on the walls. It's a queerly satisfying distraction from the dull pain radiating from miscellaneous stab wounds in locations that I am only now still discovering as I sit here typing this with my two remaining fingers.

Some favored scrawls: the aforementioned 'Grottor' in which a boy regrettably visits his grandmother; 'The Second Boy,' an ever-widening gyre of frozen horror; 'Baby or Doll,' a colossal failure of psychotherapy:

And even though there was so much else that remained uncertain, so much that remained unclear in his mind, all his anxiety quickly found itself adhering to this issue: was it a baby or was it a doll? Or had there even been anything at all? You may never know, claimed the therapist, in one of her rare, unhelpful moments of utterance. This, of course, he knew was true, but he knew it well before she stated it. Was this what he was really paying her for, to spend most of an hour saying nothing and then offer a brief statement that didn't seem even to have the benefit of being gnomic or mysterious or deep, a statement that was merely obvious?

And finally 'South of the Beast', which could perhaps serve as a visceral metaphor for Evenson's writing process:

South of the beast he pored through the bodies, searching for occasions where, in the membrane still integumented between flesh and bone, language had become caught and not yet worked free of a corpse. In one body, he found a fluster of wronged syntax, knotted in the cartilage of the knee; in another, the slick pulse of a word, that, at a touch, split apart and grew cold before he could swallow it. He could feel the words leaking from his own body as well, and he himself grown faint and speechless, a dark grammar weeping from his side.

This collection is one of the best story collections I've read in years. Evenson's command of language and the micro-worlds he creates is absolute. He concocts a viscous blend of horror with noir, gothic, the surreal, the absurd, and the folkloric. It's pitch-perfect in its presentation: entry into his environments is immediate and all-consuming. There wasn't a single story here that didn't work for me at least on some level. It's so rare to find that, and the much more frequent alternative I encounter is frustrating enough that I often find myself taking a break from short story collections altogether. Thankfully every once in a while I come across one like this that restores my faith.

[Richard Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Always challenging, always amazing. Such a unique voice.

[Michele · Rating 5 out of 5]

Immediately upon finishing this, I added three or four more of this author's books to my to-read list. That should tell you something.

A collection of did-that-happen-or-didn't-it? and what-just-happened? stories, the tales in this book range from the odd and eerie to the downright horrifying. The author's command of language and range of styles are remarkable, from fairy tale to classic monster/demon to magical realism to the completely surreal, and there's a nice sprinkling of unreliable narrators which are always fun.

In the title story we're not sure whether or not the narrator had a sister, and in a later one a man may or may not have a brother; there's a classically sinister monster tale and a very peculiar piece about what I thought was a spacesuit, but on googling it found out it's actually an old diving suit ("The Sladen Suit", whose nickname apparently was "Clammy Death"!!). There's an fairy tale about a young man whose inheritance of a fabulous horse turns out to be not quite what he expects, and a short-short about bees. All are very different in tone, style, setting, and narrative voice, but all are equally high quality. I highly recommend it.

[Michael Adams · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant collection of some of the strangest stories I've ever read. Each is a unique and singular experience, fairy-tale horror-stories of the most twisted, yet perfectly self-contained logic imaginable. Yet never does one of the stories take the easy-out 'rug-pull' of introducing an unreliable narrator element in the final pages of the story, the cop-out of 'oh by-the-way, they were crazy the whole time and imagined the whole thing!' Indeed, if Evenson is going to have an unreliable narrator, you know about it from the first paragraphs, and their mental confusion or altered state drives the story from that point forward. I definitely would recommend this collection to lovers of the dark, the strange, the weird, or even the bizarre, and of stories of the highest caliber.

