INTERVIEW: Brian Evenson by Sarah Cadorette
Good Night, Sleep Tight
Brian Evenson
Coffee House Press
Interview by Sarah Cadorette
As a horror lover who grew up watching Hitchcock films and The Twilight Zone, I was eager to read Brian Evenson’s latest book, Good Night, Sleep Tight. Heralded as a profoundly terrifying writer by the likes of Carmen Maria Machado and R. L. Stine (be still, my Goosebumps-loving heart!), Evenson named this collection of stories as his favorite yet, and for good reason: these 19 stories engage the reader in questions that feel both prescient and timeless.
Evenson’s characters are humans and post-human consciousnesses who are making decisions that can alter the known world, or perhaps just the world as they know it, based on limited information and misinterpretations. Given the particular precariousness of our current cultural moment, pointing out the weight of these decisions is horrifying enough. In these stories, what follows is often even more petrifying.
This convivial master of horror sat down with me to discuss parenthood, reading faces, comedy in horror, what really scares him, and much more.
Sarah Cadorette: The most prominent theme that I saw across these stories was this idea of the inherent trust and authority that we give to familial relationships, particularly parent-child relationships. Is there a reason that so many of these stories focus on that relationship?
Brian Evenson: What I usually do is I write about half a book of stories, and at that point they're just stories that are, you know, a little random, but also talking to each other a little bit. And then when I get to a half to two-thirds, I start thinking about what things are coming up, what themes are reoccurring, what kind of ideas are happening, and and then I write much more intentionally in terms of trying to figure out what is it about this grouping of stories that makes it feel like a larger project.
Pretty early on, I started realizing that there were a lot of stories that were related to family, and to mothers, especially, and I began to lean into that. I think the earliest ones were the post-human stories, and then that led to things like the title story. The very earliest story in the collection is “Maternity”, which I wrote like 20 years ago. I kept on trying to decide if it belonged in a collection, and it never felt right. And then for this one, it just felt like, ‘Oh, here's the piece that completes [the collection] in a more realistic way.’ It's a little bit instinctual.
SC: Can I ask why you may have been thinking about families?
BE: You can, but I don't know that I have a good answer. I mean, I do have two parents who are both alive, but are aging. There is something about acknowledging the mortality of your parents, which can be kind of intense. And it also makes you think about your own mortality. On the one hand, I'm thinking about my parents and how they're moving out of the world, and then I have an 11-year-old son, and thinking about my relationship to him and the degree to which I'm either preparing him, or not, for the world. The thing about being a parent is it's a kind of enterprise that's doomed to fail in certain ways. You’re always going to make mistakes, you're always going to do things wrong. And there's something about that middle ground of being a parent and thinking about your own childhood and your own parents at the same time that ends up making these questions feel very, very rich.
SC: I was also noticing something that pops up a lot in these stories is the loss of bodily autonomy, which shows up a lot as voicelessness.
BE: That's something that a lot of my stories, in other books too, seem to have. There's that interest in what it means to be a body, or in a body. I think part of that is that I grew up Mormon. I'm an excommunicated Mormon, very happily so [laughs]. One of the big emphases in that culture is choice. You're responsible for your choices. You're responsible for your actions. I think for me, one of my big fears is being unable to act, unable to kind of move, or not being in charge of your body in some way. This lack of autonomy is really terrifying, and it's something I think about in a really different way now, both because of the way in which politics have moved, and also because of developments in AI. You start to think that there's a certain helplessness that gets preyed on almost in some ways, or you realize that, oh, I think I'm thinking an original thought, but it's the algorithm that is pushing me towards this.
SC: As I check in on my AI assistant who’s taking notes for me…
BE: I mean, I'm not opposed to AI. There's a number of stories in the book that are about post-humans or machine intelligences. And I think it's a really interesting question to ask: At what point does consciousness develop? What does this mean?
There was a theorist named Benjamin Bratton who came out to CalArts, and he talked a little bit about machines and interfaces and things like that. There was a moment in his talk where I just realized that if machines develop intelligence, we're going to be the last to know, because it's going to be an intelligence that is so distinct from from our own that we're not going to recognize it as such, and they probably don't recognize us as intelligent either. It's just a whole different way of composing. So the idea of recognition is something that's really fraught in some ways. I think that there's a lot of fear for all these characters. They’re worried that they don't know things. You know, the idea that they're trying to interact with something, but they're always holding themselves back because they can't quite see what they're interacting with. [The main character] in the title story has this notion of his mother, that she doesn't have it all, and trying to reconcile those things, trying to make sense of those things, and pushing himself to a point of crisis as a way of trying to to bring his very different memories of his childhood together.
SC: Around this idea of recognition, in some of your stories there's this theme of not being able to read a face. Especially the stories told from the perspective of a post-human consciousness, in which they’re trying to read the facial expressions of a human and there's some lack of understanding. And while reading your book, I was simultaneously reading a book about faces by Namwali Serpell.
BE: I like Namwali’s work a lot.
SC: She’s great. She cites this statistic in her book about how studies have shown that people only correctly identify other humans facial expressions about 54% of the time. I wanted to ask more about what it means to you when, even between humans who are supposedly good at reading each other, we have a lack of understanding in body language.
