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    Last Days
    Last Days
    Last Days
    Ebook230 pages3 hours

    Last Days

    By Brian Evenson and Peter Straub

    3.5/5

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    To find a cult leader’s killer, a former detective must literally give up his body in this award-winning work of literary horror—“A dark treat” (AV Club). Nominated for the Shirley Jackson award and winner of the ALA/RUSA Best Horror novel, Brian Evenson’s Last Days is an intense, profoundly unsettling down-the-rabbit-hole detective noir. Kline is a former detective who’s cool head in the face of a brutal amputation makes him the perfect candidate to infiltrate a dark cult that believes amputation brings one closer to God. Kline is tasked with finding the cult leader’s killer. But to get to the truth, Kline must lose himself—literally—one body part at a time. Last Days was first published in 2003 as a limited edition novella titled The Brotherhood of Mutilation. Its success led Evenson to expand the story into a full-length novel. In doing so, he has created a work that’s disturbing, deeply satisfying, and completely original.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCoffee House Press
    Release dateFeb 1, 2016
    ISBN9781566894241
    Author

    Brian Evenson

    Praised by Peter Straub for going “furthest out on the sheerest, least sheltered narrative precipice,” Brian Evenson has won the World Fantasy Award, The International Horror Guild Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award. He is also the recipient of three O. Henry Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was a finalist for the Ray Bradbury Prize.