[Brian O'Connell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another characteristically bone-chilling set of variations on Evenson’s preoccupation with ontological/epistemological instability. It’s a little more uneven than his subsequent collections, and at times a little more diffuse, too; stories like “A History of the Human Voice” or “Hurlock’s Law” or “Knowledge” feel more like sketches than anything else. But the best stories are as impressive as anything Evenson’s written. And I love how brutally grim and pessimistic all of the endings are: generally the conclusions are a little more abstract than those in his subsequent work, but the authorial voice is also more directly, darkly commentative and clarifying as to the hopeless fates these characters are sealed away into. Some favorites: the title story; “The Second Boy”, which has the same structure of the two mirrored stories that bookend the later collection A Collapse of Horses, but is substantially more chilling than either of them; “Dapplegrim”, another example of Evenson’s talent for rendering the equine eerie; “The Moldau Case”, terribly funny and structurally interesting and finally petrifyingly scary, with, as a bonus, a passing citation of one of my favorite metaphors from James Purdy’s Eustace Chisholm and the Works; “The Drownable Species”, which boasts perfectly Evensonian lines like “If the man at the lake was my brother, why did he have no face? If he was not my brother, same question”; the terrifying highlight “Grottor”, refashioned out of scrapped material from Evenson’s masterpiece The Open Curtain and feeling like a gruesome twin of both that novel and “The Second Boy”; and the bleak final tale. Also “Angel of Death” and “The Sladen Suit”. Lots of good stuff!

[Kyle Muntz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Maybe the best thing I've read from Evenson, or pretty close. This is an incredibly broad ranging collection, though held together by an emphasis on endless journeys, unhealing ruptures in the body, unsolvable mystery, and a sense that (whether they're fantastical, contemporary, or somewhere inbetween) the stories take place in a kind of impassable void. There's less excruciating violence here than Evenson is known for, but always in a way that lets the broadness of the subject matter shine through; and, in particular, "Windeye," "The Second Boy," and the "Dismal Mirror" are three of the best short stories I've read. I'm going to be reading Dark Property soon, and pumped to see a longer project after this fantastic collection.

[Robert · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really like Brian Evenson, but the stories can occasionally be tiresome as they are so purposely vague. It can also be frustrating to read the protagonist struggle with really basic things like the difference between a baby and a doll. The quality of the good stories does ultimately make it worthwhile and I look forward to reading more of his work.

The Second Boy and The Dismal Mirror were my favorite stories in the collection and I also enjoyed Bon Scott: The Choir Years, Grottor, and Anskan House.

[Tom]

The stories in this collection were perfect for me at the moment. They are almost all short, they vary dramatically in content, and they are written in a precise language that draws you into their strange worlds with the utmost economy.

I thought some could have been a little longer (e.g. ‘The Dismal Mirror’, which builds a mystery so intriguing that it begged for further development). Others are the perfect length (e.g. ‘Knowledge’, which is a great little metafiction with a philosophically rich and interesting take on the concept of truth).

What stood out about the collection was the abundance of ideas across which Evenson moves easily. His prose feels effortless, regardless of whether it’s being employed for more formal storytelling or whether it’s merely conjuring an unnerving situation and leaving it hanging.

Thanks αlyvια for recommending this as my first Evenson book. I'll definitely be reading more.

[Klava · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a collection of stories by a writer whose work I've never read before and I am very happy to have found this book because the stories, although short (one story only takes up one side of the page!), seem to transport you to very different places filled with intrigue and mystery. As every writer knows, it's very hard to write effective short stories and work out whole personality in a few hundred words, but Brian Evenson seems to have a good grasp of that.

The title story, Windeye, is a haunting story about a boy who remembers his little sister despite some very unusual circumstances, and sets the tone for the whole book.

If you like mystery and word play, you'll definitely enjoy this little gem of a book!

[Yórgos St. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing, amazing collection of literary horror stories!

My highest recommendation to all those who are into weird or horror literature.

[Samuel Moss · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stand outs were 'Windeye', 'The Second Boy', 'Angel of Death', 'The Sladen Suit' and 'Knowledge'

[cardulelia carduelis · Rating 3 out of 5]

While reading Windeye, it wasn't the question of whether this was a short story that I kept coming back to. Instead, it was: what makes a story scary? What makes a story fall into the horror genre? And do any of these stories meet that criteria?

Windeye is a strange book. It combines the uncanny with folklore-esque retellings. The writing is generally good, as one would expect from someone of Evenson's record, but overall I was underwhelmed. I think this comes down to two things.

