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The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell
“Here is how monstrous humans are.” A sentient, murderous prosthetic leg; shadowy creatures lurking behind a shimmering wall; brutal barrow men―of all the terrors that populate The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell, perhaps the most alarming are the beings who decimated the habitable humans. In this new short story collection, Brian Evenson envisions a chilling future beyond the Anthropocene that forces excruciating decisions about survival and self-sacrifice in the face of toxic air and a natural world torn between revenge and regeneration. Combining psychological and ecological horror, each tale thrums with Evenson’s award-winning literary craftsmanship, dark humor, and thrilling suspense.
248 pages, Paperback
First published August 3, 2021
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5240 people want to read
About the author
Brian Evenson
265 books1,506 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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September 23, 2024
‘The World is a hell because we have made it so.’
Horror often thrusts your gaze into the path of oncoming doom, be it a chilling end to everything or a fate that makes death seem like a mercy. And what can be more chilling then the idea that humanity itself may all succumb to a ghastly demise. Sure, every era has it’s apocalypse criers, but even paying marginal attention to the news lately has one wondering if we have already crossed the precipice of doom and just hang over our doom like that cartoon coyote chasing the roadrunner, suspended in the air so we can all mock him for his self-inflicted mistakes before taking the plunge. Brian Evenson’s latest collection of short stories, The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell, thrives on positioning it’s characters in this sort of suspension above doom in a wide variety of horrific and spooky situations. With already a fantastic back catalogue of books and stories, it feels like sheer mastery that he delivers a seemingly inexhaustible variety of fresh ways he finds to unsettle you. The most common way in this collection is end of humanity scenarios and frightful futures of a decaying planet. With only minimal world building that often leaves your imagination to brew its own terror and prose sharp enough to bleed you dry, The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell is a wickedly fun cavalcade of dread.
If you are looking for frights, Evenson delivers in droves. With Song for the Unraveling of the World only 2 years old I worried this would be like a B-sides collection but it is just hit after hit. And the shrieks are torn out of you from so many different and imaginative angles. A prosthetic leg can come alive and devour your enemies, a strange tree might steal your face and wear it around on a path of devastation, there are eerie cities, portals, a genocide by strange alien visitors, monsters, ghosts, and very often here, the planet being rendered unsustainable for human life. This collection is an excellent example of the many avenues speculative fiction can travel hand in hand with horror. While this collection is less psychological horror than the previous—stories like Come Up being an exception with a narrator who realizes how his every action following his wife’s disappearance makes him look increasingly guilty—Evenson’s storytelling is marvelous, leading you through his stories as if down a dark passageway with only the light from a match to see. Most often you have a vague idea of what is going on and what is to come and then the shock arrives. And, like the final line in the story Palisade, ‘by the time he managed to get another match lit it was already too late.’
Evenson has an excellent grasp on the notion that less is more in horror. Most of these stories have fantastic settings and seem to be screaming the existence of backstory, worldbuilding and supernatural lore that never reach you. Which, for short fiction, really works as it cuts right to the heart of matters and leaves you feeling disoriented along the way. Monsters and creatures are rarely given much detail (with the exception of one), and most encounters are told to be ‘vaguely human’. Choose your own trauma, I suppose. Your mind can illustrate your own landscapes of worldbuilding which keeps the stories lingering in your head with the unknown always more terrifying than the known. This also invites the reader to collaborate with the story, creating their own hellish lore and making oneself complicit in the story. Evenson helps bring the reader into several stories by having them told to a “you” in the narrative that might as well be you, done most effectively in Extrication where ‘you’ are hearing the rantings of a man about to perform an experiment on you after falling helplessly into his trap. It is chilling and really just a ton of fun.
However, our complicity becomes the biggest point of terror in the many stories around the idea of climate change and environmental destruction (or rebellion, in several stories). ‘‘The world was changing,’ one narrator says, ‘we had ruined it.’ In these stories we often see the gruesome results of not caring for the planet, with multiple stories involving watching the slow and pathetic extinction of humanity due to the air becoming toxic or similar situations. Even stories such as Justle or the longest (and one of the best), To Breathe the Air, show a horrible quality of life living under a rapidly dying planet. One of my favorites, Elo Havel, is a fairytale-like story using the common motif of discarding aging citizens into the forest to be devoured by a monster. When the monster is finally seen, Evenson describes it as ‘an odd amalgam of dead forest and city refuse...at once so hideous and so marvelous,’ and reminds us that our pollution and unsustainable growth makes us the monster to the natural world. The effect is powerful.
‘As the world sickens further, as the air grows poisonous, as the oceans die, so too must we shift and change if we care to survive. We must extricate ourselves from humanity and become something other than ourselves. Something that can adapt to the harshness of this new world.’
Change becomes a key theme in the book, a reminder we must make a change for the better or the changes forced upon us will be terrifying. In these stories there are some who want to save the human race, but more often than not they decide the extinction of humanity may be the best result. Curator features the chronicler of humanity deciding we should be forgotten right as the world ends, while Nameless Citizen has us follow possibly the last living human as he rejects an offer to rebuild humanity (this latter story veers a bit uncomfortably close to eco-fascism but like, that isn't the message either). The silence at the end of the world becomes the horror soundtrack for this collection, a whole orchestra of silence to bring goosebumps on your skin.
Brian Evenson is a delight and The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell is a success. While I may have preferred his previous collection only slightly, this one is a hell of a lot of fun. From traditional hauntings like in My Haunting (one of my favorites) to weird science fiction parallel worlds fun as in The Shimmering Wall, Evenson crafts an amazing tale no matter what the situation. Definitely pick this up for Spooky Season, but this is sure to deliver frights all year long.
4/5
‘I am rooting for you.Whether you survive the change or perish, I will be here with you, I swear, until the bitter end.’
Horror often thrusts your gaze into the path of oncoming doom, be it a chilling end to everything or a fate that makes death seem like a mercy. And what can be more chilling then the idea that humanity itself may all succumb to a ghastly demise. Sure, every era has it’s apocalypse criers, but even paying marginal attention to the news lately has one wondering if we have already crossed the precipice of doom and just hang over our doom like that cartoon coyote chasing the roadrunner, suspended in the air so we can all mock him for his self-inflicted mistakes before taking the plunge. Brian Evenson’s latest collection of short stories, The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell, thrives on positioning it’s characters in this sort of suspension above doom in a wide variety of horrific and spooky situations. With already a fantastic back catalogue of books and stories, it feels like sheer mastery that he delivers a seemingly inexhaustible variety of fresh ways he finds to unsettle you. The most common way in this collection is end of humanity scenarios and frightful futures of a decaying planet. With only minimal world building that often leaves your imagination to brew its own terror and prose sharp enough to bleed you dry, The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell is a wickedly fun cavalcade of dread.
