A Moment of Doubt, or Nearly So

Zachary Gillan reviews Brian Evenson’s new collection “Good Night, Sleep Tight.”

By Zachary GillanOctober 7, 2024

• SF

• Fiction

• Environment

ALL OF BRIAN EVENSON’S stories begin with a moment of doubt, or nearly so.

Evenson has an anecdote he’s fond of recounting: walking through a parking lot, he saw a wounded bird, only to realize as he approached that the bird was, in fact, a leaf caught in the wind. That uncertain and liminal space between the two ways of seeing the world, the lingering unease and the confusion after, is where his stories live—in deep, pervasive doubt. In his new collection, Good Night, Sleep Tight, that doubt is fixed, more than ever before, on the future. These are stories of parents and their tenuous bequeathments to their children, humanity’s uneasy relationship to AI and synthetic life, the downward spiral of climate change driven by the rapaciousness of the ultrarich, the terror of looming night and an unsure tomorrow. The stories here, masterful as always, highlight this doubt, this epistemological horror, in a number of ways: syntactically, metafictionally, thematically, narratively.

Given that this is his 12th collection of short stories, one hardly need recount the well-worn territory of Evenson’s biography: the Mormon upbringing, the critical theory PhD, the faculty position at Brigham Young University lost over the violence and darkness of his early fiction, his voluntary (and happy) excommunication from the church. In the 30 years since his first book, Altmann’s Tongue, was published, Evenson has proven both remarkably consistent and incredibly protean. We might draw a more or less direct line from his initial uncertainty with LDS teachings to this constant state of epistemological horror in an uncertain world that unites all of his fiction. The grotesque violence and absurd religion of his early work, though, has given way to a more firmly science fictional approach to the weird. His previous collection, The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell (2021), marked a shift into eco- or climate horror, which continues in Good Night, Sleep Tight, with many of these stories taking place in post-collapse futures where the ultrarich have plundered and ruined the earth. Here, however, he’s also increasingly concerned with the interiority and humanity of his protagonists.

Take, for example, “Maternity,” a story we might cheekily sum up as that of a protagonist doubting her choice to take part in a Brian Evenson story. Anna, a nurse, works in a maternity ward when a new mother (also named Anna) loses her newborn and then comes back days later to steal someone else’s. The nurse, after the death of the first baby, checks the chart and reads that the baby had been born dead: “It was strange, she thought then, to phrase it that way, and she had corrected the chart to read stillborn. That word, too, she had often thought, was strange, and got stranger the more you looked at it.” The Evenson devotee will immediately think of “Born Stillborn,” collected in 2019’s Song for the Unraveling of the World, where a man haunted by two therapists dwells on the oddity of the titular phrase. “Born Stillborn” is the story of a man’s descent into madness as his understanding of the world unravels around him, as so many of Evenson’s stories have been. “Maternity” is the story of a woman feeling wistful about a life she hasn’t lived: years after the death and kidnapping, the mother returns to give birth again, and Anna considers stealing her baby to teach her a lesson (and, perhaps, to see what life as a mother could have been like). The stories are doppelgängers, we might say, as are the two Annas, and Nurse Anna’s two lives.

“Maternity” is replete with backstory, humanization, and a deep interiority, but even within his increasingly humane stories, Evenson’s devotion to doubt is unwavering. Narrative aporia runs throughout his corpus, details and specifics entered and then immediately hand-waved, wavered, doubted. Take this line, for example: “The more time goes by, a detective admitted to the nurse, unless he was an FBI officer—it was hard to keep straight who was who—the less likely it is that the child will be recovered.” This foregrounds not only Evenson’s devotion to doubt but also his rhythmic mastery, the use of brief clauses broken by commas, em dashes, and italic emphases. The two are inextricable: these ragged caesuras prevent the reader from placidly settling in, just as his characters are consistently unsettled by their doubt in the world.

The bridge between the two time points in “Maternity” is a perfectly Evensonian bit of murk and rhythmic tap dancing: “It might have gone on like that indefinitely, even forever, for the rest of her career anyway, until she retired. But, simply put, it didn’t.” Many of these stories end with something quite similar, narrative voices arguing over interpretation of impending doom in vaguely quippy ways—one can almost imagine Rod Serling saying some of these closing lines with a smirk, like “What awaited her there, beyond the inner room? Who can say? Certainly not her. At least not anymore.”

