The Din of Celestial Birds

by Brian Evenson, Jonathan Beville (Reader)

Though published second after Altmann's Tongue , The Din of Celestial Birds (1997) consists of the best of Evenson's early stories. They take place in a country (perhaps several countries) that seems at once everywhere and nowhere, haunted by birds, ghosts, poverty, tyranny, and the permeability of the line between the living and the dead. These stories offer a heady mix of absurdity and bleakness on the one hand and exuberant magic realism on the other. In one, a character imagines that a bird has been calling his name for six consecutive nights―and perhaps a bird actually has. A dead child is brought back to a stuttering and incomplete life, while a dictator refuses to admit that he is dead even as he is being buried. A scientist works in isolation to try to cheat death. An ex-Nazi wanders in and out of the jungle, having become a different sort of nightmare. These stories offer the gestures and satisfactions that would come to define Evenson's later work, but also suggest other paths he might have taken and reveal how indebted his fiction is to writers such as Ben Okri, Sony Labou Tansi, and writers of the Latin American Boom. And as Leslie Norris suggests, "They are written, too, in a faultlessly efficient prose, so we see these strange worlds in the clearest and coldest of lights." 

Genres: Horror

Audio CD

First published September 1, 1997

About the author

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

Reviews

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Early Evenson; you get a feeling for the writer to-be in these pieces, even in the un-even ones. There's still a lot to love here for BE fans - just not recommended as a first read if you are new to his work.

[G. Brown · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm a huge Evenson fan, and while this book is my least favorite of his collections that I've read thus far, I do recommend it to any others who are already acquainted with Evenson's broader catalog. This collection is different from his others in that the stories are tied together by locale and other small threads. The protagonist of one story may be the neighbor, relative, or victim of the protagonist of the previous story.

While this collection is mostly dark fiction chronicling the troubled lives of various people in and around the city of Labaise on an unnamed island in the Caribbean or off the coast of South America, it also incorporates some supernatural elements, especially in the title work, which I originally read in the Lovecraft Unbound anthology (though it is really far more like Poe than Lovecraft).

The writing is not as crystalized as in his later work, and the stories are not as witty and experimental as in Altmann's Tongue. Still, they are definitely worth the read for his fans. But this is not a starting point for the uninitiated.

[Robbie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Crazy that he was this good this early.

[Mary Giblin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh, Brian. Your books scare the sh*t out of me.

[Seth Augenstein · Rating 5 out of 5]

His fifth-best collection… but still excellent

[Simon · Rating 1 out of 5]

Another one of my wife's brother's book. Again, I do not feel like I can judge his work. I did not like the stories though.