If you are looking for frights, Evenson delivers in droves. With Song for the Unraveling of the World only 2 years old I worried this would be like a B-sides collection but it is just hit after hit. And the shrieks are torn out of you from so many different and imaginative angles. A prosthetic leg can come alive and devour your enemies, a strange tree might steal your face and wear it around on a path of devastation, there are eerie cities, portals, a genocide by strange alien visitors, monsters, ghosts, and very often here, the planet being rendered unsustainable for human life. This collection is an excellent example of the many avenues speculative fiction can travel hand in hand with horror. While this collection is less psychological horror than the previous—stories like Come Up being an exception with a narrator who realizes how his every action following his wife’s disappearance makes him look increasingly guilty—Evenson’s storytelling is marvelous, leading you through his stories as if down a dark passageway with only the light from a match to see. Most often you have a vague idea of what is going on and what is to come and then the shock arrives. And, like the final line in the story Palisade, ‘by the time he managed to get another match lit it was already too late.’
Evenson has an excellent grasp on the notion that less is more in horror. Most of these stories have fantastic settings and seem to be screaming the existence of backstory, worldbuilding and supernatural lore that never reach you. Which, for short fiction, really works as it cuts right to the heart of matters and leaves you feeling disoriented along the way. Monsters and creatures are rarely given much detail (with the exception of one), and most encounters are told to be ‘vaguely human’. Choose your own trauma, I suppose. Your mind can illustrate your own landscapes of worldbuilding which keeps the stories lingering in your head with the unknown always more terrifying than the known. This also invites the reader to collaborate with the story, creating their own hellish lore and making oneself complicit in the story. Evenson helps bring the reader into several stories by having them told to a “you” in the narrative that might as well be you, done most effectively in Extrication where ‘you’ are hearing the rantings of a man about to perform an experiment on you after falling helplessly into his trap. It is chilling and really just a ton of fun.
However, our complicity becomes the biggest point of terror in the many stories around the idea of climate change and environmental destruction (or rebellion, in several stories). ‘‘The world was changing,’ one narrator says, ‘we had ruined it.’ In these stories we often see the gruesome results of not caring for the planet, with multiple stories involving watching the slow and pathetic extinction of humanity due to the air becoming toxic or similar situations. Even stories such as Justle or the longest (and one of the best), To Breathe the Air, show a horrible quality of life living under a rapidly dying planet. One of my favorites, Elo Havel, is a fairytale-like story using the common motif of discarding aging citizens into the forest to be devoured by a monster. When the monster is finally seen, Evenson describes it as ‘an odd amalgam of dead forest and city refuse...at once so hideous and so marvelous,’ and reminds us that our pollution and unsustainable growth makes us the monster to the natural world. The effect is powerful.
‘As the world sickens further, as the air grows poisonous, as the oceans die, so too must we shift and change if we care to survive. We must extricate ourselves from humanity and become something other than ourselves. Something that can adapt to the harshness of this new world.’
Change becomes a key theme in the book, a reminder we must make a change for the better or the changes forced upon us will be terrifying. In these stories there are some who want to save the human race, but more often than not they decide the extinction of humanity may be the best result. Curator features the chronicler of humanity deciding we should be forgotten right as the world ends, while Nameless Citizen has us follow possibly the last living human as he rejects an offer to rebuild humanity (this latter story veers a bit uncomfortably close to eco-fascism but like, that isn't the message either). The silence at the end of the world becomes the horror soundtrack for this collection, a whole orchestra of silence to bring goosebumps on your skin.
Brian Evenson is a delight and The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell is a success. While I may have preferred his previous collection only slightly, this one is a hell of a lot of fun. From traditional hauntings like in My Haunting (one of my favorites) to weird science fiction parallel worlds fun as in The Shimmering Wall, Evenson crafts an amazing tale no matter what the situation. Definitely pick this up for Spooky Season, but this is sure to deliver frights all year long.
4/5
‘I am rooting for you.Whether you survive the change or perish, I will be here with you, I swear, until the bitter end.’
January 30, 2021
Literary horror at its most existential, visceral and wonderful. These strange stories build upon each other to create an uncanny shadow universe rich, vivid and shimmering with every kind of terror. Another brilliant collection.
May 28, 2025
Real Rating: 4.5* of five, rounded up because you won't find a better teacher or practitioner of the form in any genre
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: A collection from Brian Evenson, even one with some pieces that weren't quite as welcome to me as they ordinarily are (see the whole review), will never not be greeted with warbles of delight from me. These tales are all from other homes, but they belong together. They're Family, much as a cult is.... Last Days, a pair of odd and deeply disturbing novellas linked by one hugely upsetting premise...and this premise is the *only* one I've ever encountered whereunder I am simply delighted to be called a "one"...made me think and shiver in 2014, and still does today. His short fiction tends to be very, very short (see my review of Windeye from 2013). This can render me almost mute, considering how very unreasonable the demands of reviewing collections, as opposed to anthologies of multiple writers, of short stories are. What's one meant to say? How to capture the gestalt of the collection? Is there a gestalt? If not, what the heck?! I get all verklempt and deeply verschmeckeled. But this is Brian Evenson. The peace is kept. These stories will take you, quickly, to places you're not at all sure you'd like to go.
I got a bit of a foretaste of the unease Author Evenson had in store for me when I kept thinking I should know that title, such a resonant phrase and so elegantly crafted! Is it a quote? A line from some famous poem by Milton, or permaybehaps Swinburne...turns out the author attributes it to Marguerite Young from Miss Mackintosh, My Darling! That monster hasn't been mined as thoroughly for titles as I'd've expected. I don't have any notion of where in the book it occurs, nor does he vouchsafe the information, but the sense of that exact phrase *belonging* somewhere has been answered and laid to rest. Unlike, it must be said, the science-fictional treatments of Otherness, the spooky treatments of cruelty and neglect, and the other many-sided polygons of storytelling he gets up to here. I agree that the planet's had it with us, and can even understand the more, um, arcane ways Author Evenson's come up with for it to shuffle us off. But they are as one expects from him: Unsettling, open-ended, and prettily told even when they aren't at all pretty.
With my usual éclat, I employ the Bryce Method of short impressions but no distinct individual ratings (at Expendable Mudge Muses Aloud, there's twenty-to of 'em!) for the stories so as to organize my thoughts and feelings, while hopefully allowing you to reach your own conclusions.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: A collection from Brian Evenson, even one with some pieces that weren't quite as welcome to me as they ordinarily are (see the whole review), will never not be greeted with warbles of delight from me. These tales are all from other homes, but they belong together. They're Family, much as a cult is.... Last Days, a pair of odd and deeply disturbing novellas linked by one hugely upsetting premise...and this premise is the *only* one I've ever encountered whereunder I am simply delighted to be called a "one"...made me think and shiver in 2014, and still does today. His short fiction tends to be very, very short (see my review of Windeye from 2013). This can render me almost mute, considering how very unreasonable the demands of reviewing collections, as opposed to anthologies of multiple writers, of short stories are. What's one meant to say? How to capture the gestalt of the collection? Is there a gestalt? If not, what the heck?! I get all verklempt and deeply verschmeckeled. But this is Brian Evenson. The peace is kept. These stories will take you, quickly, to places you're not at all sure you'd like to go.
