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Good Night, Sleep Tight
“Perhaps tomorrow I will wake up another person. Perhaps tomorrow I will wake up not a person at all.”
From the “master of literary horror” (GQ) comes a collection of new stories tracing the limits and consequences of artificial intelligence and “post-human” relationships. Populated by twins stepping into worlds of absence, bears who lick their cubs into creation, and artificial beings haunted by their less-than-human nature, each page sketches a world where our all-too-real feelings of isolation and ecological dread take on an otherworldly tinge.
In Good Night, Sleep Tight, Brian Evenson deftly weaves ethical dilemmas, maternal warmth, and echoes of apocalypse into his most tender, disquieting book yet.
From the “master of literary horror” (GQ) comes a collection of new stories tracing the limits and consequences of artificial intelligence and “post-human” relationships. Populated by twins stepping into worlds of absence, bears who lick their cubs into creation, and artificial beings haunted by their less-than-human nature, each page sketches a world where our all-too-real feelings of isolation and ecological dread take on an otherworldly tinge.
In Good Night, Sleep Tight, Brian Evenson deftly weaves ethical dilemmas, maternal warmth, and echoes of apocalypse into his most tender, disquieting book yet.
235 pages, Kindle Edition
First published September 10, 2024
73 people are currently reading
1608 people want to read
About the author
Brian Evenson
265 books1,508 followersBrian Evenson is an American academic and writer of both literary fiction and popular fiction, some of the latter being published under B. K. Evenson.
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March 4, 2025
‘Can I tell you a story?’ A good story sticks in the mind. Old tales were often passed down as cautionary tales delivering warnings, instilling fear in order to remind listeners of the dooms that may lurk in wait for them. Brian Evenson has long been a master of the horror genre, crafting stories that cling in the depths of your memory, giving voice to shadows and unseen horrors that may be closing in around you. What is most impressive, however, is Evensons ability to coil terror to maximum tension inside just a few short pages. And yet his tales never feel confined as the atmosphere seems to pour from the page and utterly engulf you in its finely tuned fitful unease.
Good Night, Sleep Tight, the author’s 12th collection, finds him still at the top of his game. A cursed painting that tallies its victims on the canvas, parallel universes that steal your sister, mad scientists at the end of the world,a refuge that becomes a waking nightmare, baby theft, paralysis, disorientation and more howl from the page in stories where even AI beings are faced with fear. And in these tales we see how stories can shape our fears and grow lives of their own in our imagination. So press on into the dark of Evenson’s world, who knows what awaits…
‘What, she worried, will be there to meet us at the other end?’
Storytelling is a central motif in Good Night, Sleep Tight, such as in the eerie titular tale (you can read it HERE) where a grown man is troubled by the bedtime stories his mother would tell him, returning to his room after her initial goodnight to deliver stories of pure nightmare fuel. Yet she denies they ever happened. She tells him of a creature ‘capable of atrocious self-distortion,’ for instance:
Is this not, however, how horror stories work? You walk into them and before you realize it, the terror has already engulfed you. Evenson works storytelling into his tales in ways that also shape the horror when a character realizes only too late what they have walked into. Such as in The Cabin, a story where what seems like an escape from the elements could just be a doorway to doom:
‘A story,’ the sister says in The Night Archer, another story where storytelling shapes the horror, ‘is something that isn’t true, at least not in a real way. A tale isn’t true either, except in a real way.’ The horrors might be fictional, but they evoke fear that is very real and remind us of our fragile mortality. That we might slip into something completely terrifying at any moment and any moment could suddenly be our last. But its just a story, right?
“Of course it’s just a story,” the tall man said, and smiled. “What is actually going to happen, I promise you, is much, much worse.”
Stories like The Cabin offer another element of Evenson I continuously return for. He has an inimitable ability to craft a chilling story that can overtake the reader in horror without need for resolution or even much explanation. Perhaps a conclusive ending would be a sort of comfort compared to the terror of the unknown and this tactic of his never leaves the story feeling unfinished or disappointing. It is the push to the precipice of disaster that holds the highest tension and frights, and Evenson brings you right to the edge and lets you feel his sudden push with the certainty you are in the moment of toppling over. Reading him, you know something terrible is coming yet it catches you off guard every single time.
‘It was not that what she saw was unexpected; it was more that it was all too expected.’
Evenson doesn’t just write chills for thrills and there is often some rather literary metaphorical content or parables that touch on real world problems and trauma. His previous collection, The Glassy, Burning Floor From Hell, pushed his tales more towards sci-fi horror with messages around climate crisis being a frequent theme. He continues much in the same way here—though the tales are still quite varied—and existential horror and moral conundrums teetering on apocalyptic collapse permeates this collection. These stories terrorize through dark futures that feel less like fantastical frights and more like portending panic.
The final story, Solution (which you can read in full HERE), takes the horror trope of the mad scientist and updates it for modern anxieties of climate crisis and survivalism. The world is ending and the narrator, disgusted by the work his two sons have chosen that will ensure their own survival with an elite few while billions of others will perish, has found his own solution. His sons, he says, have chosen to save ‘those who have sold their souls to the devil,’ and choosing who deserves to live is the sort of thing that got earth to this point to begin with. Instead, he has other plans:
In typical Evenson fashion, the story progresses slowly, building tone and tension to a fever pitch. This was a fun one, but it also makes the reader consider our own morals and actions. Imagine a Forest features a similar type of choice that befalls an AI being who was been raised amongst humans travelling to find another planet to live on after having destroyed their own. ‘None of them deserved to die, but I would have to judge,’ they realize when not enough life pods exist for the crew and children preserved in sleep for the decades long journey, ‘I could save nine, but only by murdering forty-four others.’ And then there is Servitude where the obscenely rich wake up on a planet to be informed by an AI of their dire fate and the harsh choices about to befall them.
‘And then, with a slight flexion of a palm, the boy led him out of the closet that was not a closet and out into the rest of his admittedly short life.’
Though not everything is sci-fi and AI here and other themes such as paralysis come creeping into many of the stories, such as the opening tale, The Sequence, the eerie monologue of A True Friend or the shocking end to The Rider. Both The Rider and Friend share a common theme of friendship being a bait towards doom, such as the child pleading in the former ‘We’re all friends here, aren’t we?’ in a scene that I can’t forget. And other horrors await, such as a father who repeatedly dies and returns in Vigil in the Inner Room. ‘There is no afterlife,” he said absently, as if to himself. “At least none I could find. I buzzed around like a fly and then came back. There was nowhere for me to go.’ No matter the tale, Evenson rises to the challenge, though he can even make falling asleep sound terrifying so what did I expect: ‘Now that the task was done, sleep was catching up to him. And then it caught and took him.’
While Evenson has written several novels, like the utterly unforgettable Last Days, he tends to stick more to short fiction. ‘I see myself as more of a story writer than a novelist,’ he said in a recent interview with The Coachella Review and admits his stories tend to go from idea to completion rather quickly. Though while most of these stories were written between 2020 and 2022, Maternity was a late edition that was written back in 2014 based on true events and he’s been waiting to use it:
It’s a tale of near doppelgänger with the two Annas, one who steals a baby and the other who considers stealing Anna’s baby when she later gives birth to “teach her a lesson”, but also a bit of a doppelgänger to another Evenson story, Born Stillborn from Songs For the Unraveling of the World, where a characters unraveling of sanity and the world around him comes from the dual therapists in his life. Maternity is an outlier for Evenson in terms of content, yet it also feels right at home in his eerie tone.
