Brian Evenson Will Mess With Your Head

Brian Evenson’s first book, a story collection titled Altmann’s Tongue, came out in 1994. It was not widely reviewed. The few notices the book did receive in the media ranged from the curious, to the baffled, to the outright disturbed. “In a capsule review, the Los Angeles Times nervously conceded that ‘there is a talent here,’ albeit, ‘an eldritch one,’” noted Ben Ehrenreich in an essay about Evenson’s work that appeared in The Believer. One reviewer, though, an anonymous one, was unequivocal in their dismay over the book’s violent content, which included dismemberment, mutilation, insects placed in the mouths of corpses, and defenestration, among other indignities. “I feel like someone who has eaten something poisonous and is desperate to get rid of it,” wrote the nameless critic. This particular review would prove enormously consequential for Evenson’s career—indeed, for his life. It did not appear in a journal or a newspaper. It was not even published, technically. Rather, it was sent to Evenson’s employer, a university, triggering an inquiry that would lead to his dismissal. The nameless critic was a student at Brigham Young University, the flagship institution of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, located in Provo, Utah, where Evenson taught for the good reason that he was a devout Mormon, raised in the faith his whole life. The student wrote to the university out of concern that a violent, disturbing book like Altmann’s Tongue was not the sort of literary work that good Mormon professors should be pursuing. Over the course of the long and involved inquiry process, Evenson was presented with a choice. If he wished to continue working at BYU, he would have to stop writing books like that. If he didn’t stop, he would have to leave.

Read it at Defector ↗

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