Good Night, Sleep Tight by Brian Evenson: Review by Ian Mond

Good Night, Sleep Tight, Brian Evenson (Cof­fee House Press 978-1-56689-709-9, $19.00, 256pp, tp) September 2024.

The best horror fiction is about dislocation, the growing feeling that something is askew or lopsided with the world and only you, no one else, is aware. Brian Evenson gets this. In a recent article for Lit Hub, he points out that:

Writing Horror is about tapping into something that resonates for you, some­thing that makes you feel, deeply, that there is something wrong with the world, something that feels frightening or off…. It is about remembering the fear or wrongness that you felt in your body, remembering what that felt like, what your body felt like, and then finding the right words to share it with the reader.

Evenson’s discomforting new collection, Good Night, Sleep Tight, assembles 19 stories and is a master class in “wrongness,” in exis­tential dread.

The title story, which I first encountered in Conjunctions 78, is a case in point. Our nar­rator vividly recalls the nights (one in every 20) his mother would recount a frightening bedtime story. She long denies doing such a thing, but the tales – one about a “creature that looked human but wasn’t… [that] was capable, for instance… of growing as tall as the ceiling, and then across it, and then lengthening itself down the wall…” – have invaded his dreams. As an adult, our narrator is left to question why his mother would seek to terrify him as a child. Her actions haven’t ruined his life (“he wasn’t ‘trau­matized’, he didn’t need a therapist, he lived… an implacably normal life”), but those feelings of anxiety and doubt (he’s still frightened of the dark) remain unresolved. The eerie ending only heightens this sense of dislocation.

We see a similar effect in stories like “The Se­quence” – a sister compels her innocent twin to play an insidious game – or “Annex” – a newly minted android, empty of memories, learns its circular, eternal fate – and “Mother” – where a survivor of a crashed spaceship starts to question his identity. Like “Good Night, Sleep Tight”, the protagonists of these tales gradually interrogate the status quo as their sense of self shifts under their feet. And like the title piece, that feeling of disconnection is a direct result of being manipulated by someone close to them – a mother, a sister, a fellow artificial intelligence.

For Evenson, the generation starship proves to be a rich source of dislocation – particularly when the main character is not entirely human. I’ve already mentioned “Mother”, where the generation ship in question has crash-landed, killing the frozen occupants (including em­bryos). In that story, the main characters are androids or synthetics built to serve the human colonists – though, to start with, our main character is unaware of his purpose or past. Similarly, Vettle, the protagonist of “Imagine A Forest”, is aware they are different to the other children – stronger and larger – but doesn’t understand why they won’t join their friends in cryo-freeze, alongside their parents when they reach maturity. We figure out the truth well before Vettle, but that doesn’t make the story any less powerful – moving and tragic, threaded with love and drama. Much darker and cyni­cal in tone, “Servitude” sees an AI explaining to a group of recently awoken colonists – the obscenely rich who fled a dying Earth – the fate that awaits them, the desperate choice they now must make. Here, it’s the humans who are bewildered, forced to come to terms with a new and stark reality.

In unmooring the readers – because we’re also along for the ride – Evenson isn’t afraid to dust off some classics. There’s the spooky, empty suburb hiding a terrifying secret (“The Rider”) and the cursed painting that leaves death in its wake (“Untitled (Cloud of Blood)”) and the paralysed person about to be buried, believed dead, crying out to be heard (“A True Friend”). Evenson, however, is at his best when he ups the weird quotient to a thousand. “Vigil in the Inner Room” is about a daughter who watches over her father’s corpse, which, while morbid, isn’t especially unsettling until you learn that this isn’t the first time the father has died. In the claustrophobic “The Thickening”, Greppur has spent his life dealing with a nighttime phenom­enon where the air thickens around him so he can barely move or breathe, an uncanny state of affairs that grows increasingly disturbing. And then there’s “Under Care”, where a patient in a hospital starts to wonder how long he has been there and why he can’t seem to leave – a truly disorientating and discombobulating bit of writing. If you have any interest in the art of horror fiction, in the skill involved in eliciting feelings of dread, confusion, and, yes, disloca­tion, then you should read the work of Brian Evenson. Good Night, Sleep Tight is as good a place to start.

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This review and more like it in the November 2024 issue of Locus.

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