There’s much to appreciate about an author who can, in a short story collection, juggle with a limited and recurring set of ideas without coming off as monotonous and repetitive. Collections are considered accomplished to the degree that they are varied and reflect a mixed assortment of literary devices; differing points of view, thematic and stylistic variation, anything to keep tedium away. It takes a master hand like Evenson to go against that convention and to write a collection of stories thematically focused and subtly interconnected, extremely well curated and arranged, unparalleled in minimalistic writing and laconic dialogues, examining themes like environmental collapse, paranoia, AI, or cruel family ties through heady, composed, original horror.
He walked in what he thought was a place he knew, but walked in such a fashion as to slip into another place altogether.
Straight from the start, the first story, The Sequence, provides an equally fantastic as realistic taste of what to expect in Good Night, Sleep Tight - a swirling amalgamation of weird and dreamlike motives glued on an often critical and analytical subsurface. In it, a set of twin sisters discover a way to enter a magical parallel world, in which strange doppelganger entities of themselves lead their lives differently than they do. A perfect intro which opens the doors of and invites the reader to step into a different plane of reality echoing, but not exactly mirroring, our own. This motive creeps through many of the nineteen stories in this collection, with the following two stories, The Cabin, the story of a hunter being hunted by strange entities, and The Rider, a kind of reverse-home invasion, in which a traveler is lured and trapped in a home, being close at the heels of the opening piece in this sense. More than any other stories here, these three convey an atmosphere of an eerie fairy tale, beside focusing on being trapped and incarcerated in another realm, thus losing bodily autonomy.
Of course it's just a story, the tall man said, and smiled. What is actually going to happen, I promise you, is much, much worse.
If you are no stranger to Evensonian writing, you will recognize the terror of losing control over your bodily capabilities either by falling in a coma or being strapped or being buried alive and perceive everything mentally but unable to move or react, from super short stories such as Hospice. A True Friend follows in that tradition, and so does Under Care, where a person is completely helpless in a hospital. But is he really?
What's new to me in an Evenson book is that this collection heavily features AIs and their autonomy, thought processes and how "human" conditions, such as motherhood or friendship, can translate into their worlds. In Annex, for instance, an artificial human must face a highly philosophical problem and accomplish a grand mission. Imagine a Forest puts another AI under the burden of determining humanity's fate and Never Little, Never Grown echoes this mission as well as the notion of an AI and its relationship to its "mother". Servitude picks up the trope of the ultra rich and their hirelings in the post-apocalypse and also features AI. All these read like older, nice SF stories from decades ago.
Let us go back to a concept I already mentioned above, but haven't yet elaborated; namely the "mother". Evenson dedicates this collection to his mother and the mother, as a kind of figure of authority, which can be cruel, like in the story Mother, where a mother traumatizes her son with scary good night stories, or Vigil in the Inner Room which revolves around a mother who forces her daughter to hold vigil at the bedside of her recently deceased father, or strict but benevolent as in the above mentioned Imagine a Forest.
... and I am nearly certain she was already dead when I first buried her. So I buried her again and got to work on my plans.
There are, as in every collection departures too, short stories that are neither SF nor focus on any of the subjects above; in Untitled (Cloud of Blood) a cursed portrait kills each of its owners or in The Thickening, my favorite of this collection, a man is forced to confront his childhood boogeyman after the death of his wife.
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