Pure Nightmare Fuel

Anna Marie Cain interviews Brian Evenson about his latest collection, “Good Night, Sleep Tight.”

By Anna Marie CainNovember 16, 2024

• Fiction

• SF

“THERE ARE TIMES,” observes Brian Evenson, “when it hurts to be alive.” The line—the opening of “A True Friend,” one of the stories in the acclaimed horror writer’s newest collection, Good Night, Sleep Tight—offers a vivid reminder of why Evenson is your favorite writer’s favorite writer: though existential pain and bleak honesty simmer at the core of many things he writes, to read his work closely is also to find space for joy. (There are times, presumably, when living doesn’t hurt.)

To speak to Evenson, as I was lucky enough to do over Zoom one afternoon this August, is to realize very quickly that this joy is present off the page as well. As he discussed nightmares, human failure, and his favorite twisted fairy tales, the author’s love of craft was omnipresent. The minimalist absurdism of stories like “The Other Floor” elicits Franz Kafka, while the twisting, dark tonal haze that brings so many of his pieces to unsettling ends reminds you that his mom’s “bedtime stories” were not Goodnight Moon but Edgar Allan Poe.

In this new collection, Evenson deconstructs familial connections, asks what it means to be human, and scrutinizes the horrors of climate change and greed that—as his stories make harrowingly clear—can only lead us to the precipice of extinction. His words evoke loneliness, curiosity, and rage; reading, your tongue itches to yell “Eat the Rich!” while the rest of you yearns for your mother’s arms. Good Night, Sleep Tight begs to be pored over by flashlight, under the cover of sheets. Turning the book’s pages turns one’s inner self back into the adolescent who wasn’t quite ready to go to bed—no. Not without one more story.

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ANNA MARIE CAIN: Many of the pieces in this collection are pure nightmare fuel. Were you someone who had recurring nightmares as a kid?

BRIAN EVENSON: I had a vivid imagination as a child; I guess I still do. I had really vivid dreams and nightmares. If I was in the dark on my own for even a minute or two, I would start to imagine things there. All of that is stuff I felt when I was writing. I’m just tapping into feelings I had when I was a kid and growing up.

A lot of horror writers admit to being afraid of the dark.

It’s partly desensitizing yourself a little bit, going through worst-case scenarios and just seeing how they feel—which is weirdly reassuring, even though it probably shouldn’t be. I think for me, the best horror writers are not the ones who are like, “Ooh, blood, guts”; they’re the ones who feel like they’re writing from a place of not only trying to frighten the reader but also trying to honestly approach something they’ve experienced and share it. There’s a kind of empathy there that can really make the horror more resonant.

Your work sits a lot in ineffable space, and they say fear of the dark is usually an indication of the fear of the unknown. So, it makes sense that the parts you leave out allow your imagination to go to (no pun intended) darker places.

There’s a lot of ambiguity in my work, which I hope is a productive ambiguity. There are a lot of things you have to fill in. Very little is nailed down completely.

This book deals with the concepts of storytelling and bedtime tales. What stories had an impact on you growing up?

I read a lot of fairy tales. We had these huge volumes of fairy tales from around the world that we used to read. I didn’t actually read all that much horror as a kid; it was not something I was necessarily aware of or drawn to. But my mom used to read Poe to me, and she would sometimes read it as a bedtime story … which is maybe not the best parenting technique.

Maybe it’s the parenting technique.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, she didn’t always do that, but she introduced me to him, and my dad got me reading Kafka. Even though Kafka’s not horror, he got me thinking about things that were adjacent to horror. I think his sense of humor and ambiguity are things I’ve picked up as well.

I can see the influence of Kafka in some of the more uncanny and absurdist aspects of your writing. You have this ability to start a story right in the action—it shows incredible trust that your readers will be on board. Is that something you’ve had to build up to?

Most of my training was in literary fiction, and I was always an ugly duckling in literary fiction, because my stuff was weird and strange and kind of dark. But I didn’t really consider myself a horror writer. It wasn’t until I was a couple of books into my career that I started reading horror and realized, “Oh, what I thought horror was isn’t exactly what it is.” Because I came up in literary fiction, I think a lot of the work I was reading and responding to involved minimalism. Sometimes it’s about withholding from the reader. I spent a lot of time just thinking about what you can hold back and still have meaning in the story. What do you need, what don’t you need, and how can you arrange it in a way that works for the reader?

Once I started to write stuff that felt more genre-inflected, I started thinking about a story as something that gives the reader an experience. I’m not interested in conveying something or getting a meaning across—I’m more interested in getting your imagination working, having you start to fill in the gaps, and seeing what happens to you. And that does take a lot of trust.

It’s a balancing act, realizing that there may be certain readers I lose. But also, the thing I feel more and more is that if readers read several of my stories or books, then they really start to see the rhythm and figure out what’s going on.

When I think about minimalism in your work, I immediately think of the story “Bodies of Light” from the collection Altmann’s Tongue (1994). It’s such an incredible example of creating an entire world with almost nothing. It’s, what, a two-and-a-half-page story?

Yeah, it’s very compressed. I was trying to do as much as I could in it.

I think that’s what’s so interesting about the way you play with minimalism—it leaves so much to our imagination. Really, you could get into arguments with people over what the intention could be. I think that makes it more fascinating than any kind of persistent clarity.

That’s something I like. The other thing I like, which took me a long time to figure out how to do as effectively as I wanted to, is the idea that you could both give the reader something and take it away—give the sense that you think you know what’s going on, but the world also starts to feel a little shaky under your feet. That kind of tentativeness is something I love to do, partly because I feel like my own experience with the world is constantly misapprehending things and then figuring out after the fact what actually happened.

Is that why short stories are your most consistent medium?