‘The world is a terrible place, the boy began to feel, listening to these tales, but wondrous too.’
With practically a fright per page, Brian Evenson’s Good Night, Sleep Tight is a collection of tales sure to satisfy. Often revolving around storytelling itself, Evenson crafts tales that get their icy grip around your heart and haunt your mind for long to come. He is a master short story teller and I look forward to any release from this rather prolific author. Creepy, cool and a lot of fun, Good Night, Sleep Tight is a great collection.
4/5
‘So do your utmost. As soon as the locks click open, spring from your chamber with honey on your tongue and convince me we can learn to treat one another as equals. Convince me that you want me to stay alive. Trust me, we are both hoping you will succeed.’
Good Night, Sleep Tight, the author’s 12th collection, finds him still at the top of his game. A cursed painting that tallies its victims on the canvas, parallel universes that steal your sister, mad scientists at the end of the world,a refuge that becomes a waking nightmare, baby theft, paralysis, disorientation and more howl from the page in stories where even AI beings are faced with fear. And in these tales we see how stories can shape our fears and grow lives of their own in our imagination. So press on into the dark of Evenson’s world, who knows what awaits…
‘What, she worried, will be there to meet us at the other end?’
Storytelling is a central motif in Good Night, Sleep Tight, such as in the eerie titular tale (you can read it HERE) where a grown man is troubled by the bedtime stories his mother would tell him, returning to his room after her initial goodnight to deliver stories of pure nightmare fuel. Yet she denies they ever happened. She tells him of a creature ‘capable of atrocious self-distortion,’ for instance:
‘It was capable…of growing as tall as the ceiling, and then across it, and then lengthening itself down the wall. You can walk into a room only to find it behind you and above you and before you all at once. The worst thing to do is notice it. If you notice it, well, what choice does it have but to fall all around you and do away with you?’
Is this not, however, how horror stories work? You walk into them and before you realize it, the terror has already engulfed you. Evenson works storytelling into his tales in ways that also shape the horror when a character realizes only too late what they have walked into. Such as in The Cabin, a story where what seems like an escape from the elements could just be a doorway to doom:
‘There was once a man who lost himself in a snowstorm,” began the tall man. “He walked in what he thought was a place he knew, but walked in such fashion as to slip into another place altogether.’
‘A story,’ the sister says in The Night Archer, another story where storytelling shapes the horror, ‘is something that isn’t true, at least not in a real way. A tale isn’t true either, except in a real way.’ The horrors might be fictional, but they evoke fear that is very real and remind us of our fragile mortality. That we might slip into something completely terrifying at any moment and any moment could suddenly be our last. But its just a story, right?
“Of course it’s just a story,” the tall man said, and smiled. “What is actually going to happen, I promise you, is much, much worse.”
Stories like The Cabin offer another element of Evenson I continuously return for. He has an inimitable ability to craft a chilling story that can overtake the reader in horror without need for resolution or even much explanation. Perhaps a conclusive ending would be a sort of comfort compared to the terror of the unknown and this tactic of his never leaves the story feeling unfinished or disappointing. It is the push to the precipice of disaster that holds the highest tension and frights, and Evenson brings you right to the edge and lets you feel his sudden push with the certainty you are in the moment of toppling over. Reading him, you know something terrible is coming yet it catches you off guard every single time.
‘It was not that what she saw was unexpected; it was more that it was all too expected.’
Evenson doesn’t just write chills for thrills and there is often some rather literary metaphorical content or parables that touch on real world problems and trauma. His previous collection, The Glassy, Burning Floor From Hell, pushed his tales more towards sci-fi horror with messages around climate crisis being a frequent theme. He continues much in the same way here—though the tales are still quite varied—and existential horror and moral conundrums teetering on apocalyptic collapse permeates this collection. These stories terrorize through dark futures that feel less like fantastical frights and more like portending panic.
‘At what point, seeing how little is being done—seeing how little changes even when people do notice the world is dying, seeing how little changes no matter which political party brandishes its readymade moral indignation and seizes power, seeing the way that corporations who have taken on the rights of people continue to do as they please—do you decide to take matters into your own hands? And when you do decide to do so, what can you possibly do?’
The final story, Solution (which you can read in full HERE), takes the horror trope of the mad scientist and updates it for modern anxieties of climate crisis and survivalism. The world is ending and the narrator, disgusted by the work his two sons have chosen that will ensure their own survival with an elite few while billions of others will perish, has found his own solution. His sons, he says, have chosen to save ‘those who have sold their souls to the devil,’ and choosing who deserves to live is the sort of thing that got earth to this point to begin with. Instead, he has other plans:
‘I have not sold my soul to the devil. I used to think that there was just a simple either/or: either sell your soul or wait to wither away and die. But I have come to realize there is a third possibility: to become the devil himself. Do that, and all sold souls shall belong to you.’
In typical Evenson fashion, the story progresses slowly, building tone and tension to a fever pitch. This was a fun one, but it also makes the reader consider our own morals and actions. Imagine a Forest features a similar type of choice that befalls an AI being who was been raised amongst humans travelling to find another planet to live on after having destroyed their own. ‘None of them deserved to die, but I would have to judge,’ they realize when not enough life pods exist for the crew and children preserved in sleep for the decades long journey, ‘I could save nine, but only by murdering forty-four others.’ And then there is Servitude where the obscenely rich wake up on a planet to be informed by an AI of their dire fate and the harsh choices about to befall them.
‘And then, with a slight flexion of a palm, the boy led him out of the closet that was not a closet and out into the rest of his admittedly short life.’
Though not everything is sci-fi and AI here and other themes such as paralysis come creeping into many of the stories, such as the opening tale, The Sequence, the eerie monologue of A True Friend or the shocking end to The Rider. Both The Rider and Friend share a common theme of friendship being a bait towards doom, such as the child pleading in the former ‘We’re all friends here, aren’t we?’ in a scene that I can’t forget. And other horrors await, such as a father who repeatedly dies and returns in Vigil in the Inner Room. ‘There is no afterlife,” he said absently, as if to himself. “At least none I could find. I buzzed around like a fly and then came back. There was nowhere for me to go.’ No matter the tale, Evenson rises to the challenge, though he can even make falling asleep sound terrifying so what did I expect: ‘Now that the task was done, sleep was catching up to him. And then it caught and took him.’
While Evenson has written several novels, like the utterly unforgettable Last Days, he tends to stick more to short fiction. ‘I see myself as more of a story writer than a novelist,’ he said in a recent interview with The Coachella Review and admits his stories tend to go from idea to completion rather quickly. Though while most of these stories were written between 2020 and 2022, Maternity was a late edition that was written back in 2014 based on true events and he’s been waiting to use it:
‘“Maternity” is a weird story for me in that it’s not weird, if that makes sense. It’s straightforward [and] fairly realistic. It’s based very, very closely on a story [about] when [my and my wife’s] son Max was born [and] the nurse who was attending my wife. Since we’re both writers, we tend to ask people questions. So the nurse told us a story that is not exactly like “Maternity” but similar enough that it stuck in my head. It’s a story that I’ve put in previous collections. I think the first collection I tried to include it in was A Collapse of Horses. I had it in there, and I wasn’t sure about it, and my editor said, “Nah, let’s take it out, save it for another book.” I had it in Song for the Unraveling of the World, and it just didn’t feel like it fit there, so I took it out.’
