Name: Song for the Unraveling of the World
ISBN: 9781566895484

Brian Evenson

From a modern master of the form, a new short story collection that dexterously walks the tightrope between literary fiction, sci-fi, and horror.

Song for the Unraveling of the World

Ryan Mateyk

this was my first foray into reading evenson but i really enjoyed the majority of these stories. regardless of the genre, he writes masterfully as the 'unraveling' of these characters. the way he slowly reveals details, little by little, really works to keep up the suspense and general 'what the fuckery' in these short stories, most (or all?) of which are 10 pages or less - quite impressive what he's able to do with so little words. i really am looking forward to checking out more of his fiction which lucky for me there is a lot of!

standouts: 
- sisters: amorphous creatures observe human traditions on halloween
- room tone: filmmaker obsesses over recording the perfect sound of silence for his film
- wanderlust + the glistening world: go together hand in hand, disorienting tales of being followed

Taylor

Several good stories in here, only the “trigger warning” chapter left a bad taste in my mouth. Overall 3.5/5

I love this collection of short stories, but the odd thing about it is that it doesn't get very good until halfway through. Like, almost exactly halfway through. Even though there are a couple of good stories in the first half, the second half really shines. There isn't any real order to the stories, all of them are independent of each other (unless, by some display of incomprehension, I missed that memo), but none of the stories drag on much and most of them convey pretty interesting tales. Out of them, my favorite three are Smear, Wanderlust, and Lord of the Vats.