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The Open Curtain
Reviews
- Edgar Award Finalist
- International Horror Guild Award Finalist
- Paterson Fiction Prize Finalist
- Utah Book Award Finalist
- Time Out New York Best Books of the Year
- Believer Book Awards , Reader Survey List
Peter Straub:
“A stunning book.”
Time Out New York:
“One of the year's creepiest and most resonant thrillers.”
Washington Post Book World:
“[A] shocking novel of murder and madness set partly in the inner sanctum of a Mormon temple. . . . As the action progresses, Evenson compellingly spells out what it means to be a truly lost soul.”
Carolyn Kellogg of Los Angeles Times Jacket Copy at The Millions:
“Excellent, gripping . . . The first book since Nancy Drew to get me bouncing on my bed, literally shouting at the girl in peril.”
Providence Journal:
“This wonderfully strange, mesmerizing, eerie page-turner . . . will deliciously freeze your blood.”
Believer:
“Virtuosic . . . the product of a singular and radiant imagination.”
Review of Contemporary Fiction:
“Pushes beyond craft and genre into a gothic mindbender of faith, violence, and madness.”
Catalyst:
“Harrowing . . . this novel is David Lynch's Blue Velvet staged behind Provo's white picket fences.”
Brooklyn Rail:
“Hair-raising . . . by a disturbing and unsettling entwining of genres, Evenson both deconstructs his own belief system and offers the reader two versions of terror.”
Time Out Chicago:
“Though it centers around a murder, it would be wrong to describe The Open Curtain as a violent book. It's more an exploration of the ways violence and religion are tied.”
Mid-American Book Review:
“Evenson combines the best of beautiful prose, complex and engaging characters, and a suspense-filled story to keep the reader engaged until the end.”
EconoCulture:
“A tremendous, harrowing novel; an utter pleasure to be beguiled and terrified by.”
Rain Taxi:
“Dark and psychological . . . Evenson makes a devastating case that the same elements of a religion that makes one devotee a faithful and obedient member of a community—repressive rules of behavior, isolation from nonbelievers, unquestionable doctrines—can produce despair in another.”
Magill Book Review:
“A nightmarish tale of insanity and violence.”
Publishers Weekly:
“A contemporary gothic tale about the apocalyptic connection between religion and violence.”
Booklist:
“Uncompromising . . . [a] convincing portrayal of a disturbed young man pushed to the breaking point by social isolation and religious extremism.”
Kirkus Reviews:
“A very serious, very cold look at the issue of violence in Mormon history and its pernicious effect on a modern life.”
Juneau Public Libraries:
“[A] twisted and chilling modern gothic . . . Evenson's specialty is slow, creeping horror, and fans of Poe and Kafka will find much to enjoy here.”
Angela Stubbs, Bookslut:
“Explores violence in a way that is unsettling and even addicting for the reader.”
Praise for Brian Evenson
London Times:
“A writer of disconcerting power.”
New York Times Book Review:
“A backwoods Bret Easton Ellis.”
Believer:
“One of the most provocative, inventive, and talented writers we have working today.”
The Stranger:
“The bloodfests that sometimes ensue are metaphoric as miniature Francis Bacons. . . . [Evenson's] fiction is repulsive but more ‘moral' that anything than comes from Brett Ellis or A.M. Homes.”
George Saunders:
“There is not a more intense, prolific, or apocalyptic writer of fiction in America than Brian Evenson.”
Samuel R. Delany:
“Like Poe's, Evenson's stories range from horror to humor; a similarly high critical intelligence is always in control. We read them with care, with our guard up, only to find they have already slipped inside and gotten to work, refining the feelings, the vision, the life.”
Peter Straub:
“Whenever I try to describe the resonant and disturbing literature that Horror, whether acknowledged or not, lately has found itself capable of producing, I find myself alluding to Brian Evenson, along with Graham Joyce and a few others: of these splendid younger writers, Evenson places himself furthest out on the sheerest, least sheltered narrative precipice—narrative at the far edge of narrative possibility—where he can speak clearly and plainly of loss, violence, and pain.”
Rikki Ducornet:
“Readers of Ballard and Burroughs will exult in [Evenson's] brilliant, rageful, necromantic and philosophic swarm of nightmares and lingering fevers.”
Bradford Morrow:
“Brian Evenson is one of the most distinguished, probing, and courageous writers of his generation. His work has never flinched from addressing the most difficult, dangerous issues.”
Time Out Chicago:
“One of his generation's most arresting, invigorating and yes, frightening writers.”
BookForum:
“Packed with enough atrocities to give Thomas Harris pause. . . . Not many writers have the imagination or the audacity to transform what looks like salvation into an utterly original outpost of hell.”
New York Press:
“Ma[k]e[s] Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian look like a stroll in the park . . . [Evenson's] tales of blood, supernatural vengeance and hallucinatory heat [are] like Garcia Marquez on really, really bad acid.”
Asimov's Science Fiction:
“Evenson inhabits even his villains so emphatically that we never see them as alien, but as all-too-human. . . . we need artistically rich [work] like this to uncover the roots of such cruel abnormalities.”
Deseret News:
“[Evenson] is a literary version of Stephen King, trading more on psychology and character than gore. Like Poe. Like Raymond Carver writing up the Addams family.”
Publishers Weekly:
“The spirit of Edgar Allan Poe inhabits (Evenson's] violent and mysterious stories that recall not only that master of the perverse but also the seamier side of the nightly news. . . . they are told in such a compelling fashion that one reads not to understand but merely to witness.”
Meridian:
“One of the most gifted writers of his generation.”
Iron Horse Literary Review:
“Evenson's vision is compelling; his prose, forceful. His characters are seekers who look with open eyes into the dark.”
Rain Taxi:
“Evenson's stories read like evangelical sermons that end in Jonestown massacres. . . . In his troubling accounts of human nature, one will not find that nothing is sacred, but rather that there is an immense holiness in the act of realizing that each individual is contaminated, and that no one is truly contained.”
Green Integer Review:
“Very few contemporary novelists can take a narrative fiction into such dark and ominous places and still give the reader a plot line that keeps him turning the page in the proverbial manner of a best-seller.”
Jacket:
“You wade out cautiously in the tide pool, and squirm with queasy delight as the muck caresses the bottoms of your feet and climbs up your legs. Then Evenson has the back of your neck in his grip, your head is shoved underwater, your eyes are staring and bulging in the subterranean world and the brine is eating at you. When he drags you up, your first breath of air is so deep and ragged that it cuts at your lungs like a rusty blade.”
Angela Stubbs, Bookslut:
“Evenson writes stories that make you want to sleep with a light on. His work is crafty and creepy and intriguing.”
David Gutowski, Largehearted Boy:
“Melding religion, drugs, and horrific violence, Evenson . . . has created a Mormon Holden Caulfield who literally has blood on his hands.”
Matthew Tiffany of Condalmo at Elegant Variation:
“Evenson walks a fine line between use of the usual conventions of the ‘thriller' genre and a more nuanced, deeply thought narrative in such a way that the oft-used thriller narrative devices come as a welcome surprise, a genuine thrill.”
Lance Olsen, Now What:
“Engaging, accomplished, and consequential . . . Evenson's fiction rhymes with that of very few authors, living or dead. It perhaps shares the fierce and absurd stare of a Kafka, the existential and textual undoings of a Beckett, the critifictional and paraliterary engagement with its materials of a Delaney. But at the end of the day it is all its own sprightly menaced thing, and one of the most important projects currently being undertaken.”
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