It’s a tale of near doppelgänger with the two Annas, one who steals a baby and the other who considers stealing Anna’s baby when she later gives birth to “teach her a lesson”, but also a bit of a doppelgänger to another Evenson story, Born Stillborn from Songs For the Unraveling of the World, where a characters unraveling of sanity and the world around him comes from the dual therapists in his life. Maternity is an outlier for Evenson in terms of content, yet it also feels right at home in his eerie tone.
‘The world is a terrible place, the boy began to feel, listening to these tales, but wondrous too.’
With practically a fright per page, Brian Evenson’s Good Night, Sleep Tight is a collection of tales sure to satisfy. Often revolving around storytelling itself, Evenson crafts tales that get their icy grip around your heart and haunt your mind for long to come. He is a master short story teller and I look forward to any release from this rather prolific author. Creepy, cool and a lot of fun, Good Night, Sleep Tight is a great collection.
4/5
‘So do your utmost. As soon as the locks click open, spring from your chamber with honey on your tongue and convince me we can learn to treat one another as equals. Convince me that you want me to stay alive. Trust me, we are both hoping you will succeed.’
September 18, 2024
These are quietly unsettling stories that cohere into a slippery trail of dread leaking from the book's gutters. Many of them gesture back toward the title: the horror of what can happen on the edge of sleep, sometimes during and following cryptic encounters between 'mothers' and their 'children'. Here are failures to communicate, to describe, to explain, to get help; and, conversely, failures to hear, to understand, to perceive, to interpret. Another fine collection by a modern master of horror in the short form.
October 21, 2024
A collection that roams between horror and speculative fiction, sometimes straddling the boundaries of both genres. A number of entries cluster around particular themes and preoccupations: from AI and the posthuman to motherhood; childhood and rites of passage. Evenson’s writing’s admirably controlled and fluid throughout, he’s adept at establishing mood and atmosphere. But I found his plotting less consistently satisfying.
Doubling, nightmares and eldritch creatures unite one set of stories in which the standouts were: his eerie title piece; the unnerving “The Thickening” which deals with notions of loss of self, of all-pervasive personal and cultural anxieties; and Evenson’s variation on an uncanny fairy tale “The Night Hunter” which had a quality reminiscent of E. T. A. Hoffman. “Untitled (Cloud of Blood) which revolves around a malevolent painting was another highlight, mainly because of its obvious ties to my favourite brand of classic supernatural fiction – echoes of M.R. James and Edith Wharton.
I wasn’t as convinced by the majority of Evenson's explorations of artificial life forms, some of which trace back to his fascination with the ship’s computer in Alien. Many of the questions these raised around identity, consciousness and free will seemed rather unsophisticated, conceptually thin and repetitious. Although the imagery in “Annex” – inspired by one of L. Frank Baum’s Oz stories – and the fable-like “In a Forest” worked brilliantly in the moment. Of the sf pieces “Solution” was by far my favourite, an intriguing cli-fi piece which seemed to be building on Mary Shelley as well as books like The Island of Doctor Moreau with a pleasing nod to vampire fiction. It didn’t totally work for me as a story but I liked Evenson’s damning commentary on social inequality and looming environmental disaster in “Servitude.”
There are a few entries rooted in an examination of liminal spaces, loss of control and/or volition. These sometimes operated as metaphor or allegory, a way of charting the challenging journey from adolescence to adulthood. Here a journey often hampered by the constraints of familial bonds particularly manipulative, unreliable parents. Although I wasn’t keen on Evenson’s tendency to fixate on women as inextricably tied to the maternal: either desperate to be mothers or desperate not to relinquish the potential for power that role might provide. Another issue for me was Evenson’s approach to narrative, he likes to make room for his readers’ imagination, so many of the pieces here are open-ended or have abrupt/enigmatic conclusions. That attitude to storytelling wasn’t always an obstacle but it could add to my sense of his shorter pieces as sketch-like rather than fully-developed narratives, the Poe-like “A True Friend’s” a prime example. But I did like his fantastical creatures, the weird beings hatched from night terrors or, in the case of “The Cabin” encountered off the beaten track.
Thanks to Edelweiss and publisher Coffee House Press for an ARC
Rating: 3/3.5
Doubling, nightmares and eldritch creatures unite one set of stories in which the standouts were: his eerie title piece; the unnerving “The Thickening” which deals with notions of loss of self, of all-pervasive personal and cultural anxieties; and Evenson’s variation on an uncanny fairy tale “The Night Hunter” which had a quality reminiscent of E. T. A. Hoffman. “Untitled (Cloud of Blood) which revolves around a malevolent painting was another highlight, mainly because of its obvious ties to my favourite brand of classic supernatural fiction – echoes of M.R. James and Edith Wharton.
I wasn’t as convinced by the majority of Evenson's explorations of artificial life forms, some of which trace back to his fascination with the ship’s computer in Alien. Many of the questions these raised around identity, consciousness and free will seemed rather unsophisticated, conceptually thin and repetitious. Although the imagery in “Annex” – inspired by one of L. Frank Baum’s Oz stories – and the fable-like “In a Forest” worked brilliantly in the moment. Of the sf pieces “Solution” was by far my favourite, an intriguing cli-fi piece which seemed to be building on Mary Shelley as well as books like The Island of Doctor Moreau with a pleasing nod to vampire fiction. It didn’t totally work for me as a story but I liked Evenson’s damning commentary on social inequality and looming environmental disaster in “Servitude.”
There are a few entries rooted in an examination of liminal spaces, loss of control and/or volition. These sometimes operated as metaphor or allegory, a way of charting the challenging journey from adolescence to adulthood. Here a journey often hampered by the constraints of familial bonds particularly manipulative, unreliable parents. Although I wasn’t keen on Evenson’s tendency to fixate on women as inextricably tied to the maternal: either desperate to be mothers or desperate not to relinquish the potential for power that role might provide. Another issue for me was Evenson’s approach to narrative, he likes to make room for his readers’ imagination, so many of the pieces here are open-ended or have abrupt/enigmatic conclusions. That attitude to storytelling wasn’t always an obstacle but it could add to my sense of his shorter pieces as sketch-like rather than fully-developed narratives, the Poe-like “A True Friend’s” a prime example. But I did like his fantastical creatures, the weird beings hatched from night terrors or, in the case of “The Cabin” encountered off the beaten track.
Thanks to Edelweiss and publisher Coffee House Press for an ARC
Rating: 3/3.5
June 30, 2025
One of the best to ever do it
October 24, 2024
More notes:
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
Another highly enjoyable collection from Evenson, probably more consistent than his last. Mothers are a frequent presence. A few seem to play with how we read a text and associate it with specific genres. Some of the stories with science fiction settings, often with backdrops of environmental disaster and social inequality, are gentle, sad and affecting.
My favorites:
The Sequence
The Rider
The Annex
Mother
Under Care
3.5 stars, rounded up.
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
Another highly enjoyable collection from Evenson, probably more consistent than his last. Mothers are a frequent presence. A few seem to play with how we read a text and associate it with specific genres. Some of the stories with science fiction settings, often with backdrops of environmental disaster and social inequality, are gentle, sad and affecting.
My favorites:
The Sequence
The Rider
The Annex
Mother
Under Care
3.5 stars, rounded up.
