She reposed herself alone at some distance from the roadway, the
rucksack shucked from her back. Removing the stones from her pockets,
she stacked them beside the rucksack. She wrapped her arms around
her knees, stared out, gauged the decline of the light. Below the sun
the lower sky was split in twain by a bleared thread of smoke, a false
horizon. She watched the split-line bleed, spread, spartle.
 
[Evenson’s] short but heavy novel, Dark Property, could be read as a
kind of precursor to Cormac McCarthy’s own postapocalyptic novel,
The Road. —Peter Markus, The Brooklyn Rail
 
. . . an extended crawl through a terrain of utter damnation. . . .
[H]ere McCarthy’s sprawling Western lyricism has been replaced
by a tight almost Beckettian absurdism, like Blood Meridian boiled
down to an oozy ichorous syrup. Evenson’s world is far stranger; if
McCarthy tilts occasionally into the surreal, Evenson is only really at
home there. —Ben Ehrenreich, The Believer
 
Brian Evenson’s Dark Property evoked terror so well that I found one
of the opening sequences all but unreadable. . . . I could not read more
than a page at a time because of anticipating what could happen . . .
—Kathryn Hume, Aggressive Fictions
 
In Dark Property . . . readers enter a state of incomplete and uncertain
apprehension somewhat reminiscent of a young child’s.
—Scott Abbott, Open Letters Monthly
 
 
About the Author:
 Brian Evenson is the author of a dozen and a half books of fiction, most recently The Glassy Burning Floor of Hell and Song for the Unraveling of the World. His fiction has won the Shirley Jackson Award, the World Fantasy Award, the IHG Award, and the ALA-RUSA Award, and has been a finalist for the Ray Bradbury Prize and the Edgar Award. His translations include work by Manuela Draeger, Antoine Volodine, Gerard Macé, Jean Frémon, Jacques Jouet, Claro, Christian Gailly, Jules Romains, and David B. He has been a finalist for the French-American Foundation Translation Prize three times. He lives in Valencia, CA and teaches at CalArts.