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    Reviews for Last Days

    3.5/5

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    • 3/5
      3.5 stars
      The bloodiest book I ever read. It's only fiction, though, and they do way worse things to animals"brought to life for food."
      This book is about an undercover cop who, against his wishes, becomes involved in a cult where the more of your limbs you chop off, the holier you are.
      1/2 a star for originality. You'd be surprised how many different parts of yourself you can chop off, and still live, as long as you CAUTERIZE lol.
    • 4/5
      Gory and gruesome, with a terrible momentum, held together by troubling philosophical musings on subtraction, identity, and fate.
    • 3/5
      This book is certainly a quick read--I read it in one day--and Evenson is a skilled writer, but I think I would have traded some of the nonstop violence and body horror for more character development and plot.
    • 1/5
      A crime has been committed in an underground religious cult. Kline, a one-handed detective, finds himself forced into solving the murder. Hard-boiled detective tale? Not really; Kline seems to miraculously come to conclusions without the reader being privy to any of his actual investigating. There’s nothing deeply satisfying or profound or even particularly original about a narrative that dishes out page after page of consummate violence at the hands of completely non-relatable characters. Plot? Characterizations? The point of the narrative? Despite having read this often-repetitive tale, there’s nothing to say other than it takes more than violence and shocking events to make a good story. This wasn’t scary, just repulsively violent . . . definitely not my definition of horror.
    • 5/5
      Strange, profoundly unique, and unsettling. There is some of Evensons peculiar dream-logic at work here, and the setting is bizarre to the extreme; a cult which is dedicated to self-mutilation and glorifies amputation. Here Evenson employs distinctly terse prose, which starts out enhancing the noir, detective-novel like plot, but begins to serve as an increasingly strong counterpoint to the convoluted directions the story moves in. I very much enjoyed the strange ride this story took me on. 5/5
    • 1/5
      So terrible I couldn't finish and returned it to Audible. Protagonist is an idiot among idiots. The "investigation" makes no sense at all, even if you are insane which, clearly, the amputation freaks are. They are incapable of bringing the set up to fruition. Why do they think he gives a shit about their depravity or the caste system that organizes it? The writing is meh and I just didn't want to listen to any more of the creepy narration (I think the guy was supposed to be conveying horror, but it just came through as breathless awe). Yuk.
    • 5/5
      Wow...where to start? Probably by saying that there will be some spoilers, so caveat lector. Last Days begins with Kline, a former undercover cop who recently had his hand cut off by a criminal, being engaged by a cult to investigate a crime that has been committed at their compound. The Brotherhood of Mutilation takes the biblical passage " if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off" literally and believe that the more amputations one has, the closer they are to God. They have chosen Kline for the job specifically because of his recent amputation. As Kline investigates, he discovers that the crime he has been tasked with solving hasn't been committed and that he is meant to be the fall guy.After fighting his way out of the compound, Kline falls in with the Pauls, a splinter group of the Brotherhood who are all called Paul and think it's only necessary to amputate one's right hand to demonstrate devotion. The leader of the Pauls convinces Kline that he will only be safe from the Brotherhood if he kills them first, thus setting the stage for a finale that makes a Tarantino film look tame in comparison.Evenson has created a strange, twisted, and utterly compelling story. Last Days is in many ways a critique of religions taken to extremes, and the lean prose gives the book a realistic feel that makes it all the more chilling. Ultimately, this is one of the most thought-provoking books I've ever read and it will continue to haunt--in a not unwelcome way--for a long time.
    • 4/5
      The Book Report: Kline is a PI who doesn't need clients to hire him so he can live. This is because he stole money from a man who was trying to murder him. To make sure the man couldn't murder him, Kline bought time by lopping off his own hand before killing the murder-minded malefactor.All of this takes place before we meet Kline, and is the very least awful, least repulsive, and most understandable stuff that happens in the entire 201pp of this book. Still interested? Then on we go.The book is two connected novellas, “The Brotherhood of Mutilation” and “Last Days,” comprising the adventures of Kline in the weirdest subculture that christian imagination has yet to throw up: the mutilates. These are two sects of people who amputate parts of their bodies to align themselves with scripture: “And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out: it is better for thee to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye, than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire...” Mark 9:47 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?Back to the book. Borchert, leader of the mutilates and a twelve (number of body parts amputated), has Kline kidnapped and forces him to investigate the death of Aline, the leader and founder of the mutilates (a seventeen, as we horrifyingly and disgustingly learn later in the story), despite handicapping Kline by refusing to let him, a mere one (the hand that's gone), meet with any witnesses or ask any questions or see any evidence. Now old hands in the groves of noir know that this is a set-up so classic that one wonders if those blinking neon signs are visible from the parkway. Kline certainly knows the danger he's in, and has in fact been boringly repetitious in his demands to be let go, let out, left alone. And then evil, evil Borchert gives Kline just enough to compel him, as a PI, to address the itch of curiousness. (Bonus points for following that reference back to its origin.)All ends in tears, as Kline oversteps the rope he's been given to hang himself in a nefarious plot to rid the world of a bad “holy” man; the body count mounts; and Kline doesn't escape without losing yet more body parts to the Brotherhood of Mutilation. Escape, however, he does; and then we launch into “Last Days.”Oh my heck. Kline wakes up in the hospital, missing an entire arm now, to find a blond man with no right hand (go look that Biblical quotation up again) determined to kidnap him again, this time taking him to meet Paul, leader of a schismatic amputee group called “The Pauls” because they're all blond men with amputated right hands. Paul, the leader, wants Kline to go finish the job he thought was done, ie killing the unholy holy man.Which, not to belabor the point, Kline doesn't want to do but does, in the process meeting an old friend, killing an old enemy, and causing a degree of mayhem only describable as Biblical. Kline is seen as the Mutilate Messiah, the burning brand that will cleanse the filth and degradation of error from the mutilate community.I have to stop now, or I will vomit.My Review: This part will be short. It took me three weeks to read this book because I couldn't do much at a time. It is grim, grisly, and gruesome; it is horrifying and horrible; it is strong, strong stuff for even seasoned veterans of de Sade's revolting works.Brian Evenson was raised as a Mormon; he was told by the Mormon Church that he would have to stop writing if he wanted to continue being a Mormon. I don't know what happened after that, but I know there are more books by Evenson to be read. And, I cannot believe I'm typing this sentence, I will be reading them.One day.Evenson's vicious critique of christian religion is spot-on with my observations of the religion's effects on the world over the past two millennia. A more potent force for evil has never been unleashed. From the christian thugs burning the Library of Alexandria to the Westboro Baptist thugs condemning fags to burn in hell because their narrow-minded bigot of a gawd hates them, this religion should, in a properly run world, be closely monitored as a hate group and membership in it should deny a person all civil rights.Only recommended for the reader who seeks out the dark side.
    • 4/5
      What to say.... I picked this one up due to the quality of the limited edition by Underland Press, beautiful book from an aesthetic point of view. Story wise this book certainly sets itself apart. Composed of two sections, "The Brotherhood of Mutiliation" and "Last Days", the novel tells the story of Kline, a detective who loses his hand. This results in Kine becoming an object of interest for a crazy "the more body parts I remove the closer I am to God" cult. While the story stars a detective there is no mystery to solve, it's basically just the evolution of Kline himself that takes center stage. For me, reaching the end wasn't a monumental relief or feeling of accomplishment, just a sort of "Well THAT happened" feeling. The plot felt more geared for a short story/novella (alas that's what the first half of this novel originally was) and I didn't feel too captivated by it. It isn't poorly written though, so it earns a place on my "Quick summer reads" list.
    • 5/5
      Kline, suffering from depressions after forcible cutting of his own hand is dragged against his will to investigate a murder of the head of a religious cult, one that follows the precept that you should cut of your hand if it offends you.Whoa this books intense, I could just not read it in one sitting. That's partly due to my feeling on amputation but mostly its just Brian Evensons extreme story and hard hitting style. Its almost pared down to the minimum, there are no long descriptions here, no out of place word (no surnames!). There is a perfect balance kept between the extremity of the story and the brotherly matter of fact tone. Its violent but never gratuitous, its characters deeply unlikeable but always interesting and never unbelievable. You are too dragged into the labyrinth of fleeting and changing facts unable to leave until till end. This is book is expanded from the "The Brotherhood of Mutilation" novella but it doesn't seem to suffer, thematically its suits being cut into a few sections, keeping you unsettled.