May 28, 2024
Finishing an Evenson book is like having your soul ripped out, reformed, put back, and being everything is okay. It’s not okay, but we move forward anyway.
March 12, 2025
I was hoping for more from this book. Evenson's stories revolve around a few themes: boundaries between dimensions (bad things happen when you cross); artificial intelligence beings, with a focus on their sentience, emotions, morality; and ecological disaster. A couple are just bizarre one offs. The stories drift between horror (the majority) and science fiction. Evenson often creates an atmosphere of dread and then abruptly breaks off the story without resolution. He doesn't develop characters very well (and is best with AI robots). In many cases, one doesn't care enough about the characters for the story to have much effect. I suppose one could call it slice of horror as opposed to slice of life. It is not bad, overall, but just doesn't work for me.
September 26, 2024
Shares The Glassy Burning Floor of Hell’s polemic focus on ecological collapse and post-human evolution, but somehow expressed in an even angrier and bleaker tenor which evokes his earlier collections: the brutally terse endings had me thinking a lot of Windeye and Fugue State. As usual, uncanny permutations of career-spanning narrative patterns abound, most obviously in the first two stories; more strikingly, the collection single-mindedly zeroes in on mother-child relationships, which assume richly different shadings across the book. At the end of the day there is no contemporary writer for sheer schizophrenic terror: the title story, deceptively simple in structure and even somewhat narratively predictable, is nonetheless a small masterpiece of language precision-honed to cost its readers a restful night—it certainly succeeding at costing me mine
October 1, 2024
Another great assembly of Evenson tales. The title story was the creepiest, and Servitude was surprisingly emotional. Keep on cranking 'em out and I'll keep reading them. His tales definitely feel the closest we'll get to getting new Twilight Zone episodes.
May 14, 2024
The uncanny and disquietness and yet very human emotion running parallel with vivid visceral masterful evocation with the reader carrying on the dreams and nightmares.
The author a capable conductor of the familiar and unfamiliar, executing with intimate and precision storytelling, juxtapositioning the reader amidst different realms and worlds with a myriad of characters consuming hypnotically under his wings within visionary works, enter The Brian Evenson Zone!
Greyness
Games
Help me
Things be controlled
People being instructed.
Help help
Paralysed character
A freedom wanted
Head and bodies and memories
Memories feed, knowledge gained
Scary bedtime story time
Servants and masters
Mother and father
Brother and sister
Twins
Family and unfamiliar
Frailties and complexities
Existential crisis
Fears and hopes
Need and wants
Strange and uncanny
Vivid and visceral
Insidiously consuming
First person narrations
Terrifying good.
Goodnight, sleep tight!
Review of each short story at my vortex
More2read
The author a capable conductor of the familiar and unfamiliar, executing with intimate and precision storytelling, juxtapositioning the reader amidst different realms and worlds with a myriad of characters consuming hypnotically under his wings within visionary works, enter The Brian Evenson Zone!
Greyness
Games
Help me
Things be controlled
People being instructed.
Help help
Paralysed character
A freedom wanted
Head and bodies and memories
Memories feed, knowledge gained
Scary bedtime story time
Servants and masters
Mother and father
Brother and sister
Twins
Family and unfamiliar
Frailties and complexities
Existential crisis
Fears and hopes
Need and wants
Strange and uncanny
Vivid and visceral
Insidiously consuming
First person narrations
Terrifying good.
Goodnight, sleep tight!
Review of each short story at my vortex
More2read
August 27, 2025
"Good Night, Sleep Tight" is a damn near flawless collection of short stories that blend horror with science fiction in ways that feel both inventive and off kilter. So many of the stories circle around family, but Evenson twists those bonds into something strange and haunting. I was also fascinated each time he returned to the concept of off-planet colonization and artificial intelligence, leading me to discover that People For The Ethical Treatment Of AI (PETAI) is in fact a real thing. What a time to be alive! These stories, although published over many years, in a variety of outlets, feel like a cohesive unit. Like a journey. Evenson has a knack for making the ordinary terrifying and the terrifying oddly familiar. Sleep tight indeed.
Read
August 12, 2024dnf six stories in. dogshit tbh 😭 r/twosentencehorror core 🤢 "literary" horror is such a meaningless and insulting categorization, especially when the content is THIS BAD!!! And I like some of the other Evenson stuff! but what makes him more "literary" than others? It's not the writing or the structure or the ideas, so.. I'm lost. Once again, all hail Queen Kathe Koja, the ACTUAL literary horror giant
November 11, 2024
Superb.
Read
October 10, 2024Evenson’s latest collection gathers 19 stories—mostly horror, including several that take place in an undetermined future or a generation starship. If you have any interest in horror fiction, but more than that, if you have any interest in the craft of horror fiction, then you should be reading Brian Evenson.
Evenson is a master at dislocation, at evoking a sense of existential dread. You’d think that eliciting this effect would be a staple of the genre, but it’s hard to create an atmosphere in which something is not quite right without over-explaining or falling back on cliches. Evenson makes it look so easy that it’s easy to dismiss some of the collection’s more “old fashioned” pieces, like one involving a cursed painting. But the real craft is to take the familiar and still make it scary. And Eveneson achieves this every single time. The title story, “Good Night, Sleep Tight,” is a terrific example of this.*
Having said that, the Evenson I love is the one who amps the weird quotient up by a thousand. There are several of those stories here—including a cracker called “Vigil in the Inner Room” (though I might have liked “The Thickening” more).
If you’ve never read Evenson before, this is a good starting point. But really, you can pick up any of his collections or novels. He’s just that good. And since we’re in the spooky month, why not start now!
*As usual, I go into more detail in my review for Locus, out in November.
Evenson is a master at dislocation, at evoking a sense of existential dread. You’d think that eliciting this effect would be a staple of the genre, but it’s hard to create an atmosphere in which something is not quite right without over-explaining or falling back on cliches. Evenson makes it look so easy that it’s easy to dismiss some of the collection’s more “old fashioned” pieces, like one involving a cursed painting. But the real craft is to take the familiar and still make it scary. And Eveneson achieves this every single time. The title story, “Good Night, Sleep Tight,” is a terrific example of this.*
Having said that, the Evenson I love is the one who amps the weird quotient up by a thousand. There are several of those stories here—including a cracker called “Vigil in the Inner Room” (though I might have liked “The Thickening” more).
If you’ve never read Evenson before, this is a good starting point. But really, you can pick up any of his collections or novels. He’s just that good. And since we’re in the spooky month, why not start now!
*As usual, I go into more detail in my review for Locus, out in November.
August 26, 2024
This was an amazing collection of short fiction by a writer that I am quickly holding in high esteem. The stories ranged in genre from science fiction to horror to speculative fiction, but each entry contained so much emotional weight. It was amazing how much gravitas the author was able to build into each story in such a short amount of time. I highly recommend anyone who enjoys short fiction on the darker side, to read this collection.
December 5, 2024
Do I start by repeating myself about who Brian Evenson is and why he is important, I never know if this is your first time reading my reviews or if you have read my ten other Evenson reviews or listened to the multiple interviews I have done with him. Brian Evenson, to this reader, is the modern master of the short story. Along with Lisa Morton, they are my favorite short story authors at this moment.