I got a bit of a foretaste of the unease Author Evenson had in store for me when I kept thinking I should know that title, such a resonant phrase and so elegantly crafted! Is it a quote? A line from some famous poem by Milton, or permaybehaps Swinburne...turns out the author attributes it to Marguerite Young from Miss Mackintosh, My Darling! That monster hasn't been mined as thoroughly for titles as I'd've expected. I don't have any notion of where in the book it occurs, nor does he vouchsafe the information, but the sense of that exact phrase *belonging* somewhere has been answered and laid to rest. Unlike, it must be said, the science-fictional treatments of Otherness, the spooky treatments of cruelty and neglect, and the other many-sided polygons of storytelling he gets up to here. I agree that the planet's had it with us, and can even understand the more, um, arcane ways Author Evenson's come up with for it to shuffle us off. But they are as one expects from him: Unsettling, open-ended, and prettily told even when they aren't at all pretty.
With my usual éclat, I employ the Bryce Method of short impressions but no distinct individual ratings (at Expendable Mudge Muses Aloud, there's twenty-to of 'em!) for the stories so as to organize my thoughts and feelings, while hopefully allowing you to reach your own conclusions.
September 1, 2021
Evenson’s latest collection of short stories is as weird as expected, starting and finishing with stories about a killer prosthetic leg, and containing stories of both psychological and ecological terror. It's well worth reading, but for me, it pales into insignificance when placed next to his ‘Altmann’s Tongue’ collection of 1994. It's definitely Evenson, so to be read, but I don’t feel it’s vintage Evenson.
June 3, 2021
“Yours is a holy calling,” he told her.
“Or a useless one.”
“Perhaps,” he said, ever the optimist. “Perhaps.” Then he embraced her again and departed. It was, the archivist suddenly realized, the last human contact she was likely to ever have.”
It is hard to argue that a collection made up of stories written for a whole bunch of different sources has a single mission statement. That said Evenson was in a flow it seems with themes he wanted to explore the collection with the subtle title The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell. I could be wrong but there are clear themes and ideas that were near the surface in many of the stories.
The dark surreal underbelly of high literature is kind of the space that Evenson writes in. Weird, bizarro, horror, Science Fiction, cosmic, surrealist all labels that fit stories here and there in the various collections he has released. The first author that lived in that space for me was Clive Barker, while he went on to commercial success, the first couple of years Barker was the undisputed champion of the horror short story. Over the years Poppy Z. Brite, Thomas Liggotti, Laird Barron, and few others danced the line between beautiful prose and the absolute darkness of weird and scary fiction. There might be better storytellers but in all the reading I have done over the years no one has kicked my ass with beautiful darkness as Evenson has. This should come as no shocker as I have reviewed Brian’s work half a dozen times and interviewed almost as many.
To me at this moment Brian Evenson is hands down the best horror fiction short story author. Hyperbole, sure.
The above passage says much about the themes throughout this book. If a theme runs through this dark and surreal book it is the fear and isolation of environmental and societal collapse. The characters are nameless, just descriptions like Nameless Citizen or Archivist. They are reluctant explorers in a frontier of world-ending banality. The end times and a wrecked world filled with mutated post-humans are every bit as uncomfortable as it sounds, the hell of our creation is the frontier lands these Evenson stories explore.
The reader knows the reality and the state of the planet in one of the later stories The Extrication Evenson talks directly to his reader…
“Have I been clear enough? The world is dying, is in fact already well on its way to being dead. Were it not, you never would never have wandered in here. You would never have occasion to think, what is this? An unoccupied bunker in which to shelter myself? What luck! And then have fallen into my trap. You instead would have a job in a small town as an accountant, say, or a data specialist.”
You as a reader may actually be a person with a standard job, and simple life but when you peer into these worlds and Evenson’s vision in a crafty way you have fallen into a trap. You can’t think straight forward, you have to open up your mind. He is willing to write a story that is just weird like the opener Leg. A story idea that sounds silly, about a captain of a ship whose prosthetic leg is an evil monster…
The rules don’t apply. Take the Devil’s Hand a story based on the trope of a deal with the devil story but done so strangely. A bet over a thumb. When a character points out that he has two thumbs and winning won’t mean much.
“Then I suppose you will have three thumbs. I’ll attach the third wherever you’d like.”
How humans are casually transformed in Evenson's works. Keep in mind he is the dude who wrote a noir mystery novel about an undercover agent in a mutilation cult. Probably my favorite example in this book is when the mutating people and the surreal locations melded.
“And then he would tell me a story about a city that had come from another world, a city that was, in ways he either could not explain or which I could not understand, sentient. The beings in this city had once been like us.”
Evenson is never been a writer who describes deeply. There will never be detailed world-building or chapters that describe the weather or pages about how a tree looked. The loose world-building and phantom places exist mostly in a foggy shadowy place that just gets hints of the dust or rotten unbreathable air.
A great example is the Train car in the story Grauer in the Snow.
Described as “Just a place,” and another character says “It is or isn’t.”
Characters Amorphis enough to be human, maybe or probably wrestle with the grandest and most heavy themes of who or what deserves to live. The story Leg has a main character who is the captain of a ship. Boat? Spaceship? Not sure but it didn’t hurt the effect for me. Clouds of doom in Curator push nasty air and rain acid but the exact who or why doesn’t really matter.
“Nameless Citizen!” The voice called. Surely you don’t want our species to die out?”
But I did. Why ever not? We had destroyed almost everything along with ourselves. It would be better for what little remained if we did die out.
Or they, I should say, since even though I was one of them, I could hardly be said to be so now. The disaster had changed me. I had become a different creature altogether.”
“I’m going to stop you right there,” I said “I might be nameless, but I am not a citizen. Not of your community.”
Nameless Person is a powerful point for me here. Because despite if it was Evenson’s intention it made this character all of us. I mean honestly if the world ends up becoming this ecological nightmare we all are responsible. Nameless Person could be me, you, or anyone else who reads the story. We all could end up asking ourselves if it is worth it to live another day.
That question hangs over this collection like the death cloud in the story Curator. It is the stories Nameless Citizen and To Breathe the Air that most capture the themes.
“You,” said the other. Have no such constraints. You live outside, not underground. The air cannot hurt you. Truly, you are a wonderous being.”
Nameless Person will not help them. It is a dark and sad point but, in a collection, names The Glassy Burning Floor of Hell I was not expecting unicorns and rainbows. If you met Brian he is a teacher and a father, a delightfully pleasant fellow. You might think from reading this collection that he is an angry eco-goth and I love that about this book.
My favorite stories in the collection include Leg, Curator, Breathe the Air, Justle, Nameless Citizen, Elo Havel, and Daylight come. Leg is a strange and impressive for the power it has despite the ridiculous concept. Curator is a dark tale that sets a grim stage while addressing themes. To Breathe the Air might have been my favorite mood in the collection, it is one I wish was a novel. Justle has vivid powerful world-building with the most powerful ending in the collection. Nameless Citizen is filled with powerful moments but for me, the way it speaks to the reader is the power. Elo Havel is the best of the transformed person tales and Daylight Come is a short, weird tale that drips with a vibe.
You should pre-order this collection, but if there are many Evenson collections to read. Songs for the Unraveling of the World and A Collapse of Horses are collections up there as essential like the Books of Blood. Any Corpse might be one of my all-time favorites and now I have to Breathe the Air.
“Or a useless one.”
