I thought I knew every kind of horror story. If you made a taxonomy of terrifying tales, you would start, of course, with the ghost story—perhaps the oldest genre of them all—and then add in stories about various other kinds of supernatural scary beings, including (but not limited to) goblins, witches, zombies, monsters, and anything else that goes bump in the night. A whole separate genus covers the more realistic villains in those various horror books that resemble crime stories. Here we find an assortment of blood-soaked plots about slashers and serial killers, psychopaths and the criminally insane. Then we bring in all those sci-fi horror stories about dystopian futures and demented alternative realities. Finally, on a higher plane and suitable for the more erudite reader, we include those works of existential horror, such as Kafka’s The Trial or Sartre’s Nausea , where terror is simply part of the human condition, as routine as brushing your teeth or taking out the garbage.
That pretty much exhausts the possibilities, no?
That’s what I though until I encountered Brian Evenson. His stories seem to start where other horror stories end. At the outset, something terrible has already happened . Our protagonist has already been stabbed or shot or imprisoned or maimed in a terrible accident. It seems like the worst is already behind us, that the bloodletting is over and things can only get better from here. But think again—in Evenson’s world, a near-death experience is merely a set-up for what is to come— which might just be worse than death .
Certainly there’s plenty of violence still ahead in the stories, but that’s not really the main source of the pervasive sense of dread that marks these tales. Much of the anxiety here comes from our heroes’ determination to interpret what is happening—to comprehend the incomprehensible. That is actually the most striking trademark of an Evenson character: not that they have survived a catastrophe, but that they can’t rest until they have figured out why it took place or, in many instances, the bare facts of the case. And they have good reasons for applying so much focus on these facts, because if you don’t understand what happened, it may well happen again. In the context of an Evenson story, that’s almost certainly the case.
The narrator in “The Report” is typical of these inquisitive protagonists—or perhaps ‘victims’ would be a more appropriate descriptor. He finds himself locked in a mysterious prison with strange rules and procedures. Adding to the puzzle , he doesn't know what crime he has committed, how long he will be incarcerated, or what punishment awaits him. But there seems to be a pattern in the way some prisoners are tortured and others are let off the hook, and it’s possible that some explanation can be decoded in the cryptic messages that pass from cell to cell, transmitted in a kind of alternative Morse code. If he can just figure out what’s really going on, perhaps he can save himself. Or maybe help the others who share his plight.
Tough luck, buddy! In these stories, human reason invariably falls short. Maybe rationality has reached its endpoint here, but that’s hardly a consolation when the price of a failure to understand is so high—as it is always seems to be in Evenson’s dark universe. In a way, these stories remind me of those examination dreams, where you are forced to take a test you will never pass. Only in these stories, the cost of failure is much, much worse than a bad grade.
Other Evenson tales begin in equally macabre settings. A man awakens in a hospital and has suffered terrible injuries, but the puzzling comments of everyone around him leads him to fear he has committed some terrible crime—but what did he actually do? In other stories, a character is recovering from a stab wound inflicted by his wife, or bleeding heavily from a gunshot, or stranded on an interstellar mining operation where the oxygen levels are slowing depleting, or in some other desperate situation. These contexts are inherently horrifying, but mostly because the murky details make it almost impossible to find a rational response or construct even a plausible response to the obstacles at hand.
In my favorite story in the collection, “BearHeart,” expectant parents pay for a gimmicky teddy bear that is embedded with a device that plays back their baby’s heartbeat. It’s supposed to help the child sleep at night. But when their baby dies, the bear starts to play an ominous role in their family life. In typical fashion, Evenson uses the tragedy that would normally end the narrative—the death of a child—as the triggering point for horror to come.
This type of horror story deserves its own name, a subgenre label all its own. It’s the horror of the missing algorithm, the conceptual dead end, the unsolvable problem, the illogical conclusion. It’s almost the exact opposite of our scary nightmares, in which things happens, but we never seem to stop and think about them—for some reason, that’s not allowed in the dreamland. Here action slows down, and all we are left with is an attempt to piece together the meaning, only the pieces just don’t fit.
I guess I will call it epistemological horror. That might make it seem like a kind of cerebral exercise, but Evenson is anything but a coldly philosophical writer. In fact, in his hands epistemology can be even scarier than a zombie or a grindhouse slasher. And his twists on it present a terror all the more terrifying because they are so resistant to personification. Who needs a monster when the horror is embedded in how we think?
Ted Gioia writes on music, literature and popular culture. He is the author of eleven books, including the forthcoming Music: A Subversive History (Basic Books).
This type of horror story deserves its own name, a subgenre label all its own. It’s the horror of the missing algorithm, the conceptual dead end, the unsolvable problem, the illogical conclusion.