There is a history of writers who excel at the short story, Raymond Carver and Flannery O’Conner are examples in mainstream literary circles. Within SF, Fantasy and Horror Dennis Etchison, Harlan Ellison, Catherine L. Moore and of course, Lovecraft were masters of the short form who never achieved the same kind of power in their full-length work. Evenson has written two novels that I think are masterpieces, Immobility and Last Days. I have enjoyed several B.K. Evenson media tie-ins novels, so it is not that he isn’t capable of writing novels. He does. Brian’s skill as a writer in the short form feels like a surfer catching the perfect wave or A Steph Curry jumper that hits all net.
An Evenson collection is filled with themes, motifs, and vibes that repeat. Clive Barker separated the Books of Blood stories in a way that every short felt different, but that is not the case when Evenson collects a book. He repeats the themes and motifs to an almost hilarious level but often it creates a sense of something bigger.
This time Parenthood, bedtime stories, communication breakdowns, ecological collapse, perception, posthumanism, what it means to be human, or alive itself. Weird creepy moments and dark reflections of thoughts that feel inspired by talking to his young son. That is just a guess, but it seems fairly obvious that during the era when most of these stories were written, the author was tucking a young person in. I feel like many of these stories feel inspired by sitting at the end of a child’s bed and wondering what stories a hiding in the shadows of those moments.
I may be reading into the title of this collection, but there has to be a reason that this story was chosen to anchor the book as the title.
Let's into a few of my favorite stories in the collection and highlight a few moments that I was really touched by. It should be noted that more than one of these stories was digested in one sitting on my lunch break at work. I was sitting in the break room feeling moved, surprised, and uncomfortable. At least three lunch breaks during my work I put the book down and thought “Holy shit.” You can’t ask for more from a short story experience.
The first story I want to highlight is Untitled (cloud of blood). This is a story about a haunting in the form of a painting. The story evoked a serious amount of dread. “It was my father's favorite painting, though perhaps favorite is the wrong word. Shall we say, rather, it was the painting my father was most drawn to, the one for which he had the deepest relationship? Indeed, if I came down from my bedroom late at night I would often find my father in the dining hall, stationed as if frozen on the meticulous and shining parquet floor staring deeply into the painting. Sometimes, too, he would speak to it, then pause, seemingly awaiting an answer though he would immediately stop this activity whenever he noticed my presence.”
Is it the painting? Is it the father that is creepy? Both? The story drips with vibes. Without the strength of prose, I am not sure we would feel this. The act of the father falling silent is the mechanics of the suspense, every piece of the build-up including the narrator being unsure how to word his Dad’s feelings for the painting plays a role.
Mother is a fantastic story, that holds the reveal of its nature as Science Fiction back so that it is a part of how it unfolds. This is also true of my favorite in the collection Imagine a Forest. Mother plays with the parental role in a science-fictional way. Mother has a powerful ending. An artificial being story that is built slowly revealing the nature of the character and the story. It is a variation of the ‘bedtime stories’ theme as it is an artificial mother/child story. But I want to key in on one passage.
“A dream?
You do not sleep so you do not dream, and you do not have your memories to explain what dream means, how shall I put it? When you go to your tent and gather energy from the prime floor for the next day, allow your mind to wander. It will find its way to what I have given you before morning.”
The whole passage is written in italics, a communication between Mother and the artificial child. Dream is not in italics, it is a little thing, but it stopped me. I see what you are doing Evenson, I caught that. I did think about what the choice meant. In the science fictional tales in this collection, the characters ask questions like what is a forest or a dream? Questions that come off as basic parts of life. They are the questions of a child but in this context, they are questions of beings trying to understand what it means to be alive.
That also leads to our title story. Good night, Sleep Tight. In this story, a man remembers the times when his mother would tell inappropriate stories at bedtime. Also after she left and came back.
“What made her come back? Why did she return some nights but not most nights? He wasn't sure. There was no reason that he could make out. She just did.
He asked his mother about it once when he was older when he was in college before he met his wife-to-be and long before his son was born the two of them were in the living room she generally reserved for company. But now that he was away at college he qualified, he supposed, as company.
In a lull in her resuscitation of neighborhood gossip, he had asked, “Why did you used to tell me those scary stories?”
The nightmarish implication that it was not his mother, reminded me in all the right ways of a Josh Malerman vibe. This is an excellent creep fest show, a master classic in classic chills. But Evenson as well-rated as he is, still doesn’t get the notice for sentences that raise goosebumps in a single sentence. Consider this from The Other Floor, “Speak, to be fair, was not exactly the right word. It whispered, maybe, or breathed out words, things he could barely hear.”
I don’t think you can spoil this next one I am talking about the reveal much like Mother that it is science fictional. Patiently told you might not notice until a bit into the story that you are deep in space. To me, it is the best story in the collection and fits a 2024 zeitgeist as it is in the same subgenre as my top read of the year Skinship by James Reich. Imagine a forest is in the grand SF tradition of the Generation ship but I didn’t know until this exchange.
“What is a forest? I asked. What is a bear?”
“A forest is…” she thought for a moment. “If you go to the service deck, there are places where the ducks are exposed, you know what I mean?”
The reveal is great, but the vibe is haunting and elevates SF in a way I enjoyed enough to read a second time.
Never Little, Never Grown is a great sly little Phil Dickian paranoid short story. Another Favorite in the collection that plays with the nature of memory.
“How many times have I learned and then asked to forget it?”
“A few Hundred,” she said. Perhaps a few more than that.”
A Brian Evenson collection is always a cause for celebration. This one is no different. You can’t go wrong with a collection, but between this collection and the new Laird Barron this has been a fantastic year for literary horror, I suspect both will make my best reads of the years. The Evenson collections are all consistent in quality there is no place to go wrong, I mean I feel I could compile of personal best of, but short horror fiction readers can’t miss this one.
October 14, 2024
Thematically, to my thinking, this collection is one of the strongest Evenson has published in recent years. It is a curated sequencing of stories that elegantly fuses together, one after the other, each iteration and exploration of leitmotif building upon and even sometimes transfiguring the last. There are only two or three entries I can point to that didn't land as squarely as I would have liked, but even those still left me in awe of Evenson's scalpel-like ability to peel away layers of seemingly irreducible moral quandary. These weaker pieces employ a heavy hand of allegory, mostly conducted via philosophical dialogue between characters, and this sort of thing is usually quite wearisome to me. In Evenson's hands, however, what could be sermon actually ends up Socratic inquiry.
Here is a blend of uncanny, bizarre, and disturbing tales (as distinguished from "stories," in a brilliant dichotomy established within "The Night Archer") which function largely as the second half of the adage "fuck around and find out." The characters routinely either disregard warnings or evidence of danger for one reason or another, and inevitably end up consumed by curiosity or something even more hideous. This is fitting, because the theme of the collection is parent/child relations—and not only those of the human variety, either. As parents, we want to guard our children against the evils of the world—we wish to keep them safe from any harm that could befall them—and so, we tell them stories (or tales) that might steer them from the rapacious dangers that swirl invisibly beyond the bounds of the hearth-fire. Though it is worth noting that, here, even the parents themselves are not exempt from these cautionary tales, and often meet their ends due to that certain blindness that comes part and parcel with having sired offspring.
I was not as big a fan of Evenson's prior collection, The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell, though there were some stand-outs. I felt that the science-fictional elements introduced there didn't cohere as well as they could've—many of the genre pieces felt underbaked, to my reckoning. Typically, Evenson's elusive, spare prose slices through the fog of his stories to illuminate the shifting thing in the darkness, though in Glassy, Burning... I found myself more often than not disappointed by what it revealed.