“Perhaps,” he said, ever the optimist. “Perhaps.” Then he embraced her again and departed. It was, the archivist suddenly realized, the last human contact she was likely to ever have.”
It is hard to argue that a collection made up of stories written for a whole bunch of different sources has a single mission statement. That said Evenson was in a flow it seems with themes he wanted to explore the collection with the subtle title The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell. I could be wrong but there are clear themes and ideas that were near the surface in many of the stories.
The dark surreal underbelly of high literature is kind of the space that Evenson writes in. Weird, bizarro, horror, Science Fiction, cosmic, surrealist all labels that fit stories here and there in the various collections he has released. The first author that lived in that space for me was Clive Barker, while he went on to commercial success, the first couple of years Barker was the undisputed champion of the horror short story. Over the years Poppy Z. Brite, Thomas Liggotti, Laird Barron, and few others danced the line between beautiful prose and the absolute darkness of weird and scary fiction. There might be better storytellers but in all the reading I have done over the years no one has kicked my ass with beautiful darkness as Evenson has. This should come as no shocker as I have reviewed Brian’s work half a dozen times and interviewed almost as many.
To me at this moment Brian Evenson is hands down the best horror fiction short story author. Hyperbole, sure.
The above passage says much about the themes throughout this book. If a theme runs through this dark and surreal book it is the fear and isolation of environmental and societal collapse. The characters are nameless, just descriptions like Nameless Citizen or Archivist. They are reluctant explorers in a frontier of world-ending banality. The end times and a wrecked world filled with mutated post-humans are every bit as uncomfortable as it sounds, the hell of our creation is the frontier lands these Evenson stories explore.
The reader knows the reality and the state of the planet in one of the later stories The Extrication Evenson talks directly to his reader…
“Have I been clear enough? The world is dying, is in fact already well on its way to being dead. Were it not, you never would never have wandered in here. You would never have occasion to think, what is this? An unoccupied bunker in which to shelter myself? What luck! And then have fallen into my trap. You instead would have a job in a small town as an accountant, say, or a data specialist.”
You as a reader may actually be a person with a standard job, and simple life but when you peer into these worlds and Evenson’s vision in a crafty way you have fallen into a trap. You can’t think straight forward, you have to open up your mind. He is willing to write a story that is just weird like the opener Leg. A story idea that sounds silly, about a captain of a ship whose prosthetic leg is an evil monster…
The rules don’t apply. Take the Devil’s Hand a story based on the trope of a deal with the devil story but done so strangely. A bet over a thumb. When a character points out that he has two thumbs and winning won’t mean much.
“Then I suppose you will have three thumbs. I’ll attach the third wherever you’d like.”
How humans are casually transformed in Evenson's works. Keep in mind he is the dude who wrote a noir mystery novel about an undercover agent in a mutilation cult. Probably my favorite example in this book is when the mutating people and the surreal locations melded.
“And then he would tell me a story about a city that had come from another world, a city that was, in ways he either could not explain or which I could not understand, sentient. The beings in this city had once been like us.”
Evenson is never been a writer who describes deeply. There will never be detailed world-building or chapters that describe the weather or pages about how a tree looked. The loose world-building and phantom places exist mostly in a foggy shadowy place that just gets hints of the dust or rotten unbreathable air.
A great example is the Train car in the story Grauer in the Snow.
Described as “Just a place,” and another character says “It is or isn’t.”
Characters Amorphis enough to be human, maybe or probably wrestle with the grandest and most heavy themes of who or what deserves to live. The story Leg has a main character who is the captain of a ship. Boat? Spaceship? Not sure but it didn’t hurt the effect for me. Clouds of doom in Curator push nasty air and rain acid but the exact who or why doesn’t really matter.
“Nameless Citizen!” The voice called. Surely you don’t want our species to die out?”
But I did. Why ever not? We had destroyed almost everything along with ourselves. It would be better for what little remained if we did die out.
Or they, I should say, since even though I was one of them, I could hardly be said to be so now. The disaster had changed me. I had become a different creature altogether.”
“I’m going to stop you right there,” I said “I might be nameless, but I am not a citizen. Not of your community.”
Nameless Person is a powerful point for me here. Because despite if it was Evenson’s intention it made this character all of us. I mean honestly if the world ends up becoming this ecological nightmare we all are responsible. Nameless Person could be me, you, or anyone else who reads the story. We all could end up asking ourselves if it is worth it to live another day.
That question hangs over this collection like the death cloud in the story Curator. It is the stories Nameless Citizen and To Breathe the Air that most capture the themes.
“You,” said the other. Have no such constraints. You live outside, not underground. The air cannot hurt you. Truly, you are a wonderous being.”
Nameless Person will not help them. It is a dark and sad point but, in a collection, names The Glassy Burning Floor of Hell I was not expecting unicorns and rainbows. If you met Brian he is a teacher and a father, a delightfully pleasant fellow. You might think from reading this collection that he is an angry eco-goth and I love that about this book.
My favorite stories in the collection include Leg, Curator, Breathe the Air, Justle, Nameless Citizen, Elo Havel, and Daylight come. Leg is a strange and impressive for the power it has despite the ridiculous concept. Curator is a dark tale that sets a grim stage while addressing themes. To Breathe the Air might have been my favorite mood in the collection, it is one I wish was a novel. Justle has vivid powerful world-building with the most powerful ending in the collection. Nameless Citizen is filled with powerful moments but for me, the way it speaks to the reader is the power. Elo Havel is the best of the transformed person tales and Daylight Come is a short, weird tale that drips with a vibe.
You should pre-order this collection, but if there are many Evenson collections to read. Songs for the Unraveling of the World and A Collapse of Horses are collections up there as essential like the Books of Blood. Any Corpse might be one of my all-time favorites and now I have to Breathe the Air.
October 5, 2022
Check out my interview with Brian at Bookforum:
https://www.bookforum.com/interviews/...
https://www.bookforum.com/interviews/...
June 8, 2023
Evenson is simultaneously a 21st Century Poe and Kafka; Bradbury and Jackson AND none of these. Locating where his short-stories belong is like mapping Aesop Rock’s genealogy.
22 Stories:
1. Leg ★★★★
2. In Dreams ★★★★
3. Myling Kommer ★★★★
4. Come Up ★★★★★
5. Palisade ★★★★
6. Curator ★★★★★
7. To Breathe the Air ★★★★★
8. The Barrow-Men ★★★
9. The Shimmering Wall ★★★★★
10. Grauer in the Snow ★★★★★
11. Justle ★★★★★
12. The Devil's Hand ★★★★
13. Nameless Citizen ★★★★
14. The Coldness of His Eye ★★★
15. Daylight Come ★★★
16. Elo Havel ★★★★★
17. His Haunting ★★★★
18. Haver ★★★★★
19. The Extrication ★★★★★
20. A Bad Patch ★★★★
21. Hospice ★★★★
22. The Glassy Burning Floor of Hell ★★★★★
22 Stories:
1. Leg ★★★★
2. In Dreams ★★★★
3. Myling Kommer ★★★★
4. Come Up ★★★★★
5. Palisade ★★★★
6. Curator ★★★★★
7. To Breathe the Air ★★★★★
8. The Barrow-Men ★★★
9. The Shimmering Wall ★★★★★
10. Grauer in the Snow ★★★★★
11. Justle ★★★★★
12. The Devil's Hand ★★★★
13. Nameless Citizen ★★★★
14. The Coldness of His Eye ★★★
15. Daylight Come ★★★
16. Elo Havel ★★★★★
17. His Haunting ★★★★
18. Haver ★★★★★
19. The Extrication ★★★★★
20. A Bad Patch ★★★★
21. Hospice ★★★★
22. The Glassy Burning Floor of Hell ★★★★★
October 3, 2021
More notes here:
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
I'd place this on a similar exalted level as Fugue State and Windeye, and significantly higher than Evenson's last two collections. The stories are a bit more varied and less singlemindedly obsessive than what I consider the "classics" in Fugue State. Quite a few have a science fiction context, but handled in characteristically Evenson-esque ways. There's also the recurring theme of human extinction, perhaps much deserved given our callousness and cruelty. I know Evenson has won enough awards by now, but this collection certainly deserves one.