Plot/pacing
Every story sets up a decent premise and executes it well. Every story either repeats the premise. ad nauseum, before trailing off, or abpruptly ends outright. There is no sense of wholeness to all but a few of the stories. It feels like they are going somewhere, decent setup and build-up, but that Evenson pulls his punch at the last minute. At odds with this brevity is the pervasion of run-on sentences.
Take the eponymous Windeye. An excellent, creepy premise: innocence, the slow realization of a window that is both there and not there. A decent middle portion: the disappearance of a child and the amnesia. But then.. the story just stops. So too with the next story The Second Boy: a mysterious landscape, isolated and repeating. Followed by a strange bedtime story with an uncanny bedmate that has echoes of the landscape. And then, it's over.
I understand that not all stories need a 3-act arc. Some of my favourite short stories would better be classed as vignettes, for example; a little slice of an idea or atmosphere but lacking any plot. These stories are somewhere in between because the quality of the writing is not good enough to enjoy it for itself but neither is there a good enough plot to make up for the bland, albeit serviceable, writing.

Is this horror?
I'm not trying to gatekeep horror, particularly since it's a genre I dabble in, at best. The horror I've come to love over the last few years is cosmic horror, old + new weird, and the slow apocalypse. So think: Matheson, Ligotti, Lovecraft, Vandermeer (some of it), SCP, Broodcomb, Hilbig, Kiernan. That's a particular brand of horror that relishes the creepy, the uncanny, the paranoid. It's usually not very gruesome nor does it have shock - but I am aware that there are books that have those qualities that are considered horror.
So.. where does this fall? Mostly in the uncanny/weird side of things. But it feels like this is not Evenson's wheelhouse. As with my qualms about the structure of his stories, so too do I find the creepy factor here lacking. It feels, at best, like literary horror to me. And many of the stories have nothing to do with horror: they're suspenseful murder mysteries. Or philosophical meanderings. In those stories Evenson's style stands out - perhaps this is what he's better known for?

Rereading my in-situ notes for this collection I noticed a repeating observation. Many of the stories are vague enough to lend themselves open to interpretation: literal reading, allegories, reflections on the personal life of the author. Is that why people like this collection so much? That they can mold it to their own ideas?

There are a few stories in this collection that are the exception to the rule, listed in my best-of below.

Overall I am underwhelmed by the collection. The fundamentals are there but they lack the meat. It's a collection of teaser trailers when I was hoping for a cinematic experience. Not sure I'll try his other work.

Best stories:
History of the human voice
Anskan House
Grottor
Discrepancy
Knowledge
South of the Beast

====== I N D I V I D U A L R E V I E W S ======

Windeye follows a young boy recounting his experience with his childhood home and a strange window. The writing is atmospheric and punchy but the pay-off feels subdued. This strongly calls to mind other haunted houses like House of Leaves but is more like a preview than the feature film.
First line: “They lived, when he was growing up, in a simple house, and old bungalow with a converted attic and sides covered in cedar shake.” (3/5)

The Second Boy follows two hikers caught in a strange storm. Eventually they lose contact and reunite in the shelter. But something feels off with one of them, and he won't keep telling a strange story. This is a David Lynch short but I don't get it. It was neither creepy nor isolating. I'm not sure what I'm having a problem with: the writing or the content.
First line: “A kind of darkness had swept up very quickly to catch them unaware.” (2/5)

The Process , similarly, was a good idea but not taken far enough. It reads like a throwaway chapter in a speculative fiction novel. The one in which our hero comes across the strange, backwater town. I wanted more from this: more violence, more obscenity.
First line: “Once everybody was settled in, we began with a straw poll - a simple show of hands in favor of one candidate or the other - despite, as Jansen mentioned somewhat huffily, Robert's Rules of Order referring to straw polls as ''meaningless and dilatory''.” (2.5/5)

On of my top three in the collection is surprisingly the History of the Human Voice. The bees put me in mind of the splendid works from Broodcomb Press. Do I just like this because it harkens to a weirder, richer work?
First line: “The earliest recordings of the human voice confirm what I have long suspected: in the past, there existed a symbiosis between the human voice and the inset known as the bee.” (4/5)

Dapplegrim, the bloody horse, felt like it was going to be a fable with a lesson. But in the end it was just a blood-lusting horse. Was Evenson trying to be funny here? It's just all too on the nose. I feel like I'm missing something with these stories. They go through the motions, the setup is there, but the punch is missing.
First line: “There came a time when I, the youngest of twelve brothers, each of whom had imposed his dominion on me in turn, could bear it no longer and fled the house.” (3/5)