    Book preview

    Last Days - Brian Evenson

    INTRODUCTION

    What Are You Doing, Where Are You Going, Who Are You?

    by Peter Straub

    The first persons to mention the work of Brian Evenson to me were students in the Writing Division of the Columbia MFA program. Despite the handicap of never having taken or previously taught a course in creative writing, once a week during the month of October 2004, I conducted what Columbia called a Master Class. In our first class session, not long after I learned that the campus bookstore had not yet received the students’ copies of our text, I asked the fifteen people arrayed before me to name the writers they most admired, and boom, there it was, a whole new world: George Saunders, Jim Shepherd, Ken Kalfus, Gary Lutz, Brian Evenson, two or three others. Of the writers they mentioned, I knew the work of only Mary Caponegro, Lydia Davis, and Ben Marcus, the director of Columbia’s writing program. Over the next few days, I ordered a good number of books by these writers, among them Evenson’s Altmann’s Tongue. Soon the books arrived and I read them, or at least started reading them, at least sampled them. Some of the stories in the books Amazon faithful delivered to my doorstep really worked, I thought, really made the case for their author’s vision by maneuvering language and the old tools of character, situation, rhythm, and presentation into brilliant combinations and patterns. Some others seemed less successful, and a very few clearly had been written for an audience that did not include me. (Their resolute bad temper as prose narratives closed the door, but these same stories struck me as extremely interesting, even beautiful, if read as poetry. Apparently, a radical reinterpretation of basic genre markers had been put into play utterly without my noticing it. In the intervening four years, I came across examples of this process I found more congenial, chief among them being Rosalind Palermo Stevenson’s great story, Insect Dreams.)