Evenson has always had the inclination towards science-fiction, even in prior collections. "Dust," an excellent novelette-length story from A Collapse of Horses, remains a favorite of his work, and it is squarely in the realm of "space horror." I think that it is when the genre elements take center stage that the pieces falter for me, as in the majority of Glassy, Burning.... Here, though, (and in "Dust," as well) the genre elements serve to augment and deepen the stories: foregrounding character interaction rather than oblique hints at world-building to convey narrative makes these stories feel more resonant, interrogating more than anything the nature of relationships between creator/created and master/servant as well as parent/child.
The stories are squarely in Evenson's wheelhouse: doppelgangers, twins, and parallel realities all make an appearance in the very first installment, "The Sequence." There is codependence, and puppeting of a very literal kind, in "The Rider," set in a dilapidated Anytown somewhere west of Ligotti. Most of the entries which deal squarely with science fiction and consider the rigors of robotic and artificial thought-processing coming in contact with the messy loops and squiggles of human-borne logic. The concept of "eternal return" makes an appearance more than once (ha!), even in stories that do not feature a science-fictional element—in the title story, fear is passed down from parent to child in more ways than one, an inescapable helix of terror. In "Mother," the titular role is separate from the bearer, and can transform them, too. In "Annex," self becomes ouroboros (though Evenson inverts the classic image; here, it is the head that is consumed, rather than the tail), and in an incestuous, ingrowing pattern, "self" is one's own lineage. (Elements of this story also reminded me of the so-called birthing graves in the subterranean levels of the title building from Ligotti's classic story "The Red Tower.")
Even when Evenson is at his most obvious, as in "Servitude," the stories are still cerebrally teasing. "Servitude" takes on the form of a parable-within-a-parable, and is the author at his most didactic. The story, being a parable, requires that humanity is represented broadly—as stereotype, displayed at its worst—with no qualms or scruples, and thus loses some nuance for me. Perhaps, though, in this day and age, where we are faced with ecological disaster and an uncertain future for our species, such nuance is unnecessary—maybe now is the time for broad, sweeping strokes. Regardless of this distinction, the story is food for thought, even if the meal is poisoned. "Imagine a Forest" does similar work in and around these themes, though I think this story is far more effective because it focuses more on the education and development of a character rather than species-level commentary—even if the character is not exactly human. I like to think that, despite the brutality of the eventual resolution, "Imagine a Forest" has a kind of happy ending, which is relatively rare in Evenson's work, and certainly stands out amongst the others here.
There are also a few stories here which fit more into the Evensonian tradition: "The Other Floor" sees its young protagonist disregard warnings from both an Earthly plane as well as one ... adjacent ... and reap the harrowing consequences. "The Night Archer" deals with elements of toxic, dysfunctional family relations, adding in some pseudo-folk horror while commenting on the nature of narrative—the stories we tell ourselves as well as the stories told to us—in one fell swoop.
It is telling that the title chosen for this collection is ostensibly a benediction: one is wished well as they embark into unconsciousness, a journey over which they have no conscious control. It is in this liminal state where Evenson's nightmares lurk, however, and in this light, the benediction seems to twist into something more sarcastic.
However, after reading this, the bite of the bedbugs will most likely be the very least of your concerns.
Sweet dreams.
Here is a blend of uncanny, bizarre, and disturbing tales (as distinguished from "stories," in a brilliant dichotomy established within "The Night Archer") which function largely as the second half of the adage "fuck around and find out." The characters routinely either disregard warnings or evidence of danger for one reason or another, and inevitably end up consumed by curiosity or something even more hideous. This is fitting, because the theme of the collection is parent/child relations—and not only those of the human variety, either. As parents, we want to guard our children against the evils of the world—we wish to keep them safe from any harm that could befall them—and so, we tell them stories (or tales) that might steer them from the rapacious dangers that swirl invisibly beyond the bounds of the hearth-fire. Though it is worth noting that, here, even the parents themselves are not exempt from these cautionary tales, and often meet their ends due to that certain blindness that comes part and parcel with having sired offspring.
I was not as big a fan of Evenson's prior collection, The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell, though there were some stand-outs. I felt that the science-fictional elements introduced there didn't cohere as well as they could've—many of the genre pieces felt underbaked, to my reckoning. Typically, Evenson's elusive, spare prose slices through the fog of his stories to illuminate the shifting thing in the darkness, though in Glassy, Burning... I found myself more often than not disappointed by what it revealed.
Evenson has always had the inclination towards science-fiction, even in prior collections. "Dust," an excellent novelette-length story from A Collapse of Horses, remains a favorite of his work, and it is squarely in the realm of "space horror." I think that it is when the genre elements take center stage that the pieces falter for me, as in the majority of Glassy, Burning.... Here, though, (and in "Dust," as well) the genre elements serve to augment and deepen the stories: foregrounding character interaction rather than oblique hints at world-building to convey narrative makes these stories feel more resonant, interrogating more than anything the nature of relationships between creator/created and master/servant as well as parent/child.
The stories are squarely in Evenson's wheelhouse: doppelgangers, twins, and parallel realities all make an appearance in the very first installment, "The Sequence." There is codependence, and puppeting of a very literal kind, in "The Rider," set in a dilapidated Anytown somewhere west of Ligotti. Most of the entries which deal squarely with science fiction and consider the rigors of robotic and artificial thought-processing coming in contact with the messy loops and squiggles of human-borne logic. The concept of "eternal return" makes an appearance more than once (ha!), even in stories that do not feature a science-fictional element—in the title story, fear is passed down from parent to child in more ways than one, an inescapable helix of terror. In "Mother," the titular role is separate from the bearer, and can transform them, too. In "Annex," self becomes ouroboros (though Evenson inverts the classic image; here, it is the head that is consumed, rather than the tail), and in an incestuous, ingrowing pattern, "self" is one's own lineage. (Elements of this story also reminded me of the so-called birthing graves in the subterranean levels of the title building from Ligotti's classic story "The Red Tower.")
Even when Evenson is at his most obvious, as in "Servitude," the stories are still cerebrally teasing. "Servitude" takes on the form of a parable-within-a-parable, and is the author at his most didactic. The story, being a parable, requires that humanity is represented broadly—as stereotype, displayed at its worst—with no qualms or scruples, and thus loses some nuance for me. Perhaps, though, in this day and age, where we are faced with ecological disaster and an uncertain future for our species, such nuance is unnecessary—maybe now is the time for broad, sweeping strokes. Regardless of this distinction, the story is food for thought, even if the meal is poisoned. "Imagine a Forest" does similar work in and around these themes, though I think this story is far more effective because it focuses more on the education and development of a character rather than species-level commentary—even if the character is not exactly human. I like to think that, despite the brutality of the eventual resolution, "Imagine a Forest" has a kind of happy ending, which is relatively rare in Evenson's work, and certainly stands out amongst the others here.
There are also a few stories here which fit more into the Evensonian tradition: "The Other Floor" sees its young protagonist disregard warnings from both an Earthly plane as well as one ... adjacent ... and reap the harrowing consequences. "The Night Archer" deals with elements of toxic, dysfunctional family relations, adding in some pseudo-folk horror while commenting on the nature of narrative—the stories we tell ourselves as well as the stories told to us—in one fell swoop.
