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Fugue State
Fugue State | Brian Evenson
8 posts | 1 read | 2 to read
"Brilliant...Evenson manages to capture madness with a masterful tone. The specific genius of Fugue State rests in subtlety, in Evenson's ability to maintain suspense, dread and paranoia through utter linguistic control.”--Time Out New York "19 satisfying and surreal stories...packed with subtly hilarious sentences.”--Cleveland Plain Dealer "Brian Evenson is one of the treasures of American story writing, a true successor both to the generation of Coover, Barthelme, Hawkes and Co., but also to Edgar Allan Poe."--Jonathan Lethem "The stories in this collection will thrill, unsettle, and captivate. Like lanterns in dark rooms, paper boats carried down on subterranean waters, they lead the reader into mysterious and perilous territory. Read at your own risk."--Kelly Link Illustrated by graphic novelist Zak Sally, Brian Evenson's hallucinatory and darkly comic stories of paranoia, pursuit, sensory deprivation, amnesia, and retribution rattle the cages of the psyche and peer into the gaping moral chasm that opens when we become estranged from ourselves. From sadistic bosses with secret fears to a woman trapped in a mime's imaginary box, and from a post-apocalyptic misidentified Messiah to unwitting portraitists of the dead, the mind-bending world of this modern-day Edgar Allan Poe exposes the horror contained within our daily lives. Brian Evenson is the author of the Edgar and International Horror Guild award-nominated novel The Open Curtain.
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quote
Bertha_Mason
Fugue State | Brian Evenson

"Life without father began some few weeks before he actually died, at the moment when he started encasing his head in orange plastic mesh held shut with twine."
-"Life Without Father"

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Bertha_Mason
Fugue State | Brian Evenson

"Let‘s turn out the light and—despite the soft gleam of her open eyes in the darkness, despite the sounds of her tossing and turning within her box, despite, as night deepens, her little groans of frustration—let‘s smile and, lying, tell ourselves yes, everything is all right, yes, shhh, yes, she‘s finally asleep."
-"Invisible Box"

quote
Bertha_Mason
Fugue State | Brian Evenson

"There is, in every event, whether lived or told, always a hole or a gap, often more than one. If we allow ourselves to get caught in it, we find it opening onto a void that, once we have slipped into it, we can never escape."
-"Desire With Digressions"

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Bertha_Mason
Fugue State | Brian Evenson

"Were my inquest (assuming there is to be an inquest) to take place before a group of starved men, I might at least accrue some sympathy. But to the well-fed, necessity must surely appear barbarity. And now, again well-fed myself, I regret everything. Would I do it again? Of course not. Unless I were very hungry indeed."
-"An Accounting"

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Bertha_Mason
Fugue State | Brian Evenson

"Nevertheless, I grew to love Finger and it was for this I was sorry and even wept when later I had to eat him."
-"An Accounting"

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Bertha_Mason
Fugue State | Brian Evenson

"I named the dog Finger for reasons obscure even to myself."
-"An Accounting"

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Bertha_Mason
Fugue State | Brian Evenson

"I have been ordered to write an honest accounting of how I became a Midwestern Jesus and the subsequent disastrous events thereby accruing, events for which, I am willing to admit, I am at least partly to blame."
-"An Accounting"

quote
Bertha_Mason
Fugue State | Brian Evenson

"Indeed, as the younger sister reached first her teens and then her twenties, she came to realize that people who felt things as intensely as she were either institutionalized or dead."
-"Younger"
Mood.