    Evenson and Altmann’s Tongue, though, seemed to me to operate on another level altogether. In these stories, stoniness, obduracy, harshness, madness, and violence take wing and fly, released into the air by a completely original imagination. The early Evenson stories tend to stop you in your tracks with flat, declarative reports of monstrosity. Bodies litter the ground. Murders take place, again and again. A man chews his way out of his coffin. A man named Horst advises our unnamed first-person narrator to eat the tongue of Altmann, whom the narrator has killed, whereupon the narrator kills Horst, admires his handiwork, and (I think) turns into a crow. Former concentration camp barbers hang out together. Alfred Jarry and Ernst Jünger pop in and do things that might as well be called inscrutable. In a great story called Two Brothers, a dying religious fanatic attempts to amputate his own gangrenous leg but is murdered by one of his two sons, who cuts his eyes out of his head. Despite all the violence, which is somehow muffled by Evenson’s spectacularly matter-of-fact delivery, the feel of the comic is never distant from the enterprise. It is not entirely clear where the comedy lies, unless it is in the extravagance of the grotesquerie. Very little else can be said to be extravagant.

    In fact, an incredible amount is left out of these stories’ rather sketchy narratives—landscapes, contexts in general, back stories, and history in general. The stories take place in a barren world that offers very little of the unspoken consolation provided by fictions in which the reader sees the characters park their (brand name and dashboard description supplied) cars, walk up their paths past the pansies and daffodils, open the fridge and take out a (brand name supplied) beer, then walk past a coffee table and a corduroy sofa to flop down onto a Barcalounger and point the remote at the TV. None of that ever happens in Evenson’s fiction, unless the fridge contains a severed head and the corduroy is sticky with blood. The landscape inhabited by these Therons and Aurels and displaced writers is as stripped of particulars as the empty universe in which lovelorn Ignatz the mouse aimed bricks at the head of Krazy Kat. We might as well be in a desert. Also absent are the different, more profound consolations given by traditional narrative methods that establish tacit ground rules and expectations. Evenson was never at all interested in writing fiction that provided its own safety net. Without ever quite recognizing this habit, we enter fiction looking for the proscenium and the parted curtain, and when these comforting signs have been utterly erased, we readers have to deal with what turns out to be a productive anxiety. What does it say, to have violent acts depicted in such a thorough isolation, with such an absence of emotional affect? I don’t mean say in some vaguely philosophical sense; I mean: what does it say to the reader? One has the sense of a requirement without much specificity as to the required. This in itself evokes a powerful requirement, that of suspending judgment, of maintaining openness to whatever thoughts are evoked in the reading process.

    Before we move on to the book at hand, one other point should be made about Evenson’s early, very striking fiction, namely that it clearly is the work of a writer just coming into his stride. Despite a pervasive nihilistic despair, the atmosphere and flavor of youth penetrate everything. This writer is willing to try almost anything that occurs to him, as long as it falls more or less within the circle of his aesthetics. Going wild makes him feel good, and he believes that when they read the results other people will feel good, too. Experiments with compression and duration tempt him. There are passages in these stories that, no matter how seriously their author took them, how much he understood to be at stake at even the simplest word-to-word level, undoubtedly made him laugh out loud with pleasure.

    Throughout stories published over the six or seven years that followed Altmann’s Tongue, as well as in the more mature and developed work Evenson has been producing since Dark Property of 2002, he has been demonstrating, illustrating, and justifying a consistent faith in the operations of the kinds of extremity present in his work from the beginning. The Open Curtain, published in 2006, uses a character’s psychic disorder to push the novel into actual red-eyed, hell-for-leather narrative extremity, the only occasion I have ever seen in which a novel stops in its track and hunkers down to question its most elemental components. It’s beautiful. It’s stunning. It takes your breath away. The moment I read it, I knew that I had to steal it, and so I did, in the novel now sprawled out on my workbench/operating table, its little heart struggling to beat while its guts squirm beneath the editorial screwdrivers.