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
I'd place this on a similar exalted level as Fugue State and Windeye, and significantly higher than Evenson's last two collections. The stories are a bit more varied and less singlemindedly obsessive than what I consider the "classics" in Fugue State. Quite a few have a science fiction context, but handled in characteristically Evenson-esque ways. There's also the recurring theme of human extinction, perhaps much deserved given our callousness and cruelty. I know Evenson has won enough awards by now, but this collection certainly deserves one.
May 29, 2025
The beings in this city had once been like us.
I have a strange relationship with genre literature. Perhaps that is not the most precise use of the term genre, but I simply mean those popular tropes and structures such as horror, pulp, speculative that exist in opposition to some orthodox notion of literature, whatever that is? I turn to it periodically to satisfy something, but I know that yearn can be more easily digested through streaming. I also have issues with short fiction although when applied to genre there have been successes Stories of Your Life and Others and Pump Six and Other Stories come to mind. That said, I bought a few collections by Evenson during Covid and had enjoyed what I had parsed. I sort of read Rod Serling saturation three quarters of the way through but persisted if only to complete such. I enjoyed how the titular concluding piece was a callback to the initial offering, how New Age nonsense could serve a menace without caricature. I enjoyed the awareness that extinction might be the best choice humanity could make. I also enjoyed the sense of curse here but felt it had been served far better by previous authors.
I have a strange relationship with genre literature. Perhaps that is not the most precise use of the term genre, but I simply mean those popular tropes and structures such as horror, pulp, speculative that exist in opposition to some orthodox notion of literature, whatever that is? I turn to it periodically to satisfy something, but I know that yearn can be more easily digested through streaming. I also have issues with short fiction although when applied to genre there have been successes Stories of Your Life and Others and Pump Six and Other Stories come to mind. That said, I bought a few collections by Evenson during Covid and had enjoyed what I had parsed. I sort of read Rod Serling saturation three quarters of the way through but persisted if only to complete such. I enjoyed how the titular concluding piece was a callback to the initial offering, how New Age nonsense could serve a menace without caricature. I enjoyed the awareness that extinction might be the best choice humanity could make. I also enjoyed the sense of curse here but felt it had been served far better by previous authors.
November 7, 2021
It is always a very strange and a very specific pleasure to read Brian Evenson's short stories - a very own blend of latent dread, existential fears, perturbed presentation of everyday life and a good portion of chuckle humor is sure to grab and not let go until you have finished reading the last page. So, I’m more than happy to have had that pleasure again when this summer his new short story collection The Glassy Burning Floor of Hell was published.
Apart from the exceptional high quality of each story, the sequencing also plays an important part in making it easy to step into the dreadful world of Glassy, which starts with a striking piece of writing that instantaneously enthralls: “Leg”. This admittedly short but remarkably absurd and intriguing piece about a sentient shapeshifter leg turning into a serial killer on a spaceship, is only the gateway to a universe of uncanny encounters, environmental urgency, body horror, folk horror but also noticeably often dystopic and even post-apocalyptic elements; divided people, oppressive hierarchy structures, pollution, catastrophes, invasions.
The world is a hell, because we have made it so.
I was a little taken aback by the heaviness, grimness of the almost claustrophobically dystopian stories that form a proper block towards the middle of the book; domed cities outside of which (or inside, depending on who you are) air is unbreathable, robot-like creatures terminating humankind, the last human living, migration, torture… So many timely issues packed in so few pages - delicious, short pieces of contemporary critique surrounded by the more individual types of horror.
You never know when you are going to need a good scalpel.
Loss of control is another theme that creeps through the pages of Glassy, especially the loss of control over one’s body - through body modification gone wrong, through old age, through oppression by others, through illness or even one’s very own mind. I think this is one of the most potent fears there are and there is a typical Evenson-way in which he treats this fear that I personally could read forever without being bored. This goes for each of his stories in which he, almost in a Lynchian way, creeps under your skin by combining the sinister with the mundane.
As I already mentioned above, I think the arrangement or sequencing of the stories deserve an extra praise here, opening and closing the circle with the absurd and sinister leg-creature.
Reading Evenson’s last short story collection The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell was, again and always, a very strange and specific pleasure and I’ll be looking forward to his next one.
Apart from the exceptional high quality of each story, the sequencing also plays an important part in making it easy to step into the dreadful world of Glassy, which starts with a striking piece of writing that instantaneously enthralls: “Leg”. This admittedly short but remarkably absurd and intriguing piece about a sentient shapeshifter leg turning into a serial killer on a spaceship, is only the gateway to a universe of uncanny encounters, environmental urgency, body horror, folk horror but also noticeably often dystopic and even post-apocalyptic elements; divided people, oppressive hierarchy structures, pollution, catastrophes, invasions.
The world is a hell, because we have made it so.
I was a little taken aback by the heaviness, grimness of the almost claustrophobically dystopian stories that form a proper block towards the middle of the book; domed cities outside of which (or inside, depending on who you are) air is unbreathable, robot-like creatures terminating humankind, the last human living, migration, torture… So many timely issues packed in so few pages - delicious, short pieces of contemporary critique surrounded by the more individual types of horror.
You never know when you are going to need a good scalpel.
Loss of control is another theme that creeps through the pages of Glassy, especially the loss of control over one’s body - through body modification gone wrong, through old age, through oppression by others, through illness or even one’s very own mind. I think this is one of the most potent fears there are and there is a typical Evenson-way in which he treats this fear that I personally could read forever without being bored. This goes for each of his stories in which he, almost in a Lynchian way, creeps under your skin by combining the sinister with the mundane.
As I already mentioned above, I think the arrangement or sequencing of the stories deserve an extra praise here, opening and closing the circle with the absurd and sinister leg-creature.
Reading Evenson’s last short story collection The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell was, again and always, a very strange and specific pleasure and I’ll be looking forward to his next one.
May 29, 2021
My first Evenson! I've read individual stories here and there but never before a full collection, and this one was freakin' fantastic. Some stories are eerie, some are outright terrifying, some are strange in other ways... and nearly all of them are fantastic. Even the stories that didn't hit for me were interesting and odd; can't wait to go read a thousand more of his tales.