Angel of Death follows a scribe walking through a wet, slate grey shallow world. He notes the deaths of each person in his small company. At some point no more die, but ask to be noted as dead in the book. Then they can walk besides him as ghosts. This is another story vague enough to be an allegory for your choosing: a general election, university, family relations, dating.
Too vague to mean anything.
First line: “To begin, there are eight of us, but only one of us can write.” (2/5)

The Dismal Mirror is the first story I found to be genuinely creepy. It has a David Lynch quality to it again: the red drapes being replaced by black, the isolation, the strange siblings. What made this one a little better than its predecessors is the parable of the blind sister's deal with the devil. So where is she now? Did she see him and realise she brought the wrong person back? A complete story at last!
First line: “In early spring, Harmon's sister disappeared, one moment she was standing at the edge of the property, near the back fence, the dog just beside her, listening to him plow.” (3.5/5)

In Legion, we explore something with more of a sci-fi bent, to limited success. It's a fine short story but again it doesn't feel like it's saying anything original. This has to do with sentience of individual body parts, something explored to much more success by the scottish absurdists like Alastair Grey.
I actually like the story a lot more if I think of it as a metaphor for an organization or a military legion.. but that's projection.
First line: “This happened back during the time when I still believed, if it could properly be called believing, that humans were the sole repository for a person, and that there was only one person filling each repository, a single person crammed into each casing of blood and flesh and bone.” (2.5/5)

The Moldau Case had good, suspenseful writing. And while again the content felt a little bland, the execution was excellent. In this story, a shadowy but bureaucratic organization is investigating the crime of a man, Stratton. But did they consider the history of the investigator? (Even writing that makes it sound boring. In this case, the writing is worth the dull plot). Maybe Evenson is better at crime?
First line: “For those who claim to know me (and I think it safe to say that apart from myself, there are few, if any, who truly do), it will come as no surprise that I, Harbison, was assigned the Stratton case.” (3.5/5)

The Slade Suit was genuinely creepy and the first story I'd recommend from the collection. I like how organic the rubber prison seemed. It reminded me a lot of the first book of the Elric saga, where Elric is trying to get to Stormbringer through the meaty throat of the cave. In this we follow a crew stranded below deck in an everlasting storm. Their only means of escape from their ongoing famine? The old diving suit in the captain's cabin.. it is said that it leads to other realms..
First line: “I was the third man to enter the Sladen Suit.” (3.5/5)

I then read Hurlock's Law which is a sketch of an twilight zone story. Pretty good but nothing special if you've read any creepypasta before. Hurlock finds some seemingly random strips of paper but starts to believe they are part of a wider conspiracy, dictating his next move. Again, there's the potential for a good story here but this is less than an outline. It's the setup with no meat.
First line: “It began with tattered bits and scraps, little pieces of paper with a word or two on them, and with Hurlock, who began to notice them.” (2.5/5)

Discrepancy is great and feels out of place in this collection. It's about a woman dissociating from her marriage and her life as she starts to realize she might not be happy in her marriage.
First line: “There was a day she noticed a disrepancy between sound and image on the television, and found no matter how she mesed with the tracking she could not make it go away.” (4/5)

Knowledge may be my favorite so far. It's playful and philosophical. Maybe this is where Evenson's writing excels? Where plot doesn't matter as much? Where he can just play with the concept of writing?
First line: “In the detective novel I have yet to write, two corpses are discovered in quote different locations, miles apart: one in a dumpster, the other in a hotel bathroom.” (4/5)

Baby or Doll captures well the eerie unraveling of a traumatized mind. I love the interactions with the therapist, if you've ever interacted with a mental health professional, or an HR rep, that is not good at their job it feels familiar. Evenson has a talent for writing the disillusion of a gaslit mind. Again this suffers from good setup and atmosphere to poor ending.
First line: Only a few months later, Servin found that he could no longer keep all the details straight. (3/5)

The Tunnel hints at a vague unease to lesser impact than the Process. I feel so apathetic about this one, it's not scary and it's dull. Meh.
First line: When they had grown tired of prodding the old man with a stick, they left the stick where it was and continued down the tunnel, Jansen trailing along the left wall, Lindskold on the right. (2/5)

