Last Days

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Brian Evenson". PEN American Center. Archived from the original on 2014-10-22 . Retrieved 2014-02-05. First and smallest of my anti-xian rants here commenceth: Srsly y'all can any sane person in possession of even modest decoding skills think this crap is meant literally? And if so, how can that morally defective person claim this horrifying religion is a force for love and peace after reading just this one passage?) Imaginez un curieux croisement entre Franz Kafka et Quentin Tarantino... un impeccable choix de la part des responsables de cette collection particulière qu'est le 'Lot 49'.» a b c Young, Adrian Van (10 February 2016). "The Dark Fiction of an Ex-Mormon Writer". The New Yorker . Retrieved 25 April 2018.

A fascinating set-up: An ex-police detective, who had his hand by a crazed killer, become the target of obsession of a cult that glorifies self-amputation. After repeated attempts to recruit him are rebuffed, the members essentially kidnap him and keep him hostage a this large estate, under the pretext of solving a murder of a religious leader. Cool idea, huh? The book then introduces an antithesis to the Brotherhood of Mutilation, the Pauls. This association consists of men renouncing their own individuality by collectively taking the identity of Paul (the Christian one from the Bible) and plot the ruin of the former society with the help of Klein, in whom they see a sort of destroyer prophet. Things go crazy from here on if they were not deranged enough to begin with.

Evenson occupies a special place in contemporary fiction because he’s a giant of the literary realm who loves to produce genre fiction. In this regard, Last Days is a masterpiece: a narrative that could simultaneously be used to teach dialogue and plot in MFA programs and a text that all horror writers should refer to when trying to induce visceral reactions from their readers: All of that is fairly subtle in a novel that is decidedly unsubtle. The first signs of it, though, are in the simple excellence of Evenson’s narration. He puts us thigh deep into the story by the end of the first paragraph, and he never compromises his aesthetic vision. He never explains; he presents everything through a red, anaesthetizing mist. We experience one dehumanizing moment after another, but the narrative only gradually pulls away from what we recognize as human experience. Last Days is not an easy read. In fact, it is a surprisingly complex, frustratingly inscrutable, and uncompromisingly disturbing story full of gore, religious fanatics, and blood. However, it is also a novel that must be read by fans of mysteries, noir, and horror if they want to have an idea of what those genres can be. It’s also great for those who crave fiction with unforgettable passages:

Sin duda, la mejor parte ha sido la que nos hace reflexionar sobre el poder de las religiones, de los peligros del fanatismo y de las barbaridades que pueden llegar a cometer algunas personas en pos de sus creencias. The horror of the grotesque is always fundamentally the horror of empathy, which is to say a confusion of bodies. Evenson's achievement lies in intensifying and exploring the power and mystery of that experience." Cuanto menos miembros tengan más cerca estarán de alcanzar esa divinidad y más alto es el rango dentro de su jerarquía. Under the pen name B.K. Evenson, he applied his deft eye for the horrific to the video game franchise Dead Space, with the 2010 novelization, Dead Space: Martyr . He even lent his prowess to the Alien film series with 2008’s novel tie-in, No Exit. Pero con muchos altibajos. Se suceden muchas situaciones similares y repetitivas que han hecho que me costara ponerme a leer.How do you know the moment when you cease to be human? Is it the moment when you decide to carry a head before you by its hair, extended before you like a lantern, as if you are Diogenes in search of just one man?" Este libro con esta portada tan sumamente brutal llevaba ya tiempo pidiéndome a gritos ser leído y por fin le hice casito y lo elegí para la última conjunta del año con mi querida loca de los libros. The passivity of the woe is me protagonist is frustrating enough, but the reader does the materials no favors. The soporific voicing of the protagonists makes Ben Carson look like Pee Wee Herman on an espresso bender. What is worth pointing out that in all the seriousness of the book's tone and content, it contains plenty of humor. Kline is a private eye who never loses his cool, and the dialogue he engages in is straight of the hardboiled fiction of the past. aspects of the plot are so over the top that they're almost a farce but the whole thing absolutely works, and brilliantly! Every task is difficult, every decision morally complex and ambiguous. Character which can be perceived as sympathetic are really monsters, and monsters soon start to be perceived as sympathetic. Kline is thrown around, his physical strenght never in full potential, never allowing him an easy way out - but then so is the power of his opponents. The question of power is another fascinating theme of this surprisingly complex and multilayered work.