August 16, 2021
Fucking brilliant, but I expected nothing less. Evenson honestly can do no wrong and this collection is proof of the crazy scary endless depths of this man's imagination. These are creepy, unsettling, crawl up under your skin and hibernate in your brain kind of stories. The BEST kind of stories.
August 7, 2021
I'm in awe of Brian Evenson, and have been for some time now. His work is unique in a way that I have never encountered before, and the slipperiness of his prose is astonishing. He is meticulous in his construction, too: each word, each sentence, builds on the next in an efficient, brutal pattern to create a vision in your mind. This is what makes it so jarring and so disorienting once he collapses the whole structure around your disbelieving eyes. Often, all it takes is something as simple as a shadow in the corner of the room: suddenly the entire geography of the space is inverted, and before you know it, you've been turned inside-out.
This is the kind of uneasiness I was hoping for with this collection. And, for the most part, I was satisfied - Evenson is still a consummate master of the uncanny - but I was surprised by these twenty-two stories in more ways than one.
It's always great to be able to see a writer evolving, shifting their own paradigm, breaking out of the typecasting mold, and in all twenty-two stories here, Evenson is on the move, restless and hungry. Some more than others are existential gut-punches in the way that Evenson's come to be known for: vague, shifting Polaroids of dread and unease, often from the perspective of the hapless, or the seemingly well-adjusted, as their world (or their perception of it) slides inexorably out of true. This style of Evenson is still my favorite, and there's plenty of it in this collection, especially towards the end. Stories like "His Haunting" and "Haver" hit these notes beautifully, and will, I think, satisfy those looking for the psycho-cerebral terror evinced in earlier shorts, like most of his last collection, Song for the Unraveling of the World.
Evenson is also known for his far-ranging ability to dip into many genres confidently and with great ease, science-fiction in particular, and there's a lot of that here. Many stories feature humanity as antagonist, casting our species in a dismal, murderous light, with the Earth as the decaying corpse at our feet. And why not? We are, in reality, systematically choking the life out of this planet, and it's never been more obvious. It is no exaggeration to say that there is a vast amount of ignorance and apathy when it comes to our precarious tenancy of this planet.
One story, however, seems to advocate for not only the extinction of humanity, but for selectively leaving only evidence behind that humanity was nothing but destructive, hideous monsters. This, to me, carries with it a sour note. Make no mistake: the writing is assured, and the story is hideous in the right way, but the allegory feels just a touch too heavy-handed for what I've come to expect from Evenson's work. Again, if there was ever a moment to be blunt with our observations of humanity, in any last-ditch effort to course-correct our destruction of the environment and the Earth, it is now, but a story like this paints a nihilistic, reproachful picture. Evenson is suggesting, it feels like, that it's too late. We can't even turn into the slide: all we can do is watch, mouths gaping, as we crash. Because it's Evenson, the characters act more as instruments, means to an end, than actual people, and so it reads like a parable told by an angry Cassandra.
Or, on the other hand, maybe Evenson is saying that this depiction of such a shocking possibility is necessary - perhaps the only way! - to course-correct in the present. I'm not sure which is the case, and this, for me, lessens the impact of the story itself.
This theme is echoed a few times throughout the book, and many share the motif of one species coming in contact with another, in various forms. In fact, I'd hazard to say that alien lifeforms almost take center stage here, whether described as such or otherwise - and it is this alienness that pervades the entire selection, minus only a few. "The Devil's Hand," for instance, one of my favorites, seems more of a period piece, closer to a "new" urban legend than any of the others, more classically Evenson in tone, and it sticks out to me as oddly placed between "Justle" and "Nameless Citizen," both of which harken back to the aforementioned themes of extinction and alienness.
A few stories dip into the realm of dark fantasy, such as "Elo Havel," another one of my favorites here. This one brilliantly touches on the fraught, even antagonistic relationship of humans vs. nature, but does so in such a way that I feel is in stark contrast to many of the others. The horror here doesn't depend so much on the wanton disregard of humans for nature, but rather on the horror of the symbiotic relationship between the same, and a different kind of doom. This, to me, was far more compelling, and because of its inescapability, far more terrifying, than the parables of doom foretold in "Curator."
All in all, some really great work here, by a master of his craft: relentless, avid prose that even at its weakest moments can still conjure a shudder. I would recommend this book as slightly more accessible, generally speaking, than his other collections, making it an excellent entry point for those new to Evenson's work.
Just don't expect to be any less terrified.
This is the kind of uneasiness I was hoping for with this collection. And, for the most part, I was satisfied - Evenson is still a consummate master of the uncanny - but I was surprised by these twenty-two stories in more ways than one.
It's always great to be able to see a writer evolving, shifting their own paradigm, breaking out of the typecasting mold, and in all twenty-two stories here, Evenson is on the move, restless and hungry. Some more than others are existential gut-punches in the way that Evenson's come to be known for: vague, shifting Polaroids of dread and unease, often from the perspective of the hapless, or the seemingly well-adjusted, as their world (or their perception of it) slides inexorably out of true. This style of Evenson is still my favorite, and there's plenty of it in this collection, especially towards the end. Stories like "His Haunting" and "Haver" hit these notes beautifully, and will, I think, satisfy those looking for the psycho-cerebral terror evinced in earlier shorts, like most of his last collection, Song for the Unraveling of the World.
Evenson is also known for his far-ranging ability to dip into many genres confidently and with great ease, science-fiction in particular, and there's a lot of that here. Many stories feature humanity as antagonist, casting our species in a dismal, murderous light, with the Earth as the decaying corpse at our feet. And why not? We are, in reality, systematically choking the life out of this planet, and it's never been more obvious. It is no exaggeration to say that there is a vast amount of ignorance and apathy when it comes to our precarious tenancy of this planet.
One story, however, seems to advocate for not only the extinction of humanity, but for selectively leaving only evidence behind that humanity was nothing but destructive, hideous monsters. This, to me, carries with it a sour note. Make no mistake: the writing is assured, and the story is hideous in the right way, but the allegory feels just a touch too heavy-handed for what I've come to expect from Evenson's work. Again, if there was ever a moment to be blunt with our observations of humanity, in any last-ditch effort to course-correct our destruction of the environment and the Earth, it is now, but a story like this paints a nihilistic, reproachful picture. Evenson is suggesting, it feels like, that it's too late. We can't even turn into the slide: all we can do is watch, mouths gaping, as we crash. Because it's Evenson, the characters act more as instruments, means to an end, than actual people, and so it reads like a parable told by an angry Cassandra.
Or, on the other hand, maybe Evenson is saying that this depiction of such a shocking possibility is necessary - perhaps the only way! - to course-correct in the present. I'm not sure which is the case, and this, for me, lessens the impact of the story itself.
This theme is echoed a few times throughout the book, and many share the motif of one species coming in contact with another, in various forms. In fact, I'd hazard to say that alien lifeforms almost take center stage here, whether described as such or otherwise - and it is this alienness that pervades the entire selection, minus only a few. "The Devil's Hand," for instance, one of my favorites, seems more of a period piece, closer to a "new" urban legend than any of the others, more classically Evenson in tone, and it sticks out to me as oddly placed between "Justle" and "Nameless Citizen," both of which harken back to the aforementioned themes of extinction and alienness.
