Fugue State Book

Brian Evenson's fiction can be oddly comforting in such uncertain times as these, for in his typically grim, unsettling stories we see that circumstances could always be much more dire and desperate than whatever crisis we're facing at a given moment. Certainly this is the case with the title story in this collection, which aptly reveals a pandemic-afflicted setting over time. This story showcases Evenson at his best, in my opinion: hypnotic, menacing, vaguely dystopic and/or apocalyptic, and marked by his peculiar trademarks such as characters with odd names whose brains appear to have stopped working properly and now find themselves puzzling over both their own identities and the very structure of language. Evenson does this sort of thing so well that I'm always wishing every story in a given collection would reflect these very attributes. However, I have not found this to typically be the case. A few of the stories in this collection even stray into pretty tame (for Evenson) realist, domestic drama territory. One of the longest, 'Ninety Over Ninety', is a satire of the book industry that largely fell flat for me. That said, there are certainly high points beyond just 'Fugue State'. I particularly enjoyed 'An Accounting', 'Desire with Digressions', 'Dread' (illustrated by Zak Sally), 'Wander', 'In the Greenhouse', and last but not least, 'Helpful', which is a classic Evenson tale that closes with the type of pitch-perfect dryly humorous ending I love encountering in his stories. These were mostly four-star stories for me. No rating for the collection as a whole, though, as only about half of it really stood out to me.