Last Days

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Especially since it’s possible, after all, to completely exchange the religious reading of the two sects with a political reading, which could focus on a contrast between a more collectivized, communistic ideology and a pseudo-individualistic ideology like capitalism. Evenson not only does a great job at showing the gradual loss of sanity that anyone would understandably go through if thrown into this world, he also maintains a really singular atmosphere. Turns out, that was the easiest, and most normal incident that he goes through following that moment. I’d wager it’s something along the lines of - it’s a slippery slope from religious zealots to fanatical death cult.

As Kline becomes more deeply involved with the group, he begins to realize the stakes are higher than he previously thought. However, he’s also very human and his inquisitiveness, which grows with each painful experience he’s forced to endure or witness, is contagious. Brian Evenson’s Last Days is simultaneously one of the greatest send-ups of the hardboiled detective novel and of the best celebrations of the brutal, violent, and mysterious nature of the genre. These are spaces that, more and more, become his spaces, as the outside world is increasingly dangerous to and suspicious of him.

Lisp and Low Voice do not take no for an answer and Kline finds himself being transported to the compound of the “Brothers of Mutilations,” a religious cult founded on the premise that chopping off your body parts makes you holey holy and makes God happy. But the leap from this conclusion to the actual physical removal of a hand itself is perhaps more difficult to explain. Kline is a badass noir hero - after having his hand cut off, he used a hot plate to cauterize the wound, then blew his attacker's brains out.

He refuses in part because of the cloak and dagger nature of the summons, and in part because he has no need of money. The book gets crazier and crazier as Kline falls deeper into the rabbit hole that is the Brotherhood of Mutilation. In 2016, nonprofit independent publisher Coffee House Press reissued Last Days, featuring an introduction by horror novelist Peter Straub.The curious power structure in the compound, where the man who has the least means of moving is the most powerful, is another. Finally, I want to give a shout out to Maciek and his spectacular review without which I never would have picked up this book, and that would have been my great loss. And what a novel it is, a perplexing ride that can leave you breathless, a book about bodies and spaces, about religion, doubt and a detective you’d better not mess with.

As in The Trial, the two men eventually show up at Kline's place, and it becomes clear that he has no choice in this matter; he's dragged into a situation which is so bizarre and riddled with ill logic and seemingly unsolvable.

As I’ve already noted in my review of his novel The Open Curtain, his writing draws both on the strengths of genre fiction, which include a certain reduction of means and a suspenseful story that draws the reader in, the kind of book that blurbs on the jacket will label “addictive”, and on the strengths of literary fiction, which include a high precision of style and an economical but powerful use of tropes and symbols.