Last Days

How do you begin to describe Last Days? Ostensibly, it's a detective novel about a private eye named Kline, who is just beginning to recover from the violent loss of his hand when he is pulled into a bizarre investigation at the compound of a unique religious cult. But while Last Days plays with a lot of detective story tropes, it's as much visceral body horror and pitch-black satire of religious fanaticism as noir - imagine The Maltese Falcon crossed with The Ruling Class - Criterion Collection as directed by David Cronenberg, and you approach the uniqueness of what Evenson's created here. The book will inspire any number of reactions from a reader - there are parts of fascinating depth, and some parts that play as some surreal twisted joke that only the sickest will laugh at, while others are pure farce - and that says nothing of the violence and horror that permeate the book's pages. Last Days moves like an absolute rocket, and if you think things are strange in the first half, just wait until Paul shows up. Or, you could wait until the cleavers start coming back out. To know too much is to ruin the fun, which is why I beg you to avoid Peter Straub's introduction until after you finish the book - it's a fascinating discussion, but it discusses the entire story, including the ending. So let me just say this about how good Last Days is: I barrelled through it last night, went to bed, woke up this morning, and restarted it. It's that good, and I can't wait to get my hands on more of Evenson's work.

Last night I did something I rarely ever do: I decided to read before I went to bed. This backfired, of course, when I decided to stay up until I finished the book and then talk about it with a friend, which then put me to bed a few short hours before I had to be up for work. This is why I do not read before bed. The book was Last Days by Brian Evenson, which is actually two novellas placed together to form a book. This is important, because though they have a lot of similarities, they differ in quality. The Brotherhood of Mutilation (henceforth referred to merely as Brotherhood because I don't want to type that out over and over again) is the first novella and it also the weakest. The beginning starts out fine, fine enough that I bought the book based on the excerpt. From there it gets a bit wonky. I am not the biggest fan of third person limited, which is what both novellas are written in, mostly because I feel that first person works just as fine-and for a while I thought that first person probably would have served it better, but I gave that up because it would not have made much of a difference. The problem I had was how the novel jumped around a lot, which can be attributed to just how often the main character, Kline, was drugged or knocked out. It had a disorienting affect on me and left me confused at points, but that also may have something to do with me reading it so late in the evening when I am about to drift off to sleep. I have no major complaint for Brotherhood other than that, but I do have a minor one and the book is not to blame for it. Reading reviews for Last Days, most have one thing in common: they talk about how disturbing and disconcerting the book is, especially Brotherhood. This is actually one of the things that brought the book to my attention in the first place. Unfortunately, Brotherhood, which deals with self-mutilation and dismemberment, was lacking. To me at least. I just felt it tame. Not fault at all to the book or author, but I would give a dirty look to those reviews and their weak stomachs. Last Days, the second novella (huzzah, confusion!), actually has not a single complaint from my direction. I felt it was the strongest of the two, taking elements found in the first novella and basically doing it better. I bitched about third person limited in Brotherhood and I can admit that I was wrong to have thought it would have been just as well in first person. I feel that Brotherhood did not pull it off all that well, but I can happily proclaim that Last Days went above and beyond with it. There are few books that pull me in as well as Last Days did and it was because of Evenson's wonderful use of the limited perspective that it was accomplished. I could feel the frantic pacing and Kline's frustration and that is what made it great. Last Days is also the disturbing novella, I quickly found out, but not in the same way as you would expect from a novel that features self-mutilation. In the end, Last Days is a de

This story was anything but ordinary. At times it seems to be trying too hard to be weird, but it will peak your interest. If your into the strange and unusual, you'll like it. If you like Edgar Allen Poe, you'll probably like it as well.

I had a great time reading this book. For a short read the characters are rich and the story itches you to read on. Not for everyone but I'm a huge fan.

In Brian Evenson's LAST DAYS, Kline is a mutilated detective (lost his hand in a shadowy, never explained previous case) recruited/kidnapped by an underground religious cult of self-mutilators to solve a murder. Hardbioled meets grand guignol. Religious cults are easy targets, of course, but Evenson knows this and goes so over the top with the detailed descriptions of the cult's fetish and the violence (the mind-numbing casework detail of a detective novel becomes cold, detached passages of amputations and cauterizations) that it becomes, in an odd way, personally affecting. Kline as an everyman slowly going to pieces at the seams (and not at the seams). LAST DAYS is fast, funny, and disturbing.