Brian Evenson purloined the title of The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell from Marguerite Young’s Miss Macintosh, My Darling. He gushes about her book in the acknowledgments of Glassy, Burning: “It is a book that I truly admire, and that manages the confusion of what is real and what is imagined in a way that I find truly remarkable.” And the 22 short, potent stories in Glassy, Burning do just that — they force the reader to constantly question what is real and what is imagined. Evenson accomplishes this feat by lulling the reader into a fugue-like state with his otherworldly imaginative prose, and like his predecessors Ballard and Poe, his unparalleled talent allows the reader to empathize with all characters — real and imaginary.
In “Leg,” the adventurous captain of a ship, Hekla, lost her “flesh-and-blood leg” in an accident and replaces it with a prosthetic limb with a mind of its own. This appendage is smart, patient, and manipulative. When it wants, it takes on the countenance of humans. The leg convinces Hekla to hunt a mythical sea creature, pitting Hekla against the navigator. After the leg does Hekla’s dirty work, the leg takes command of the ship, setting the stage for an ending that will rival the myth of Jormungand.
“In Dreams” is a tale about augmented reality — on steroids. The author presents a man whose brain is controlled by a supernatural consciousness which was permanently threaded “in and through his brain tissue.” Evenson keeps the reader off-balance in this story, making it unclear who governs control of the man’s actions and thoughts. However, the man’s real nightmare occurs when “his progeny would awaken and affix their augments like crowns around their brows … pretending to not be human,” driving the man into a state of madness and confusion.
In “Grauer in The Snow,” the protagonist, Grauer, is separated from his brothers when a blizzard descends upon an unnamed town. Evenson does not reveal the setting, pulling the reader deeper into the story. After the separation, Grauer takes cover in a train where he meets a diabolical, ghost-like creature:
“Where am I? Grauer managed. Just a place, said the face, and then it stepped back a little farther. The body below the face was clothed in a garment made of long, tattered strips of fabric that pooled on the floor.”
It turns out that the strips of fabric are actually the face’s skin. Throughout his stay inside the train, Grauer is disoriented and not able to decipher reality from a delusion.
The disturbingly brutal story “The Barrow-Men” introduces readers to Evenson’s barrow-men who kill innocent “true men” with spears. After one killing, a barrow-man retrieves his spear by “bracing the feathery end of its hindleg on the dying man’s back, [and] it used three of its forelimbs to tear the spear free.” The protagonist, Arnar, tries to outsmart the barrow-men by lying still in a cart carrying “a pile of dead.” The barrow-men, who talk through attached neck boxes which sound “gravely [and] synthetic,” kill the “true men” for no apparent reason. Arnar fights to avoid his own death sentence, but one barrow-man detects his movement and believes he is a ghost: “Ghost, he heard a voice box say, then the others. Ghost. Ghost. Ghost.” The barrow-men then perform a ghastly ghost ritual, one that is worse than being murdered, causing Arnar to beg for his own death: “Why not simply kill me?” he states.
In the final, title story, Hekla reappears as a participant in a workshop at an eco-lodge that teaches humans to hear and see the underworld. One way they accomplish this is by mastering attunement: “a matter of speaking at-one-ment, the state of being at one with the world … of seeping through the world’s surface to permeate its entire being.” The reader is treated to Evenson’s talent for creating an ominous setting when Hekla checks into the lodge:
“No door [was] marked with nine. [Hekla] moved down the passageway and there, at the end, there it was: a door with a shaky 9 burned into it at the level of her forehead. It was very dark — so dark that when she waved her fingers in front of her face she saw nothing at all.”
The next day, the workshop leader moves Hekla to another room so he can work with the group in room nine. During the session, the leader, through his attunement, is told that the woman whose spirit is present in the room had a prosthetic leg … that when unfurled “[became] a being of glass and steel” just like the leg in the first story. “Something happened in this room that made them leave it as it was,” and that something causes Hekla to faint and run home as fast as she can after regaining her wits.
Because the details of his stories are revealed in short, powerful sentences, and because Evenson creates unique worlds featuring characters with human and supernatural traits, the reader’s sense of reality is constantly obscured. He is a master of ambiguity, leaving it up to the reader to acknowledge a story’s dénouement. But the stories never really end, so his readers can return to their favorite pieces and relive their preferred nightmares. The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell proves, once again, that Brian Evenson is a master of short fiction.
[Published by Coffee House Press on August 3, 2021, 256 pages, $16.95 paperback]