Stories by Brian Evenson
September 10, 2024 • 5.5 x 8.25 • 256 pages • 9781566897099
“Perhaps tomorrow I will wake up another person. Perhaps tomorrow I will wake up not a person at all.”
From the “master of literary horror” (GQ) comes a collection of new stories tracing the limits and consequences of artificial intelligence and “post-human” relationships. Populated by twins stepping into worlds of absence, bears who lick their cubs into creation, and artificial beings haunted by their less-than-human nature, each page sketches a world where our all-too-real feelings of isolation and ecological dread take on an otherworldly tinge.
In Good Night, Sleep Tight, Brian Evenson deftly weaves ethical dilemmas, maternal warmth, and echoes of apocalypse into his most tender, disquieting book yet.
About the Author
Praised by Peter Straub for going “furthest out on the sheerest, least sheltered narrative precipice,” Brian Evenson has won the World Fantasy Award, The International Horror Guild Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award. He is also the recipient of three O. Henry Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was a finalist for the Ray Bradbury Prize.
Praise for Good Night, Sleep Tight
“Within these pages: boundless imagery and virtuosic range. Evenson seems to have sequenced the stories like he would the songs of an album: thematic handoffs that become echoes, one tone harmonizing with another. While Good Night, Sleep Tight harbors moments of legitimate terror, it’s Evenson’s powers of emotional observation that will make you gasp. And the unmatched artistry with which he renders them. This book is more than a gem: it’s a collection of precious stones.” —Josh Malerman, New York Times bestselling author of Bird Box
“Brian Evenson’s new collection, Good Night, Sleep Tight, is nineteen installments of idiosyncratic, weird genius. I can’t think of a better practitioner of the short story at work today.” —Jeffrey Ford, Edgar Award winning author of The Girl in the Glass
"Peeling back the thin veil that separates our humanity from the incomprehensible and the decadently weird, Brian Evenson crafts a masterful and utterly beguiling collection of literary unease with Good Night, Sleep Tight. With a pervasive sense of isolation and existential worry leaking from story to story, this disturbing collection proves why Evenson remains the undisputed master of short literary horror fiction." —Eric LaRocca, author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke
Praise for Brian Evenson
Winner of the 2020 World Fantasy Award for best collection
Winner of the 2019 Shirley Jackson Award for a single-author collection
"His stories are deeply terrifying and so troubling that they linger in your mind long after you've read them." —R.L. Stine
"Brian Evenson is one of my favorite living horror writers." —Carmen Maria Machado
"There is not a more intense, prolific, or apocalyptic writer of fiction in America than Brian Evenson." —George Saunders
"Like with Borges or Kafka, every one of Brian Evenson’s stories are a whole world distilled down to a few pages, and rendered in a pointillism that feels not just abstract, but cosmic, yet is gritty all the same, and leaves a distinct, bloody residue in your mind, in your heart. And then you can no longer look at the world the way you used to." —Stephen Graham Jones
"Evenson is one of our best living writers—regardless of genre." —NPR
"Evenson’s fiction is equal parts obsessive, experimental, and violent. It can be soul-shaking." —The New Yorker