“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.