It is telling that the title chosen for this collection is ostensibly a benediction: one is wished well as they embark into unconsciousness, a journey over which they have no conscious control. It is in this liminal state where Evenson's nightmares lurk, however, and in this light, the benediction seems to twist into something more sarcastic.
However, after reading this, the bite of the bedbugs will most likely be the very least of your concerns.
Sweet dreams.
June 11, 2024
How the horrific scenarios still flow so strong and feel so fresh after this many collections kind of blows my mind. The vicious mountain spring flooded the mental mine, my cognitive ore turned sunken treasure, and the kicker is: he brought robots along for the deluge. Adding sci-fi into the stream gives it some Kim-Bo-Young-slash-George-Saunders peanut butter cup (savory/sweet) magic. After all these years, I keep thinking the tap will run dry, but he keeps finding ways to overwhelm the levee between my childhood wonderment and adult fears.
Want to read
July 1, 2024oh i am going to be INSUFFERABLE when this comes out
April 18, 2025
Masterful! I have a new favourite author. How is it possible I've never read something by Evenson before? I love short fiction and I love the kind of horror and speculative fiction that he writes - a perfect fit (as horror in short story format is the best kind). Well, I know that this is one author I will try and peruse his back catalogue, as he has a lot of short story collections for me to enjoy.
I do recommend this collection (and on the basis hereof this author) to any horror-afficionado who likes the more ambivalent stories that gain their power not from gore or shock value, but from atmosphere, suggestion and creeping dread. These are the kind of stories that make me shiver, in just the right way. The endings offer finality, but not often clarity - which makes them powerful, as the fear of the unknown is the scariest fear there is. There is something out there, waiting beyond the borders of this reality, and it sees us as prey. We do not know what it is, we have only seen glimpses, we know only stories (storytelling is an important theme here), but the reality is something else entirely.
I find Evenson has very diverse horrors in this collection (and a couple of SF-stories that deal in the same kind of uncertainty about transitions as the horror stories do), but there are returning themes. An important theme in this collection is that about transitional stages. First one is in one's own reality, one's home - a safe space, where the rules are known and one knows how to behave and what to expect. There are stories about other realities, tales about the unknown, remembrances of dreams - but they can be put aside, neglected without having lasting impact. But from this safe space one enters into a transitional space that leads to a state that is unpredictable, where the rules aren't knows, that is unsafe. We all enter this transitional space often. When we go to sleep, we pass time between waking and sleeping. There's travel, from one's home to a strange town or country - the time in a train of plane is a transitional space. There's the transition from child to adult (here often illuminated by using artificial life forms) - as a child our rules are clear and our lives are mostly kept safe. We hear a bit from our parents about what adult life pertains, but we cannot be sure. But then we have to grow up, transition into that new world, and we find out it is unpredictable and unsafe. Here other transtions, between rooms, between land and sea etc are also used as metaphors. And there's another transition that is important to the author: that from a safe and liveable world into a devastated ecology because of climate change. Here billionaires and the other mega rich try to keep security intact and espace form the chaos they leave behind ...
I thought these themes were explored well. The prose is effective. There is a slight formality from it - as most stories are told as remembrances, often memories of childhood or from a more innocent state, and the formal tone helps make the horrors stand out more. Less is more is often the case in horror stories. A review on here made mention of the characters not being very deep or layered, but a) these are short stories and b) that is the point of the stories: the characters are in a state of clarity, of innocence, of known rules, where they had not yet had to grow up or develop. It is by the transtion to another state that they will gain depth (if they get the chance).
There are nineteen stories in here. Some of the best are opening story 'The sequence' - about a girl that is asked by her sister to play a game, by following her movements - but they have a sinister purpose. The end was spine chillingly suggestive. A great start to the collection. I liked the weird tone of 'The Cabin' as well, as someone who got lost in the snow thinks he has found shelter. Again, the end did not make everything clear, but it was the unknowability of what happened that was scary. 'The rider' had a great situation, that I won't spoil. But it was very effective. 'Untitled (Cloud of Blood)' is about a painting that has a sinister effect on people. A great story that was very well constructed up to the fitting end. 'Mother' is a great SF-tale of an artificial being finding out the creature it calls 'Mother' has kept information from him about their circumstances. It has to take drastic action to uncover the truth. 'Vigil in the Inner Room' has great atmosphere. 'Maternity' is a story without a SF-nal or supernatural element, but is still disturbing. 'Under Care' is spine tingling medical horror about a man who finds himself in a hospital room but no-one gives him any information. The final story, 'Solution' is a SF-story with a lot of anger beneath it. A scientist sees the world being devastated by people, and searches for a solution ...
All in all, a great collection with stories that will live in my imagination for a long time. I hope other fans of this kind of subtle horror will discover Evensons stories as well and hopefully enjoy them as much as I did!
I do recommend this collection (and on the basis hereof this author) to any horror-afficionado who likes the more ambivalent stories that gain their power not from gore or shock value, but from atmosphere, suggestion and creeping dread. These are the kind of stories that make me shiver, in just the right way. The endings offer finality, but not often clarity - which makes them powerful, as the fear of the unknown is the scariest fear there is. There is something out there, waiting beyond the borders of this reality, and it sees us as prey. We do not know what it is, we have only seen glimpses, we know only stories (storytelling is an important theme here), but the reality is something else entirely.
I find Evenson has very diverse horrors in this collection (and a couple of SF-stories that deal in the same kind of uncertainty about transitions as the horror stories do), but there are returning themes. An important theme in this collection is that about transitional stages. First one is in one's own reality, one's home - a safe space, where the rules are known and one knows how to behave and what to expect. There are stories about other realities, tales about the unknown, remembrances of dreams - but they can be put aside, neglected without having lasting impact. But from this safe space one enters into a transitional space that leads to a state that is unpredictable, where the rules aren't knows, that is unsafe. We all enter this transitional space often. When we go to sleep, we pass time between waking and sleeping. There's travel, from one's home to a strange town or country - the time in a train of plane is a transitional space. There's the transition from child to adult (here often illuminated by using artificial life forms) - as a child our rules are clear and our lives are mostly kept safe. We hear a bit from our parents about what adult life pertains, but we cannot be sure. But then we have to grow up, transition into that new world, and we find out it is unpredictable and unsafe. Here other transtions, between rooms, between land and sea etc are also used as metaphors. And there's another transition that is important to the author: that from a safe and liveable world into a devastated ecology because of climate change. Here billionaires and the other mega rich try to keep security intact and espace form the chaos they leave behind ...
I thought these themes were explored well. The prose is effective. There is a slight formality from it - as most stories are told as remembrances, often memories of childhood or from a more innocent state, and the formal tone helps make the horrors stand out more. Less is more is often the case in horror stories. A review on here made mention of the characters not being very deep or layered, but a) these are short stories and b) that is the point of the stories: the characters are in a state of clarity, of innocence, of known rules, where they had not yet had to grow up or develop. It is by the transtion to another state that they will gain depth (if they get the chance).