    Extremity radiates through every inch of Last Days, though you would never know it from the book’s odd, deliberate tone. This is a novel made of two novellas joined at the hip, where they share a common seam. When one ends, the other begins, and we are within a new fictional body, one that perfectly remembers all that took place in the body we just left. The narrative manner picks up with exactly the same gestures, i.e., minimal to none, and the same intention, to import into the Evensonian world a version of the hard-boiled detective novel, that its genre-specific stances, devices, and expectations might be upended, ignored, denied, and mocked with the straightest of faces.

    With its traditional concerns for the restoration of order and proper assignment of blame, its well-nigh universal depiction of its detective-protagonists as agents of reason, personal honor, and proper communal ethics as represented by the marginalized, the detective novel makes an odd vessel for representation of extreme acts and extreme psychic states. In perhaps the greatest and most probing of all pi novels, Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, the only psychic extremity on view—apart from Philip Marlowe’s accelerating loneliness and disgust—is the product of his frequent beatings and consequent spells of unconsciousness. You would have to go to one-off eccentrics like Harry Stephen Keeler and John Franklin Bardin to find in detective fiction anything faintly comparable to the unflinching oddness, morbidity, and perversity of Brian Evenson in full spate, as in Last Days.

    The novel begins with an after-the-fact recognition that, as far as our protagonist is concerned, everything was lost right from the beginning. It’s pretty striking, this first sentence: It was only later that he realized the reason they had called him, but by then it was too late for the information to do him any good. Only later . . . too late. The repetition lets us know that we really are in the Last Days, which begin at the very moment when it has become too late for intervention. In the Last Days, the apocalyptic circumstances gathering around us can no longer be reversed: Don’t start looking around for that Bible now. Sorry, it’s too late for herpicide. It is precisely this situation in which Evenson’s detective, Mr. Kline, more a nonhero or unhero than a hero or antihero, finds himself enmeshed in the novel’s first few paragraphs.

    Reluctant detectives, PIS who take cases on despite the feeling that they cannot end well, are far from uncommon in the mystery genre, but Kline takes this initial hesitation to its logical limit. Like most ruthlessly logical end-points, it turns out to be savagely irrational. He flatly refuses, a number of times, the job his callers are offering to him. He has two reasons for his refusals. Most days, Kline is too depressed to get out of bed. There is an excellent reason for his depression, namely that his left hand was severed by a foe, the gentleman with the cleaver, who watched stunned as Kline cauterized his stump on a hotplate before shooting him in the eye. The depression occupies the precise amount of time it takes him to adjust to his traumatic loss.

    The second reason Kline refuses the offer of a job is that he in no way needs the money. On his way out of the room he snaffled up several hundred thousand dollars. Not only does he not see taking the money as an act of theft, he regards it as a profoundly moral act in a kind of moral, biblical, old testament sense: an eye for a hand, and a bag of money thrown in. Being without forgiveness or mercy, utterly cold-hearted and completely without nuance, and steeped in a code of well-earned retaliation, this version of the moral life far outdoes the simple desire for justice and clarity that animates most fictional private detectives. PIS like Marlowe and Lew Archer seek a kind of historical understanding, familial and societal, of the various messes wished upon them by their clients; as far as we can see, Kline is incapable even of conceiving of, much less desiring, such an understanding.

    In his case, the familiar reluctance to take up a matter that seems too complex, too simple, or too draining to be rewarding is replaced by the detective’s outright and obstinate refusal. In the end, his callers, Ramse and Gous, both of whom are at least as mutilated as he, must drag him out of bed, stuff him into a car, and deliver him to the man who set them in motion, Borchert. At every opportunity, Kline tells his captors that he wants out, he wants to go home. They want him to investigate a great crime, the murder of their founder and Borchert’s only superior, Aline. Kline informs Borchert that he wishes to go home, but basically by persuading him to listen to a few of the details, Borchert gets him involved in the case. And then, protest though he does, he is involved, enmeshed. Much later in the story, Kline’s request to go home has been replaced by the frequently voiced desire never to be bothered again by these lunatic people, and Paul—the prime figure in a competing band of lunatics, the Pauls—informs him that to be left alone, all he must do is kill every member of the Gous-Ramse-Borchert faction. And so far into blood and madness has he wandered that he agrees to commit mass murder. In the second half of this novel, Kline does very little else but murder people: the section Last Days accumulates a great many sentences that end with variations on the phrase, and then he killed him with the cleaver. By Kline’s hand, nearly everyone in the Borchert faction and the Pauls perishes; a severed head, Borchert’s, has been dropped into a bucket and set on fire; behind the locked door of a burning building, the few who would have survived Kline’s bloody progress through their world wind up screaming for help. This is where strict adherence to logic gets you.

