Brian Evenson's fifth story collection constructs a human landscape as
unearthly as it is mundane. Replete with the brutality, primordial
waste, and savage blankness familiar to readers of his earlier works,
Evenson's Kafkaesque allegories entice the mind while stubbornly
disordering it. In the title story an obsessive consciousness folds
back on itself, creating a vertiginous mélange of Poe and Borges, both
horrific and metaphysical. Here, as in "Moran's Mexico," and
"Greenhouse," the solitary nature of reading and writing leads
characters beyond human limits, making the act of putting words to paper a monstrous violation opening onto madness. In "White Square" the
representation of humans by dimly colored shapes confirms our feeling
that something lies behind these words, while seeming to mock us with
the futility of seeking it. Evenson's enigmatic names – Thurm, Bein,
Hatcher, Burlun – placeable landscapes, and barren rooms all combine to
create a semblance of conceptual abstraction, as though the material
universe had come to exist inside someone's head.
Small wonder
that Evenson's work has attracted so much attention among philosophers,
literary critics, and other speculative intelligences, for it
continuously projects a tantalizing absence, as though there were some
key or code that, if only we knew it, would illuminate everything.
However, the blade of discernment wavers, and we are left to our own
groping interpretations.