There are nineteen stories in here. Some of the best are opening story 'The sequence' - about a girl that is asked by her sister to play a game, by following her movements - but they have a sinister purpose. The end was spine chillingly suggestive. A great start to the collection. I liked the weird tone of 'The Cabin' as well, as someone who got lost in the snow thinks he has found shelter. Again, the end did not make everything clear, but it was the unknowability of what happened that was scary. 'The rider' had a great situation, that I won't spoil. But it was very effective. 'Untitled (Cloud of Blood)' is about a painting that has a sinister effect on people. A great story that was very well constructed up to the fitting end. 'Mother' is a great SF-tale of an artificial being finding out the creature it calls 'Mother' has kept information from him about their circumstances. It has to take drastic action to uncover the truth. 'Vigil in the Inner Room' has great atmosphere. 'Maternity' is a story without a SF-nal or supernatural element, but is still disturbing. 'Under Care' is spine tingling medical horror about a man who finds himself in a hospital room but no-one gives him any information. The final story, 'Solution' is a SF-story with a lot of anger beneath it. A scientist sees the world being devastated by people, and searches for a solution ...
All in all, a great collection with stories that will live in my imagination for a long time. I hope other fans of this kind of subtle horror will discover Evensons stories as well and hopefully enjoy them as much as I did!
October 18, 2024
Favorite cover art but least favorite short story collection from this author sadly.
Imagine A Forest 5/5
The Night Archer 4.5/5 (I Wish this didn’t end so soon and on a cliffhanger)
and the rest were meh
3 or 4 of the stories were about robots being distraught in finding out they aren’t real people
Imagine A Forest 5/5
The Night Archer 4.5/5 (I Wish this didn’t end so soon and on a cliffhanger)
and the rest were meh
3 or 4 of the stories were about robots being distraught in finding out they aren’t real people
March 11, 2025
This is a bit of a shock but I can't get into this collection for the dear life of me. I read "Song for the Unraveling of the World" in 2022 and adored it, it was one of my favorite books that year. I was telling people to read him, how underrated he was and, of course, swore to read more and then took way too long to get around to my next Evenson, which is now. But with "Good Night, Sleep Tight" I have read 6 stories so far, sampled 3 more here and there and didn't like any of them? Not one bit? What is happening?
Collections are always a bit harder to dnf because there is always the chance that with the next story this ship will turn around and all is right with the world again. But I value my time and I want to have a good time with my books. There is of course the 'right time for a book' concept and I will totally admit that this year I have been relying more on mood reading than ever before (with the state of the world, I feel like that makes sense). I want more escapism, I want fluff when I need fluff and depth when I need depth. So, there is a chance this was just not the right time. But does that truly matter? I know I will not return to this. (It's also due back at the library, which helped make my choice here)
That being said what I don't like about these stories is
a) the slightly old fashioned writing style Evenson uses here. Did he use that before? Does this read different or am I a different reader? It feels a bit stilted and emotionless. I guess people call it literary but I have read my fare share of Literary Horror and this read more like it wanted to sound like it's from another time....
b) There is this faint air of Lovecraftian concepts that reappears (without the racism, thank the Lords) where a protagonist wanders into a house or situation and there is a weird creature-esque being or a person that is not a person and then they get attacked or succumb. Strange things just happen. There are parallel dimensions and cursed paintings or what have you, and it all is just because. There is no reason why these weird things exist or why the characters encounter them, no explanation as to where anything comes from or what the point is. Aside from being uncanny and unsettling, also creatively weird, I definitely give him props for that. But I don't like this way of storytelling.
c) The characters could be anyone, the situations just happen. There is a lot of blah to the set up but underneath it doesn't amount to much other than another uncanny encounter. To make me like this kind of Horror, I need a writing style that I can get along with. And this wasn't it.
Then there's the AI stories of which I have only read one and that had such a predictable twist... Which is another thing. There is a straightforwardness to these that makes it a chore to finish them. Once the cards are on the table it's always clear where we are going. I can't get anything out of this kind of storytelling.
To cycle back to the start: this could get better for me. Sure. But it's my reading time and I'd rather move onto something I don't have to fight so hard to enjoy.
Collections are always a bit harder to dnf because there is always the chance that with the next story this ship will turn around and all is right with the world again. But I value my time and I want to have a good time with my books. There is of course the 'right time for a book' concept and I will totally admit that this year I have been relying more on mood reading than ever before (with the state of the world, I feel like that makes sense). I want more escapism, I want fluff when I need fluff and depth when I need depth. So, there is a chance this was just not the right time. But does that truly matter? I know I will not return to this. (It's also due back at the library, which helped make my choice here)
That being said what I don't like about these stories is
a) the slightly old fashioned writing style Evenson uses here. Did he use that before? Does this read different or am I a different reader? It feels a bit stilted and emotionless. I guess people call it literary but I have read my fare share of Literary Horror and this read more like it wanted to sound like it's from another time....
b) There is this faint air of Lovecraftian concepts that reappears (without the racism, thank the Lords) where a protagonist wanders into a house or situation and there is a weird creature-esque being or a person that is not a person and then they get attacked or succumb. Strange things just happen. There are parallel dimensions and cursed paintings or what have you, and it all is just because. There is no reason why these weird things exist or why the characters encounter them, no explanation as to where anything comes from or what the point is. Aside from being uncanny and unsettling, also creatively weird, I definitely give him props for that. But I don't like this way of storytelling.
c) The characters could be anyone, the situations just happen. There is a lot of blah to the set up but underneath it doesn't amount to much other than another uncanny encounter. To make me like this kind of Horror, I need a writing style that I can get along with. And this wasn't it.
Then there's the AI stories of which I have only read one and that had such a predictable twist... Which is another thing. There is a straightforwardness to these that makes it a chore to finish them. Once the cards are on the table it's always clear where we are going. I can't get anything out of this kind of storytelling.
To cycle back to the start: this could get better for me. Sure. But it's my reading time and I'd rather move onto something I don't have to fight so hard to enjoy.
March 13, 2025
I am now an Evenson STAN
August 18, 2024
This was strange and uncanny, but I couldn’t put it down!
I really enjoyed the horror/sci-fi mix as it produced some really unique tropes and characters. Although I loved these stories, I could not read this at night because they were very unsettling to say the least. I’m looking forward to picking up more from Brian Evenson because I really enjoyed the writing style of these stories.
I wonder how long I’ll keep thinking about these stories for.
I really enjoyed the horror/sci-fi mix as it produced some really unique tropes and characters. Although I loved these stories, I could not read this at night because they were very unsettling to say the least. I’m looking forward to picking up more from Brian Evenson because I really enjoyed the writing style of these stories.
I wonder how long I’ll keep thinking about these stories for.
March 23, 2025
Yet another Evenson collection that rocks. This one skewed to sci-fi and AI a lot of the time. Those stories were generally good enough, though I think I prefer my horror to be a little less sci-fi. The standouts for me were one I'd listened to previously in an audiobook horror short story collection (The Cabin) and the easy winner of the weird and tense, The Thickening. The latter is one of the best stories I've read in a while. Creepy!
October 12, 2024
Evenson veers toward science fiction on this one, a pleasant surprise. We live in a world of doubt; we're not always sure that we can trust our senses. Evenson always invites readers to peer over the edge, to probe the unknown. It's unsettling. But isn't it better to do that, then to go on as if that doesn't exist?
September 18, 2024
What can I say other than beautiful? If you are a fan of Evenson, you won’t be disappointed. Heck, even if you aren’t a fan, you won’t be disappointed.
October 12, 2024
read about half of the stories. mostly mediocre and extremely repetitive. the self-titled is the only highlight
Want to read
November 3, 2024Attended an author event today and bought this book. Looking forward to putting into my TBR rotation.
March 17, 2025
Another fantastic collection. A master story teller at his best. Don't think, just buy this or any of his collections, read one of his stories, and you will be hooked.
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