Contagion and Other Stories

Rating:
Summary: A Door Into the Dark, and Words About Words
Review: I've read just about everything that Brian Evenson has published, and this recent collection was especially encouraging, as it contains some of his most adventurous and aggressive fiction to date (including the O. Henry Award pieces, "Two Brothers" and "The Polygamy of Language"). Some of the stories don't catch hold as well as others, but overall, in bleak tones and economic prose, Evenson lays bare the damaging inter-relatedness of language, religion, and violence.

Several of the stories in "Contagion" have a darkly cultish feel to them: a preacher rewrites scripture and his children are unsure of how or whether to resist him; a madman discourses on the origin of language while going through a polygamists' camp. Others have a somber and scientific pulse: in "Internal," an interning research assistant begins to suspect that the subject of his observations may in turn be observing him, or that the line between observer/observed might not exist at all; in "Watson's Boy," humans in (what the back cover tells us is) a conditioned response box vie against rats for survival.

For me, the highlight of the collection is the title story, "Contagion." As two hired hands walk a long stretch of barbed-wire fence, the clarity of their assigned mission--repair? report?--begins to fade, and they begin to distrust each other. One of the men keeps a journal of their actions, until, the two men separated from each other, the whole thing begins to unravel. At the story's end, one of the men is held captive in a room and forced to keep writing, until the clarity of the story itself begins to fade.

Evenson is able, in a short amount of time, to rig a perfectly normal story and then let it unravel as problems of language and fiction become thematized. Shades of Kafka, Perec, maybe, or some of Handke's earlier work. Often, fiction about fiction and language about language is just plain dull, but Evenson's compact, blunt prose won't allow that.

If you're interested in fiction that walks a little on the wild side, "Contagion" is a good buy.