South of the Beast is great. I bet writers love this thinly disguised (if it can even be called disguised) metaphor for the profession. Again, I feel like Evenson is at his strongest when writing about writing.
First line: South of the Beast he pored through the bodies, searching for occasions where, in the membrane still integumented between flesh and bone, language had become caught and not yet worked free of a corpse. (4/5)

The Absent Eye feels like Death Note fanfic. But hollow.
First line: I lost my eye back when I was a child, running through the forest as part of some game or other. (3/5)

Bon Scott: the Choir Years doesn't sit right with me. I know AC/DC from their music of course, but not anything about them as people. So I assumed this journalist tell-all was using the band name only. Yet it turns out Bon Scott did die under confused circumstances, although nothing Mormon. The whole things sits strangely, I get the sense he is being made fun of but I don't know what he's done to deserve this. Also it was criminally boring.
First line: In 1997, living in Utah and writing for a small music monthly called Grid Magazine, I was asked to do a story on AC/DC. (1/5)

So, Tapadera is covered/lid ins Spanish. I did not get this one at all. It was just violent.
First line: He took the bucket in his hands and brimmed it with water, sloshing the boy's face. (1.5/5)

The Other Ear is another body displacement story, like Legion and the Absent Eye. Although this is far less effective - phantom limbs have been covered ad nauseum. At this point in the collection I was considering DNF'ing but I'm glad I didn't, some of the best stories are at the end.
First line: Istaván acquired the other ear during the worst days of the war. (1.5/5)

They is the start of a sciFi thriller by Blake Crouch. Or the teaser trailer. But that's it. I was very bored by this story.
First line: The first time S. came to see Rauch, it wasn't S. at all. (1.5/5)

The Oxygen Protocol is good and creepy and a complete story. Calls to mind the Babadook. The descriptions of delirium and oxygen starvation feel so real probably because those are things Evenson actually experienced. Maybe he'd be better served as a memoirist?
First line: Later he work up, not entirely sure at first what happened, what had been real and what he had dreamed. (3/5)

The Drownable Species is an excellent psychological thriller with an unreliable narrator. One of the better themes and stories in the book. Again, it feels like Evenson would be better in the crime genre.
First line: Without warning, I gave over the search for my brother and came here, to his room rumored to have belonged to him. (3/5)

Grottor the penultimate story in the collection, is probably its scariest and certainly its best crafted. In it a little orphan boy is dropped off with his grandma at the edge of town. But all is very much as it seems and before long he's been sucked into an unholy schedule in the caves of the nearby mountains. Great story, a retelling of the Krampus.
First line: At age thirteen, shortly after his father's death from tuberculosis and his mother's removal to the state facility for the insane, Bernt was given to his grandmother. (4.5/5)

And finally, Anskan House, which is the scariest story in the collection and again, in the top three. There is some mild body horror in this and another strange haunted house which takes the wounds of one and lends them to another. To be honest, it is just another creepy-pasta but well written with a complete arc. This is the story I was hoping for in this collection, and it delivered right at the very end.
First line: Sefton was just a boy when he first learned of the Anskan House. (4.5/5)

[Kasandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Astoundingly good. Superb writing, not a word wasted, Evenson uses archetypal horrors mixed with unease to full effect. Suspenseful, creepy, gothic stories that put me mentally straight into that state between wakefulness and sleep the way good stories do. This sucks you right in and doesn't let go. The repeated themes here, including missing family members, missing body parts, tunnels, parallel universes, internal disquiet and anxiety rising to a fever pitch, and so on, are used skillfully and don't get boring or predictable. There are no wasted run-ups to the actual story, and the endings are satisfying, even when open-ended and mysterious. This is the sort of haunting writing I thought I'd never find again after Poe in a literary sense. Horror at its best, not populist and middle-American like King, or internalized and focused on misogynistic violence like Oates (I think both these authors do horror very well, but both can be horribly boring as well). These stories stick with you and stick to you, uncomfortably. Extremely inspiring.

[Donald Armfield · Rating 5 out of 5]

Windeye a collection of short stories by Bram Stoker finalist for an Edgar award and many other awards Mr. Brian Evenson. In my opinion in the top five for horror and dark fiction. I read quite a few of his previous works and haven't been let down. Below are my favorites, but every page will have you wanting more.