    Along the way, the plot and, often, the nature of the dialogue warp this insanely grim progress into pure dizziness. Betrayals are common elements in crime novels, so about halfway through The Brotherhood of Mutilation, Kline is subjected to a gigantic, central betrayal that is echoed by a series of smaller treacheries that spin off into yet more minor yet still homicidal betrayals between secondary or even tertiary characters. As this pattern suggests, repetition of events both large and small forms the spine of this book. Sometimes the repetition is a mirroring, sometimes it plays out as an inversion. If early in the book Kline is surprised to discover Ramse and Gous in his apartment, late in the book he will find Gous cowering there: the act of self-mutilation that brings everything in its wake is echoed, at the midway point of the book, by another greatly like it. This constant ticking away of rhyming events often fades back into the swirl of outrageousness, improbability, and brutality that accompanies Kline as he is dragged back and forth between the opposing camps, but when we are reminded again of its presence, the awareness of frequent rhymes has a formalizing effect. We cannot take these murders and dismemberments at face value, for they have in effect been set to music.

    In Last Days, people tend to speak in short, urgent bursts. They favor the single-sentence paragraph. This tendency evokes two contradictory modes, the hard-boiled and the comic, which inevitably ends with the comic tone undermining the echoes of Philip Marlowe and Mike Hammer. Here is a bit of dialogue with a drunken Ramse and Gous and their bartender:

    Ramse, said Kline. Trust me and listen.

    Ramse opened his mouth, then closed it again.

    Aline is dead, Kline said.

    Aline is dead? said Ramse, his voice rising.

    Is that possible? said Gous. How is that possible?

    Or not, said Kline. Maybe not.

    Well, said Gous. Which is it?

    What did you say about Aline? asked the bartender.

    Nothing, said Kline.

    Oh, God, said Ramse, shaking his head. Dear God.

    Aline is either dead or not, said Gous to the bartender.

    Be quiet, Gous, said Kline.

    Well, which is he? asked the bartender. Dead or not dead? There’s a big difference, you know.

    This knockabout minimalist ping-pong reminds me of Hemingway, but far more of Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, and even Joe Orton and David Mamet. It also seems deliberately to refer back to the Marx Brothers and the way the patter of 1930s vaudeville and burlesque comedians was represented in the 1950s by survivors like Bert Lahr and Ed Wynn, also by comedic teams like Abbott and Costello. We are not far from The party of the first part and Who’s on first?

    And let me just say this: cliff-hanger chapter endings, beautifully executed. It’s like watching a magician snatch away a tablecloth without disturbing a formal, full-dress setting for eight.

    This comedy, submerged but fully present, serves as an abiding corrective to the gravity of Last Day’s actual theme, which concerns the fanatical belief systems and zealotry encouraged by some organized religions. The mutilates who thrust unwilling Kline into contact with their fellows count their spiritual progress in the number of joints, digits, eyes, tongues, and limbs they have amputated. Having (initially) lost only a hand, Kline would be a lowly, standard-issue one, but for the respect he generated by cauterizing his own stump. For a time, it seems that self-cauterization may become a fad amongst the mutilates. Schisms, most earnestly to be avoided, threaten to destroy a hard-won accord. The faithful are as prone to valorized acts of self-injury as high school girls, and any extra suffering means another step closer to the divine. According to the original Paul, leader of the Pauls, he and the other two

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