These are also cessations, suspensions, hangings-in-time of impending doom that aren’t quite resolved and certainly aren’t quite explicit or knowable. They call attention to the artificiality of the stories, a metafictional tactic Evenson also uses in his stories that contain their own telling, stories-recapitulating-stories infusing themselves and their tellers with doubt (think, most infamously, of “Black Bark” and “The Blood Drip,” and their earlier echo, “The Second Boy”). The very title of Good Night, Sleep Tight calls attention to this unease, the telling of bedtime stories highlighting the liminal space between wake and sleep, parent and child. The title story and “The Night Archer” are illustrative. Both are excellent; both center on the telling of terrifying nighttime tales. The former is about a man haunted by the awful stories his mother told him in his childhood, each of which could be a précis for an unwritten Evenson. The latter, where a girl tells her brother awful stories to distract him from their mother’s dying, is atavistic Evenson, with its quartered, bled corpses and phantom limbs, and contains the most unsettling description of falling asleep that I’ve ever read: “Now that the task was done, sleep was catching up to him. And then it caught and took him.”

In Good Night, Sleep Tight Evenson’s consistent, paired fascination with metafiction and doppelgängers is often expressed through iterative forms of consciousness. Evenson recently said about himself, notably, “I feel like I’ve lived about two or three different lives. […] I’m someone who used to be one thing and now I’m another thing”—one, again, can’t help but note the link between this uncertain relation to the remade self and the integral role of doubt in relation to the world. Several of the stories here revolve around artificial beings losing and regaining memories, remaking themselves appropriately, and the collection at large sequences iterative takes on similar narratives playing out in (slightly) different ways. “Imagine a Forest” and “Servitude,” for example, are both about generation ships fleeing the ruined earth. The former centers on an artificial being named Vetle, while the latter revolves around the ship’s AI, addressed as Vessel.

“Servitude” is a rare stumble for Evenson, an overly sure voice giving the narrative an unwelcome hint of lecturing wherein the AI (a ghostly replicant of an earlier AI, a fascinating approach that one wishes had been developed more), having helped the lower classes slaughter the ultrarich, leaves a message for the remaining colonists that they must convince it they deserve its help (many of these stories take the form of messages left behind, another tactic that highlights their artificiality). “Imagine a Forest,” on the other hand, is a particularly strong entry—like “Maternity,” it’s a story of intensely deep emotional vibrancy. Vetle, raised to think the captain of a generation ship is his mother, finds himself arbitrating a kind of deep space disaster “trolley problem” (with the help of the downloaded memories of its mother, in another iterative mind-meld situation). Another entry, “Mother” (not to be confused with “Maternity”!) shares many of the longer story’s conceits—space travel disaster, artificial beings, artificial parenthood—but, in a more traditionally dark Evensonian way, it weaponizes doubt and epistemological confusion. The difference in tone is evident from these stories’ opening lines: in “Mother,” we have the acerbic and paranoiac “We had lived in that place for years before I came to understand that all was not as I believed it to be”; in “Imagine a Forest,” the more wistful “From early on, I had the impression that I was not like other children.” “Mother” also contains one of my favorite examples of the Evensonian comma-laden aporia: “Was that all? That is enough, no doubt, but no, it was not all.”

The influence of Gene Wolfe looms large over Evenson’s science fictional output, an unavoidable referent for Evenson’s uncertain narration and religious subtexts (and, not to belabor the point, but Evenson’s SF work here is definitely in conversation with the iterative memories at the heart of Wolfe’s 1980s masterpiece The Book of the New Sun). Evenson, indeed, is open in his admiration for Wolfe’s “strategy of placing characters in a world that its characters aren’t quite sure how to interpret, letting them and us figure it out (or perhaps fail to figure it out) at the same time.” “Annex,” in which an artificial being addresses its successor/duplicate in an iterative chain that stretches back through at least a half dozen other lives, is particularly Wolfean, with its naive narrator, opening wordplay, opacity, and elided details (“‘Annexed to what?’ I asked my keeper. ‘What?’ he said. For a moment he was perplexed, and then he smiled. ‘Oh yes, very good. No, not that sort of annex.’ Though he did not continue on to tell me what sort of annex it was”). The meaning soon becomes clear to the reader—“annex” in the darker, more predatory sense. That’s an important thing to remember: for all that Evenson is increasingly ensconced in science fiction, the overall tenor of his work remains as terrifying as always.

The Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski, whose intellectual life was something of an inversion of Evenson’s, his doubt driving him from Marxist orthodoxy to an uneasy devotion to Catholicism, referred often to the “metaphysical horror” of the instability of living in the doubt-laden post-Enlightenment universe; Kołakowski once wrote that “it is perhaps better for us to totter insecurely on the edge of an unknown abyss than simply to close our eyes and deny its existence.” Brian Evenson, in his masterful stories, whatever combination of weird fiction, horror, and science fiction they might be; in his suspension of epistemology in the moment of seeing both a bird and a leaf; in his endless, unwavering doubt, leaves his readers tottering exactly there.