Good Night, Sleep Tight by Brian Evenson: Review by Gabino Iglesias
Good Night, Sleep Tight, Brian Evenson (Coffee House Press 978-1-56689-709-9, $19.00, 229pp, hc) September 2024. Cover by Jeffrey Alan Love.
When it comes to inhabiting and traversing the interstitial spaces between genres, no one does it better than Brian Evenson. Science fiction, horror, and literary fiction are the main three genres Evenson writes, but the bridges he builds between those genres – and the brilliant way in which he makes elements from all of those and more work together beautifully – are entirely unique. With Good Night, Sleep Tight, the author reinforces this while simultaneously showing, once again, that he is as great at writing short fiction as he is at writing novels.
There are too many stories in this collection to discuss them all, but a few of them deserve special attention. The title story is a perfect example. A story about a man remembering the scary tales his mother used to tell him is forced to realize that things were even worse than he remembers. ‘‘Untitled (Cloud of Blood)’’ is about a haunted painting that kills people. ‘‘Mother’’ also deals with a mom – something that happens a lot in this collection. This time, it’s a mother who creates her children with an ideal in mind, and she isn’t afraid to do the creation, and the destruction, time and time again. ‘‘The Cabin’’ is a surreal narrative about a man named Beck who finds a cabin in the woods and uses it for shelter, not knowing the impossible things the cabin holds. ‘‘A True Friend’’ is only two pages long, but it packs a punch as it tells the brief story of someone in a bad situation while the person who can save them merely watches things go down. This one also has one of the best final lines in all the collection.
I could go on and on, but there would be no point in that. Every story in this book is perfectly crafted to leave readers feeling unsettled and uncomfortable, deeply bothered by things that shouldn’t be, things beyond human comprehension, and things that happen that shatter reality as we know it. Evenson is an accomplished author and one of those rare writers who is both critically acclaimed and also a favorite amongst lovers of superb speculative fiction.
Evenson’s body of work speaks for itself, and this collection is a great addition to a catalog that already includes some of the best speculative fictions collections out there: Altmann’s Tongue, The Wavering Knife, Windeye, A Collapse of Horses, Song for the Unraveling of the World, and The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell, to name a few. With authors whose work I always review – Stephen Graham Jones, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Jeremy Robert Johnson, etc. – my main concern is that I’m going to run out of things to say. This collection reminded me that I need not fear that, because I can always say something simple and then invite readers to discover the magic by themselves. So yeah, this is a great collection, so make sure you don’t miss it.
Gabino Iglesias is a writer, journalist, professor, and book reviewer living in Austin TX. He is the author of Zero Saints and Coyote Songs and the editor of Both Sides. His work has been nominated to the Bram Stoker and Locus Awards and won the Wonderland Book Award for Best Novel in 2019. His short stories have appeared in a plethora of anthologies and his non-fiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and CrimeReads. His work has been published in five languages, optioned for film, and praised by authors as diverse as Roxane Gay, David Joy, Jerry Stahl, and Meg Gardiner. His reviews appear regularly in places like NPR, Publishers Weekly, the San Francisco Chronicle, Criminal Element, Mystery Tribune, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and other print and online venues. He’s been a juror for the Shirley Jackson Awards twice and has judged the PANK Big Book Contest, the Splatterpunk Awards, and the Newfound Prose Prize. He teaches creative writing at Southern New Hampshire University’s online MFA program. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.
This review and more like it in the January 2025 issue of Locus.
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