Last Days, by Brian Evenson

This is a tough one.

I had heard good things about Brian Evenson. I hear good things about a lot of writers, but I know that Peter Straub is a big Evenson fan. That carries an enormous amount of weight with me. I not only trust Straub's integrity, I know he has rare good taste in literature. So I took a chance and jumped right into Last Days.

Last Days is a grisly and grueling example of what some call Body Horror. The plot deals with a detective who has his hand amputated in the course of a case. He self-cauterizes the stump of his wrist on a hotplate so he can complete his job.

Cut to some time later. The now ex-detective, Klein, is moldering away in depression and alcoholism. Klein is contacted from a mysterious source and is requested to come to a meeting. His impulse is to ignore it, but the parties become terrifyingly persuasive. Klein is inexorably pulled into an ugly world of a cult that worships amputation. There seems to be no escape for Klein, and the violence and disfigurement grows increasingly horrifying.

I respected Last Days more than I actually liked it. The grotesque elements of the novel didn't bother me so much as the cold, clinical style in which it was written. In that way it reminds me a bit of Ballard's Crash. Last Days is like a really outré, low budget Croneberg film. Or perhaps a book by a more coherent William Burroughs. That kind of thing always seemed pretentious to me. Writers like Brett Easton Ellis or Dennis Cooper affect me the same way.

I may read Brian Evenson again, but I am in no hurry.

Written by Mark Sieber