A few stories dip into the realm of dark fantasy, such as "Elo Havel," another one of my favorites here. This one brilliantly touches on the fraught, even antagonistic relationship of humans vs. nature, but does so in such a way that I feel is in stark contrast to many of the others. The horror here doesn't depend so much on the wanton disregard of humans for nature, but rather on the horror of the symbiotic relationship between the same, and a different kind of doom. This, to me, was far more compelling, and because of its inescapability, far more terrifying, than the parables of doom foretold in "Curator."
All in all, some really great work here, by a master of his craft: relentless, avid prose that even at its weakest moments can still conjure a shudder. I would recommend this book as slightly more accessible, generally speaking, than his other collections, making it an excellent entry point for those new to Evenson's work.
Just don't expect to be any less terrified.
December 15, 2025
4.5 Stars
August 31, 2021
The horror in Evenson's work lies in it's ambiguity. There is always something terrible that is inferred but left unsaid. Something that lurks in the places we cannot see. Inexplicable, dreadful things happen, yet Evenson does not provide us the refuge of reason or explanation. I think his work often reflects the unfamiliar fathoms of ourselves - our unspoken traumas, forgotten histories and subconscious fears.
In The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell, this ambiguity does not always lend a story strength. The collection's best stories, such Myling Kommer and Unnamed Citizen, are effective because we see a part, but not the whole, of the horror. We half-hear a secret, we are asked to decipher a scrap of inscrutable lore, and whatever we little we learn does not suggest anything good. Sometimes we know more than our protagonists, which causes us to fear for them. Sometimes we suspect they're hiding something from us, or even from themselves.
Yet, many stories in this collection become lost in the unknown. Abstract to the point of formlessness, they collapse into unsatisfying vagary. With many of these stories I don't feel like I am missing something, I feel like there is nothing to get.
I have now read all but one of Evenson's short story collections and have admired them all. However, among Evenson's impressive catalogue of work, this collection has to be my least favourite. It is perhaps because I know how fantastic Evenson's work can be that I found The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell to be disappointing.
Despite my negativity, I would recommend fans of Evenson read this collection, as there are definitely stories here that you may enjoy. Newer fans should perhaps seek out the superior Songs for the Unravelling of the World, or even Evenson's excellent novellas, Last Days and The Open Curtain.
In The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell, this ambiguity does not always lend a story strength. The collection's best stories, such Myling Kommer and Unnamed Citizen, are effective because we see a part, but not the whole, of the horror. We half-hear a secret, we are asked to decipher a scrap of inscrutable lore, and whatever we little we learn does not suggest anything good. Sometimes we know more than our protagonists, which causes us to fear for them. Sometimes we suspect they're hiding something from us, or even from themselves.
Yet, many stories in this collection become lost in the unknown. Abstract to the point of formlessness, they collapse into unsatisfying vagary. With many of these stories I don't feel like I am missing something, I feel like there is nothing to get.
I have now read all but one of Evenson's short story collections and have admired them all. However, among Evenson's impressive catalogue of work, this collection has to be my least favourite. It is perhaps because I know how fantastic Evenson's work can be that I found The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell to be disappointing.
Despite my negativity, I would recommend fans of Evenson read this collection, as there are definitely stories here that you may enjoy. Newer fans should perhaps seek out the superior Songs for the Unravelling of the World, or even Evenson's excellent novellas, Last Days and The Open Curtain.
June 10, 2022
4.5/5
The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell is a fantastic and unsettling collection of short stories by a true master of the craft. Evenson isn't afraid to explore the darkest corners of the imagination and human mind. The border between real and unreal remains fluid in his stories, and his concise, almost clinical writing makes them even more powerful.
An excellent collection.
The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell is a fantastic and unsettling collection of short stories by a true master of the craft. Evenson isn't afraid to explore the darkest corners of the imagination and human mind. The border between real and unreal remains fluid in his stories, and his concise, almost clinical writing makes them even more powerful.
An excellent collection.
September 23, 2022
Evenson’s indescribably terrifying minimalist prose is so perfectly crafted that it sings, enthralls, and chills even in the weaker stories here. A very cohesive and cumulative collection, with many stories acting as diptychs of one another and a few—“Myling Kommer,” “Justle,” and “His Haunting,” for example, all involving inter generational triads of possession (and all among the collection’s finest)—even form oblique trilogies. Though not present in every narrative, the threat and consequences of ecological disaster is pretty central to the collection’s overall concerns and apocalyptic tenor, with a subsequent cue toward speculative, science-fiction generic models. Though in some cases this leads Evenson into a surprisingly didactic register (“Curator” and “Nameless Citizen”), he sells the terror and despair so well that you don’t care. He’s in the very upper echelon of horror fiction for all time—and provides some of the most sublime writing in contemporary literature in general besides.
August 18, 2021
Yet another astoundingly good collection of stories from Evenson. The more of his writing I read, the more of it I want to read; he is an addictively good horror writer the likes of which are few and far between nowadays. I cannot recommend this, and everything else of his I have read, enough.
September 9, 2023
I love Evenson’s style of writing and his quirky, kooky stories. If Kafka met Bradbury. Though I don’t really find any of his stuff scary in the slightest, I really dig the psychological dread of most of his stories.
5/5
Highly recommended
5/5
Highly recommended
November 28, 2021
Exhibit A of how Indie press is turning out some of the best, most daring writing out there. This is creepy horror done well, repeatedly, in story after story. There are a few themes which are reoccurring. The author is eco-conscious, extrapolating that we human beings are scarier than anything we can conjure, and without drastic change, we face environmental disasters of our own making. Evenson creates an otherworldly atmosphere, and suffuses it with an eerie sense of isolation and despair. He aims to knock down all sense of safety and security, making it painfully clear that even our paranormal experiences are consequences of our own creation.
October 24, 2021
Maybe my tastes have changed, but I couldn't finish this. I normally really enjoy Evenson's short stories, they're really creative and creepy and his writing is excellent, but at some point the bleakness started to overwhelm me. He also has a few themes that tend to repeat throughout his work, and while I don't think there's anything wrong with that, the repetition of themes combined with the bleakness started to make me feel trapped in a way I didn't like.
December 20, 2021
Heady, resonant horror for readers who like their scares on the weird and speculative side. The author's word economy keeps the 20-plus stories in Glassy unnerving and engaging, with very few, if any, misses. The stories themselves are inventive yet familiar. My personal favorites were Myling Kommer, Come Up, The Devil's Hand, Elo Havel, and Haver. This was my first time reading Evenson, but it won't be the last.
November 3, 2021
4.5 to 5. Evenson is always so very good.
May 27, 2022
i did not expect this
February 26, 2025
another series of banger short stories from my fave. literally no one else is doing horror like brian evenson. no one.
highlights: myling kommer, to breathe the air, the shimmering wall, the devil’s hand, the extrication
highlights: myling kommer, to breathe the air, the shimmering wall, the devil’s hand, the extrication
July 3, 2022
Some of the best horror stories I've ever read. The current run Evenson is on is next level. We might as well call his most recent trio of books the Unholy Trinity: A Collapse of Horses (2016), Song for the Unraveling of the World (2019), and The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell (2021). Read these at the beach. Surrounded by sunlight. So you can be reminded everything is okay.