In its core, you could say that Evenson's Last Days is The Trial of horror literature, a Kafkaesque nightmare of being trapped within an elusive and surreal hierarchic machinery. That this machinery belongs to a cult which focuses and fetishizes amputations, doesn't really constitute the real meat of the story, please forgive my pun, but opens up a different layer, an additional disturbing platform for Evenson to playfully and metaphorically explore further social constructs such as religion – maybe even political or philosophical tendencies? My knowledge in both fields is highly limited, so, although I wouldn't be able to distinguish which, I'll trust my instincts on this one. I put off reading this novel for a while - Evenson wrote such great horror fiction, I figured a novel might leave me feeling wanting. I was wrong. Although it's a short novel (in effect, it's two novellas "joined at the hip" as noted in the introduction written by Peter Straub), it's effective and chilling in all the right ways. Nothing is fully explained, and a few important elements to the story remain ambiguous. The protagonist is an unwilling participant in the narrative, but after a certain point he's an unstoppable, inscrutable force. He doesn't stop after the narrative ends. We don't know when he stops. If. He received degrees from BYU (BA) and the University of Washington (MA and PhD). After leaving a teaching position at BYU, he held positions at Oklahoma State University, Syracuse University, and the University of Denver before being hired at Brown University. He was Professor of Literary Arts at Brown from 2003 to 2015. [4] BYU controversy [ edit ] Evenson's Ph.D is in both literature and critical theory, and his work is subtly philosophical, particularly influenced by continental philosophy. Many of Evenson's recurrent themes of virtuality and "sensation" being traceable to Deleuze & Guattari's Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Altmann's Tongue opened with an epigraph by Julia Kristeva; Dark Property featured quotes in untranslated German from Martin Heidegger; and several of Evenson's books have epigraphs from philosopher Alphonso Lingis. However, Evenson has stated that he intends any philosophical elements to be fully integrated into his fiction rather than promoting any particular viewpoint, and has argued that reading philosophical works directly is more rewarding than reading philosophy that is veiled as fiction. [7]

I first discovered writer Brian Evenson after reading his reprinted short story, "Any Corpse," in Gamut Magazine: Issue One. The story is a bizarre and dazzlingly original sci-fi/dystopian/horror that really defies explanation. It led me to seek out more of his work. This novel is just as original and it's actually rather startling in it's boldness and novelty. Last Days is about an undercover cop named Kline who's deep in depression after his hand is chopped off by a bad guy. He's then approached by a cult who believe that amputation brings one closer to God, and is forced to solve a murder in their midst. The book gets crazier and crazier as Kline falls deeper into the rabbit hole that is the Brotherhood of Mutilation. Last Days] is a novel that must be read by fans of mysteries, noir, and horror if they want to have an idea of what those genres can be. . . . Brian Evenson is the kind of writer who should be rediscovered by every generation." --Vol. 1 Brooklyn We're following Klein who, through an unfortunate series of events sensationally amputates his own hand which attracts media attention and as a result ends up entangled within a cult, the so-called Brotherhood of Mutilation. He is being held captive and is asked to solve a mystery, though the problem is that things work differently in this brotherhood. While trying to figure out how or even if the crime in question is committed, he is confronted with a really odd hierarchy and also loses a limb or two during his quest. Even though he rejects all this in the beginning, the more he delves into the workings of the cult, the more the cult demands of him and it costs him literally an arm and a leg. Attempting to find his way through a maze of lies, threats, and misinformation, Kline discovers that his survival depends on an act of sheer will.