Windeye: A game played with her, his sister. Who is she, she disappeared into the "windeye" 5★

Dapplegrim: An inheritance becomes ones master. A steed of death. 4★

The Dismal Mirror: Haunting, sometimes what's missing should stay that way 5★

The Moldau Case: A letter to us readers. On the verge of death of a missing person. 5★

The Tunnel: Evenson makes you feel like you are in "the tunnel" with the three characters. Gripping 5★

The Grottor: A monster that drags it's skin through the caves. A little boy becomes his follower but not by choice. 4★

[Angela · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5. Unnerving little tales, some of which become dull and repetitive, but some of which take me so far away from myself and into a dark, uncanny land that I’m compelled to marvel at their genius. I was particularly charmed and mesmerized by “The Sladen Suit,” in which men lost at sea, or at least within a container afloat in something wet, crawl into a rubber umbilicus, inhabit a suit, and are thusly dissolved into thin air. Some zany riffs of the speculatively weird variety. A thematic undercurrent of severed arms and ears retaining consciousness, of amnesia, of doubled and false selves, of situations demanding an instant and new reordering of reality. Deliciously weird but more than occasionally frustrating, flat and boring. Like life!

This also gave me a horrible nightmare.

[Andy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I give this book five stars not because I loved everything in it, or I thought all the stories "worked" perfectly, but because I had to respect each and every one of these (25!) stories. This collection overflows with originality. And guess what? If you don't like a story they're only around 2,000-3,000 words each, with occasional exceptions. Evenson is a writer who can make a really big impact with a very short story.

I love mind-bendingly weird fiction, stuff that makes me think and wonder, but it's gotten harder and harder to actually scare me. At this point I don't even hope for that or take it into account when I think what rating a book should have. But Evenson managed to do that more than a few times here. Evenson has a good sense for the weird, the dream-like surreal at times, and the plain old scary.

Several of these stories have the feeling of dark fairy tales, and I don't mean kinda-sorta dark. I mean D-A-A-A-RK! There's tales of people who disappear forever, and of people passing between worlds or dimensions. The variety is something else that makes this book so darn good. My favorites would be "Windeye," "The Second Boy," "The Dismal Mirror," "Legion," "The Absent Eye" and probably my top favorite, "Grottor."

Add Evenson to the list of weird writers I intend to read everything they've written. Like Simon Strantzas, Daniel Mills, Livia Llewellyn and Scott Nicolay for starters.

Windeye - Wow, this is an excellent story, so short but effective. The idea at it's base isn't necessarily new, but it's handled so well. It has even more emotional impact considering the dedication for the book is "for my lost sister." A boy and his sister become convinced that their house has more windows on the outside than one can look out of from within.

The Second Boy - This is exactly the type of weird fiction I like -- it manages to be both unpredictable and scary. I loved everything about this story, especially the setting and the atmosphere. A man loses his companion in a blizzard, so he makes a fire and beds down, when his friend reunites with him he acts very strange.

The Process - Interesting little post-apocalyptic tale. I think what I liked the most was the dark, nocturnal atmosphere toward the end. After the Collapse, a small town tries to reinstate democracy, but hits a roadblock which calls for desperate means.

A History of the Human Voice - A bizarre little vignette. An arcane, long-abandoned way of communicating with bees is discussed.

Dapplegrim - This one certainly is GRIM, but it's kind of funny at times, at least I thought so. An excellent story either way in the dark fairy tale vein. A man cheated out of a fair inheritance inherits a horse with a nasty streak.

Angel of Death - This one is a bit more surreal than the average here, and allegorical I suppose. Not among my favorites. In a group endlessly trudging through a dull grey wasteland, one man is given the task of writing down the names of the dead.

The Dismal Mirror - A great story with a lot packed into it's 4,000~ word length. One of the creepier ones. After a farmers' blind sister mysterious disappears in a field without a trace he suspects it's more than mere abduction.

Legion - This has a fascinating core concept with sci-fi elements, and reminded me a bit of Thomas Ligotti's work. A machine attaches a decaying human arm to itself and gets a small sensation of consciousness it seeks to replicate.

The Moldau Case - This was a good story, a bit different from the others, a tense, grim noir tale. We read the accounts of two detectives for a shady, mysterious organization who are protecting a horrific murderer and are suspicious of one another.