September 2, 2021
Really, really good! Kicking off a collection with a story about a murderous prosthetic leg is a bold move. Worth reading for that story alone. But my five favorite stories, probably in order, are:
1. Myling Kommer (a boy haunted by his family's dark secrets)
2. Haver (a mental patient with an otherworldly artistic talent)
3. A Bad Patch (invasive, mind-altering body horror)
4. Come Up (slowly drowning in paranoia and guilt)
5. Curator (misanthropy in the post-apocalypse)
I also love that the final, eponymous story wraps back around to the first. This gives the whole collection a more unified feel that I wasn’t expecting and really liked. The stories run the gamut from ghosts, aliens, and post-apocalyptic dystopias. But they almost all have a general misanthropy that feels earned and well-realized. (This feature reminds me a lot of another author who I've been very interested in recently — maybe the king of weird, anti-human horror — Thomas Ligotti.)
I have very few complaints, but there are a handful of underwhelming endings. And at least one of the better endings gets reused. This feels nitpicky, because the majority of these stories are about the journey and the atmosphere, and they pretty much all deliver there.
There are also a few stories that I’d classify as sci-fi horror and I think these tend to be less impactful. When the majority of a story’s elements are otherworldly, it’s more difficult for the unnatural horror elements to draw contrast. This is especially true in short stories when there’s less time and space to ground what needs to be grounded. But maybe this is just a personal preference. (I don’t think I’m that much of a sci-fi guy.)
There’s a lot of great horror in this collection, but I don’t know if anything quite matches the mood the title evokes. The title is extremely good and the detail of the word "glassy" really throws things off kilter. Almost all of the stories are good and creepy and weird, but I don't know if any of them have the same mood that these six words promise. I think this also may be why I was mildly disappointed by the handful of sci-fi stories — my expectations were a little off.
But overall, this is really great and you should read it.
1. Myling Kommer (a boy haunted by his family's dark secrets)
2. Haver (a mental patient with an otherworldly artistic talent)
3. A Bad Patch (invasive, mind-altering body horror)
4. Come Up (slowly drowning in paranoia and guilt)
5. Curator (misanthropy in the post-apocalypse)
I also love that the final, eponymous story wraps back around to the first. This gives the whole collection a more unified feel that I wasn’t expecting and really liked. The stories run the gamut from ghosts, aliens, and post-apocalyptic dystopias. But they almost all have a general misanthropy that feels earned and well-realized. (This feature reminds me a lot of another author who I've been very interested in recently — maybe the king of weird, anti-human horror — Thomas Ligotti.)
I have very few complaints, but there are a handful of underwhelming endings. And at least one of the better endings gets reused. This feels nitpicky, because the majority of these stories are about the journey and the atmosphere, and they pretty much all deliver there.
There are also a few stories that I’d classify as sci-fi horror and I think these tend to be less impactful. When the majority of a story’s elements are otherworldly, it’s more difficult for the unnatural horror elements to draw contrast. This is especially true in short stories when there’s less time and space to ground what needs to be grounded. But maybe this is just a personal preference. (I don’t think I’m that much of a sci-fi guy.)
There’s a lot of great horror in this collection, but I don’t know if anything quite matches the mood the title evokes. The title is extremely good and the detail of the word "glassy" really throws things off kilter. Almost all of the stories are good and creepy and weird, but I don't know if any of them have the same mood that these six words promise. I think this also may be why I was mildly disappointed by the handful of sci-fi stories — my expectations were a little off.
But overall, this is really great and you should read it.
October 25, 2021
Nothing is scarier than a Brian Evenson short story, as his new collection, THE GLASSY, BURNING FLOOR OF HELL, shows. Evenson is the Svengali of horror fiction, a hypnotic artist whose work lures one in sentence by sentence, only to shock with insight. Transformative, twisted and utterly surreal, Evenson’s stories are written with the eye of a miniaturist, every detail adding shadow and gloss.
In “The Shimmering Wall,” the narrator lives in a city contained by “semitransparent and flickering walls,” a “firm, jelly-like membrane” that acts as a permeable barrier between one world and another. The narrator’s parents died crossing this barrier and, despite the danger, he tries to break through, too. The result is terrifying: “With a sucking sound, it drew my fingers in, and then my hand … the sensation was odd and disorienting, as if my hand were being taken apart and put together in a way that made it something else.”
Evenson’s stories enact this process on the reader, taking the known world apart and replacing it with something new and strange. Take “The Extrication,” a four-page story about two survivors of a ruined world. One restrains the other and puts him through a terrible procedure that results in biological transformation. Why?
In order to adapt. “As the world sickens further, as the air grows poisonous, as the oceans die, so too must we shift and change if we care to survive. We must extricate ourselves from humanity and become something other than ourselves.” That this extrication is unthinkably terrible, and involves great pain, is only to be expected.
In “The Shimmering Wall,” the narrator lives in a city contained by “semitransparent and flickering walls,” a “firm, jelly-like membrane” that acts as a permeable barrier between one world and another. The narrator’s parents died crossing this barrier and, despite the danger, he tries to break through, too. The result is terrifying: “With a sucking sound, it drew my fingers in, and then my hand … the sensation was odd and disorienting, as if my hand were being taken apart and put together in a way that made it something else.”
Evenson’s stories enact this process on the reader, taking the known world apart and replacing it with something new and strange. Take “The Extrication,” a four-page story about two survivors of a ruined world. One restrains the other and puts him through a terrible procedure that results in biological transformation. Why?
In order to adapt. “As the world sickens further, as the air grows poisonous, as the oceans die, so too must we shift and change if we care to survive. We must extricate ourselves from humanity and become something other than ourselves.” That this extrication is unthinkably terrible, and involves great pain, is only to be expected.
September 25, 2021
And then, as he watched, the stool before the table slid slowly to one side. Or not slid exactly, since it was both where it had been before and where it was now, and every place in between. Where there had been a chair there was now a smear. He was looking at something that was no longer an object, but what it was exactly he would have been hard-pressed to say. He couldn’t move. He found he couldn’t move. Then the drafting table slid too, and the whole room took on that smeared and insubstantial quality, and Haver, afraid he was beginning to take it on as well, suddenly found he could move again and fled.
Contents:
Leg
In Dreams
Myling Kommer
Come Up
Palisade
Curator
To Breathe the Air
The Barrow-Men
The Shimmering Wall
Grauer in the Snow
Justle
The Devil’s Hand
Nameless Citizen
The Coldness of His Eye
Daylight Come
Elo Havel
His Haunting
Haver
The Extrication
A Bad Patch
Hospice
The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell
Contents:
Leg
In Dreams
Myling Kommer
Come Up
Palisade
Curator
To Breathe the Air
The Barrow-Men
The Shimmering Wall
Grauer in the Snow
Justle
The Devil’s Hand
Nameless Citizen
The Coldness of His Eye
Daylight Come
Elo Havel
His Haunting
Haver
The Extrication
A Bad Patch
Hospice
The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell
August 13, 2021
Apparently I love literary horror these days? I loved each one of these stories.
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