While this collection is less psychological horror than the previous-stories like Come Up being an exception with a narrator who realizes how his every action following his wife’s disappearance makes him look increasingly guilty-Evenson’s storytelling is marvelous, leading you through his stories as if down a dark passageway with only the light from a match to see.

This collection is an excellent example of the many avenues speculative fiction can travel hand in hand with horror. A prosthetic leg can come alive and devour your enemies, a strange tree might steal your face and wear it around on a path of devastation, there are eerie cities, portals, a genocide by strange alien visitors, monsters, ghosts, and very often here, the planet being rendered unsustainable for human life. And the shrieks are torn out of you from so many different and imaginative angles. With Song for the Unraveling of the World only 2 years old I worried this would be like a B-sides collection but it is just hit after hit. If you are looking for frights, Evenson delivers in droves. With only minimal world building that often leaves your imagination to brew its own terror and prose sharp enough to bleed you dry, The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell is a wickedly fun cavalcade of dread. The most common way in this collection is end of humanity scenarios and frightful futures of a decaying planet. With already a fantastic back catalogue of books and stories, it feels like sheer mastery that he delivers a seemingly inexhaustible variety of fresh ways he finds to unsettle you. Brian Evenson’s latest collection of short stories, The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell, thrives on positioning it’s characters in this sort of suspension above doom in a wide variety of horrific and spooky situations. Sure, every era has it’s apocalypse criers, but even paying marginal attention to the news lately has one wondering if we have already crossed the precipice of doom and just hang over our doom like that cartoon coyote chasing the roadrunner, suspended in the air so we can all mock him for his self-inflicted mistakes before taking the plunge. And what can be more chilling then the idea that humanity itself may all succumb to a ghastly demise. Horror often thrusts your gaze into the path of oncoming doom, be it a chilling end to everything or a fate that makes death seem like a mercy. ‘ The World is a hell because we have made it so.’

The Open Curtain by Brian Evenson