The Sladen Suit - Wow, this is the kind of story that amazes me someone could think it up, much less make it work. This story is so good, I loved the eerie atmosphere early on, then the really strange, and claustrophobic ending. A crew with a murdered captain and stuck in a storm at sea become fascinated by an old diving suit which is hardly what it appears.

Hurlock’s Law - This is certainly one of the absolute weirdest stories, a bit confusing at the start. There's so much packed into this it's amazing. A man starts finding scraps of paper and connecting a message of warning with their words.

Discrepancy - A very novel concept here, made into quite an emotional story. More insidious than horrific. A woman starts to notice that things she sees and hears are out of sync.

Knowledge - A sort of Borges-esque musing on knowledge revealed vs. knowledge dictated.

Baby or Doll - This is one of the more perplexing stories, it reminded me of Ligotti a bit early on, but becomes even stranger with it's increasingly convincing loss of grip on reality. Was the protagonist dropped on their head as a child and having flashbacks? It does mention something "dislodged" in the brain. This was one I thought could have had more clarity without ruining the effect.

The Tunnel - Another of the creepier stories here, told from three perspectives which flesh out the picture somewhat in it's subtle details, but makes the whole situation even more dire and strange too.

South of the Beast - A brilliant little vignette where language is made flesh, or manifests itself physically.

The Absent Eye - Someone get a thesaurus and find more words for "great," I'm not sure how many times I can say it. Evenson takes a somewhat conventional idea and makes it pretty innovative here. A boy who loses his eye is able to see another, stranger world superimposed onto the real one.

Bon Scott: The Choir Years - This has a somewhat eerie, almost M. R. Jamesian feel in how it investigates events of the past, uncovering unsettling little details. A man writing for a small rock music magazine uncovers some strange coincidences in the death of a famous singer.

Tapadera - Well this is an unnerving little tale, comes off as a sort of zombie horror story. Two men contend with a boy outside their house who won't stay dead.

The Other Ear - This one is a bit like The Absent Eye, essentially the body modified in someway allowing one a portal to some supernatural force. A soldier loses his ear in battle and has the ear of someone else attached by mistake, putting him in contact with a sinister voice.

They - This was an absurdist and pretty funny story I thought. A man is brought back from the dead continually as he is tasked with investigating the death of another.

The Oxygen Protocol - A dark, sort of dystopian story. After an apocalypse a man is caught between a dictatorial, computer-managed life and a sinister hallucination.

The Drownable Species - This is one of the strangest stories, and among the longest as well. It leaves us plenty to wonder about. A man moves into what he believes to be his long-lost brother's old apartment in an attempt to find the man who may not actually exist at all.

Grottor - This story is told in a more straight-forward manner, but is one of the most impressive, memorable and downright scary stories in the book. A boy who finds himself orphaned goes to live with a very strange old grandmother and a boy who spends much of his time in some caves behind the house.

Anskan House - A pretty good story, not bad but not as interesting as many of the best. A boy learns of a house with a presence which can cause people to take on the illnesses of others.

[Forrest Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked up this book because the back listed it as a series of sometimes-funny horror stories that Peter Straub was a fan of. Spoiler alert: it isn't. Funny, that is, unless you mean "funny in a strange way." Every single one of Windeye's stories begins in a somewhat-unnatural place and get stranger from there. Eventually, you'll wind up in a place where nothing really makes sense anymore, but you still believe it. You believe that it did happen- at least in some way.
Windeye's characters are set apart from the beginning. Whether it's a dark tunnel that keeps them away from humanity, or a ship cast off in a storm, or a machine built to clean and repair trains that learned something new, or even just an unhappy woman who starts to feel somewhat out of sync, these people (animals? robots? ghosts?) find something that most of us cannot, tightly packed with humans all around us. The question is whether that something is worth finding. Each character is alone in their own skin, and in some ways, that's the worst horror of all- this whole book taps into our (or, at least, my) primal fear that we will never really be understood. You are born alone, Windeye seems to whisper, and you'll sure as hell die alone, and the rest is a farce, at best.
The only problem I had with this book was that this sense of never knowing what's real or not combined with a series of short stories is robustly problematic for me when I really want to know more about what's going on. Multiple stories could easily be expanded into a full book or even a series, and I'd eat them all up. Hear that, Evenson? I WANT TO THROW MONEY AT YOU.

