That is why brotherhood members are in awe of Kline's " self-cauterizer" status. Non-existence. Existence is something impure to them and the path to enlightenment involves removing oneself from it. Sure, the beliefs of the brotherhood of mutilation seem a little goofy. There is obviously some of that, but it would be selling Evenson's novel short not to look any further. Now, the easy thing to say about Last Daysis that it denounces the irrational nature of religion.
And it gets a whole lot weirder from here. So, the mysterious callers eventually show up to his apartment, kidnap him and bring him to the compound of an amputation cult who measure their closeness to God by the number of limbs they lop off their body. They will not take no for an answer and only Kline will do. The protagonist is a man named Kline, an undercover cop who lost a hand to " a gentleman with a cleaver" during an investigation gone wrong, who is contacted out of the blue by private interests who require him to lead an investigation they refuse to tell him anything about.
It was originally a novella titled The Brotherhood of Mutilation published in 2003, which was expanded upon and turned into a novel in 2009. Last Daysis, at heart, a detective novel. It had the effect of a jolt of electricity to my boredom and cynicism. Last Days lives up to its reputation, beautiful people.
It is nonetheless one of the most enjoyable things I've read all year. Last Days is perhaps Brian Evenson's most celebrated novel and it isn't cosmic horror at all. I received several requests to include Evenson's work in horroctober although pigeonholing him into a specific genre would be inaccurate and dismissive of how complex and engaging his prose is. His stories are elusive, unfathomable and reputably violent, which are three qualities I appreciate in fiction. Kline, surely you're enough of an armchair philosopher to realize that everything is a reconstruction of something else? Reality is a desperate and evasive creature." (p.36)īrian Evenson is the celebrated author of books such as The Open Curtain, The Wavering Knife, Windeye and more recently The Warren, which was my first experience with his writing. "How can I be expected to solve a crime by looking at a reconstruction of it?"
0 kommentar(er)