With short stories, you can enter a world, do things, and play around with it, then leave and still have this thing that exists, this encapsulated experience. There’s something really exciting to me about the story’s ability to do something in just a few pages—sometimes by implication. I like novels too, I read a lot of them, but there is this funny thing with novels where you build the world and then you just keep on reasserting it, over and over again. For me, novellas are the most interesting because they have the arc of the novel but the compression and speed of a short story.

You seem to really listen to your impulses: the path, the length, the form an idea wants to take.

I feel like it’s about intuition, approaching different topics and seeing where they’ll take me. If I know too much, or know too well where I’m going with the story, it’s not interesting to write. There has to be some level of discovery or revelation. I think it’s important, as a writer, to trust your impulses and your intuition. I mean, I also have weird impulses and weird intuition, so that works for the kind of fiction I do.

Many writers discussing AI and technology—as you do, repeatedly, here—are writing about the fear of these tools. This collection, on the other hand, emphasizes the cyclical inhumanity of humanity.

I do think there’s a kind of tension between the AI and the humans. There are stories in which these artificial beings don’t think of themselves as not being human. There’s a lot in terms of the way they interact, and some of them have very close connections to humans at the same time. What does it mean to exist as an artificial being that’s an imprint of someone who may have been an actual human at one point? What about someone who also considers a human their parent, their mother? A lot of the stories consider how we interact across species.

Interesting way to put it.

For a long time, I’ve thought that if artificial intelligence actually develops, we’re probably going to be the last to know, because it’s going to develop in a way that’s more organic to how machinic beings function. As they begin to communicate with one another, then we’ll eventually find out that we’re dealing with things that feel sentient.

I’m really interested in thinking about how there can be communication across a gap if you have two forms of sentience that are distinct: one artificial or machinic, and the other human.

The stories “Imagine a Forest” and “Servitude” are excellent examples of technologies taking on human qualities as they venture to a new planet. They feel like alternate versions of one another in a way. The robot son taking care of the ship’s children who learned grief, and the robot servant who learned to lie and use it to his advantage.

So often, when you read stuff that’s related to AI, it’s about how they can’t feel, they can’t get “out” of their programming. I think that we’re going to reach a point where that’s not the case. There’s a really good novel by Adrian Tchaikovsky called Service Model (2024), which is about a bunch of robots in a house. One of them has done something and they’re trying to figure out how to process it all. And it’s broken, in a way. It’s really intriguing.

I understand why people are writing about the terrors of AI. I agree with those terrors, but I also don’t really need a story to tell me that. I mean, I am not crazy about AI; I have so many students right now who try to take the shortcut of having ChatGPT write their papers.

Oh god. It’s so obvious when they do.

It’s really bad. And you’re right: it’s also immediately obvious. Maybe at some point, it won’t be, but it’s this strange thing of these students not realizing they’re eventually going to be competing with those programs and machines, which right now are just helping students to not learn the things they need to learn in order to compete in an effective way.

I’m floored by how many people I’ve come across who struggle heavily with reading comprehension and analysis—because they’re not practicing it.

It’s a real problem. Six or seven months ago, someone used one of those programs to make a fake book and tried to sell it under my name on Amazon.

Wait, what?

Yeah. And it finally got taken down, but it took forever. The fact that someone can potentially use these devices as a way of appropriating your identity as a writer is just … the thing that was most embarrassing was just how bad the book was.

There’s a sense of predestination colliding with free will within many of the stories, especially one like “The Cabin.” You and I were both raised in the Mormon Church; we both asked to be excommunicated. Still, being raised LDS is so all-encompassing. It’s hard not to see those themes bleed into the work.

Choice is a huge part of a lot of my fiction. Going back to the very beginning, the importance of choices, and being responsible for your choices … I do think you’re right too—this is true with several religions—but with Mormonism especially, it’s that notion of, how free am I to act? To what degree are my actions predetermined? Predestination is something I couldn’t help but think about. Some of these characters are thinking about those concerns and wondering how helpless they are, or how to really be themselves—and all those things probably did develop from my growing up in that culture.

There’s so much in the church that’s ripe for literary excavation.

The funny thing about Mormonism, if you’re raised in it and kind of get to know it, is that it gets weirder and weirder. I think a lot of people who are recent converts or have lessons from the missionaries don’t see that.

Definitely not.

But the whole planet closest to God—

Getting our own planets eventually …

Yeah, yeah.

You have to leave Mormonism with a sense of humor.

You do. Even the whole thing that I was told as a kid, that you should be in the world but not of the world—it makes you have a really weird relationship to the world around you.

I forgot about that saying.

Participating and not, at the same time. I think a lot of the disorientation in my fiction is probably tied to that.

Do you ever make yourself uncomfortable when you’re writing?

I can, yeah. My very first book, Altmann’s Tongue, has a story called “The Munich Window,” which is a novella, and very intense—and it’s also non-paragraph, so it just keeps on going and going until you get to a section break. It was really intense to write, because the character is a sociopath, maybe a psychopath, and being close to that voice was a lot. Then there are stories, like “Imagine a Forest,” that are just emotionally intense for me. I really like that story, and it’s partly because I felt like it allowed me to try something that I hadn’t really done before.

I can scare myself, I can have an intense response to a story, but it’s funny because it’s often not the stories that readers respond to strongly. I’m more interested in a story that allows me to do something I haven’t done before—whereas the stories that readers often respond to are written in a mode that I keep on working on and perfecting and get to a point where they’re like, “Oh, this works exactly how I wanted it to.”

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The author of almost two dozen books, Brian Evenson has received three O. Henry Prizes for his short stories. He is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the International Horror Guild Award. His book Song for the Unraveling World (2019) won a World Fantasy Award and Shirley Jackson Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Speculative Fiction. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches at CalArts.