[Kelly Knapp · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection of short stories was a challenge. They have a paucity of wording that borders on poetry and were equally as imbiguous in many cases. While words were few, they were powerful. Rarely have I come upon imbroglio in my readings, yet it was used perfectly in "The Moldau Case." They need to be taken in small chunks. having read the stories through once, I am on my way back through more slowly to better allow the meanings and symbolisms to gel.

My favorite story was "The Moldau Case," with "The Process" coming in a close second. At opposite ends of the spectrum, each is about how its society works. In the first story, there is an organization which is behind everything, making the decisions about how certain events will be perceived. In the second, a post apocalypes story, we watch as the community attempts to return to a more civilized way of life. However, when the two sides are each given advice about how to accomplish this transformation, one side ignores the advice, while the other side embraces it...even expounds upon it.

I suspect that these stories will be something I will reread periodically, perhaps, like poetry, finding new or additional meanings within.

[Joe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unsettling. Stories that will get under your skin. Brian Evenson is a master at creating tales that transport to a world where life is not quite right, and characters struggle to live in a world defined by bizzare and haunting events. It is not usually a different world, but our own, slowly tearing apart.

Evenson's short stories make up an impressive collection more than worth the read. The book starts out strong, lagging near the middle with a few somewhat confusing and odd stories, but finishes just as strong as it started. His writing, appropriately for the content, is not bogged down by poetics, but deals with his characters' direct perceptions and reactions to the world around them. Not having read much within the 'horror' genre I can't really relate him to any other current authors, but his writing clearly reminded me of the few Edgar Allen Poe stories I have read.

Found this book due to a recommendation by Laura van den Berg (who's short story collection is one of the best I've ever read), who referred to it as one of the best short story collections read in ages, and was not let down in the least.

[M · Rating 3 out of 5]

Brian Evenson offers up this twisted collection of short stories, taking us from our comfort zone and dropping us into the middle of the Twilight Zone sans parachute. Depending on the tale, Evenson manages to make his readers mildly uncomfortable to utterly disturbed with the flip of a page. The titular chapter establishes this well; a pair of siblings are separated by a mysterious extra window on their home, which seems to erase the young sister from existence. Highlights include the demonic horse called Dapplegrim, the notebook-carrying Angel of Death, the agent describing Moldeau's case, the oddly disturbing Oxygen Protocol, and the monstrous creature called Grottor. In each and every tale, there is just enough of a sense of unease; Evenson evens makes a one-page history of human speech feel wrong. A recommended collection of horror tales that make you check your own home for a windeye that might just be there...

[Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you like stories that have a strict, predictable narrative arc, and come to a satisfying, tidy conclusion, then this book is NOT for you. If, however, you (like me) delight in stories that can truly capture that dream-like quality - where you're always feeling just a little uncertain about the boundaries of reality, and struggling to make sense of elements that seem to have similar qualities, but don't automatically go together - then you will absolutely not be able to put down this book. A house has one more window on the outside than it does on the inside; a strange 19th century diving suit contains a strange portal to an alternate reality (maybe?); a dead boy keeps trying to come down the chimney to be inside a cabin with his killers. Much like some of the best Twilight Zone episodes, these stories aren't exactly "supernatural" (no ghosts or vampires to be found) but are certainly well into the realm of the strange and bizarre.

[Abram Martinez · Rating 2 out of 5]

I started this collection of short stories about a year ago. I put it down, picked it up, put it down and over and over again repeated this routine. It should be admitted that I'm not a huge horror fan, and not particularly a short story fan so I do not believe that my review is completely unbiased.

I didn't like this book at all. There were maybe 3 stories that piqued my interest but for the majority of stories I had no idea what was going on. Everything was vague, poorly described, and ended abruptly. I understand that many short story writers like to leave the reader guessing, but when it is almost every story it starts to become frustrating. I'm sure there are people who will enjoy this book but I'm giving it 2 stars because I tried my hardest to like it, but I just didn't. I actually gave up with about 30 pages to go because there was an obvious pattern in every story and I didn't care to stick around for the chance to maybe like one story before it concluded.