BE: I feel like so much of communication is body language and the way in which you respond to someone else physically. There's a philosopher named Emmanuel Levinas who talks about faces having an appeal, that what you're seeing is appeal through the face of the other, and that was interesting to me, but also this notion of misapprehension is really interesting to me, the fact that so often we misperceive what is around us. I mean, not only faces, but I think everything. We've all had these experiences when we think that there's something there, and it turns out to be nothing at all. And sometimes those experiences can unsettle us. Especially in the post-human stories, it's like they kind of know the code in terms of how faces work, but they don't quite know it. With the other stories, there is almost this level of trauma where people are always holding back and not sure what they're saying, not sure what they're expressing, or second-guessing themselves. One of the things we do all the time when we're communicating is we have that circuit, so you see how the person is responding to you and that lets you know, oh, I need to adjust my body language because they think I'm upset or something, or they think I'm really happy when I'm not happy. And so you're constantly in this process of correcting things.
The weird thing about the pandemic is, when everybody was wearing masks, it got even more variable. You know, it was really hard sometimes to tell what people were thinking or what they were doing under their masks and what it meant. So I think probably a little bit of the obsession with that comes from just living through that moment. I was teaching during the pandemic at CalArts, and so I literally went through a whole semester with a student before, at the end of class, outside, he took off his mask, and I realized he had a mustache. The whole time I'd been imagining him as clean shaven. It’s like I'd been interacting with a person who was not the same person that he was. And that happened all the time with Zoom as well. I was working in a television room for HBO, and I had daily meetings with four or five people who I'd never met in person. And then maybe two years after, I met one of them in person, and she was about a foot shorter than I thought she was.
SC: Well, as somebody who is shorter than everyone else assumes, please talk to me like a short person.
BE: That’s good to know. I’ll readjust my parameters.
SC: I’ve been thinking about the ways that some of the things that we've been talking about, like the discrepancies that are happening between what people are saying and what they actually mean, or what people are saying and what other people, or non-human entities, are getting out of that, are basically the same setup as a sitcom, where there's discrepancies in knowledge that lead to hilarity.
BE: I've often thought that the two genres that have the most in common are horror and comedy. So much depends on this disjunction between what you think is happening and what's actually happening, but they move, obviously, to really different effects. I do feel like there is something about the timing of comedy and the timing of horror that seems very similar. But the difference is in a sitcom, if you misunderstand something your coworker says, then by the end of the episode, it's going to be worked out, and everyone's going to be embarrassed, but then things go back to the norm. Sometimes in horror, if you misunderstand something, you end up dead.
I think a lot of my work is really funny. One of the people I read when I was really young was Kafka. My dad gave me the basic Kafka collection when I was 14, and I just really got into it. There are moments that are really, really funny, and there are moments that are kind of funny, but you feel weird about laughing at the same time. That kind of thing, where suddenly you start to feel implicated in what's going on, is really interesting to me as a writer as well as a reader.
SC: My favorite story in the collection is “The Rider.” It was the scariest story in the whole book to me, but I just kept thinking, if you remove the blood and the screaming, then it's kind of like a guy walking into a wacky sitcom scenario.
BE: I really like that story. And I do think it's funny, too. It's a very dark, quirky sort of humor, but it's definitely there. Someone is doing a graphic adaptation of that story, which I'm really excited to see. But yeah, it's a bizarre, weirdly funny story where you don't know what's happening or what's going on, [which] is something I love. I love exploring that and seeing where it can take me.
SC: Okay, I have a big, philosophical question for you.
BE: All right.
SC: Do you think that not-knowing can be just as horrifying as knowing?
BE: Yes. [laughs] I think there's a certain kind of person, and my son is really like this, [who wants] to know everything. My wife sometimes calls him the magpie, because he will lurk around and try to listen and accumulate information about whatever we're talking about. And he loves to do it in a way where we don't necessarily know. It's hard as a parent not to give cues for when you want to talk about something that you want to keep from someone, and if there are moments where we don't tell him something and he knows, it makes him just crazy. And I was like that as a kid, too. I tend to think it's always better to know, even if something is terrible.
If you're one of two children in a family, and one child is aware that things are not going well for the parents, and the other child is not, then the shock of your parents getting divorced is really strong for the one who was in blissful ignorance. So I always prefer to know, even if knowing is going to be painful. I feel like it's my fatal flaw as a human. But, it's impossible to know everything. There's so much that's just unknowable in the universe.
SC: So, do you just live in abject terror all the time?
BE: Weirdly enough, I'm a very happy person. And I think, actually, that may be one of the reasons that I write horror. It lets me play out all these worst-case scenarios, and so that's a way of processing some of that sense of the void or things that just are beyond our comprehension. You play out the scenarios in this somewhat safe way of doing it in fiction. There's something really satisfying about that.
SC: I was reading an essay by Raven Leilani about grief, in which she was talking about losing her father and brother and still going about her life, and how the the ordinariness of grief seemed to be inherent to it.
I was thinking about the settings of your stories, and how, even when they're set in the inside of a spaceship that has all of these rich people in cryogenic chambers, there is this familiarity to all of them. And, just as how it's a part of grieving, ordinariness might be necessary to horror.
BE: We're in such a weird moment, just in terms of where humanity is right now. I get the impression that there's a lot of stuff that feels like it's coming to an end, and we're not sure where things are going to go from there. Some of that has to do with the environment, and AI is certainly part of that, and there is a growing sense that the kinds of processes and governmental systems that we've used in the past may not work quite as well as time goes on.
The way I've thought about this with other books is that there are a lot of characters who feel like they have been through some kind of trauma, and it's not clear what the trauma is, but it is clear that they are not recovered. It's something that still echoes within them, even if they're continuing to go about their everyday existence. So that feels very present to me. I don't know where that comes from, exactly. I mean, I've lost various people in my life, so it may be tied to that.
I haven't thought about it in terms of grief, but I actually think that's a really good way to think about it. I think the best story to think about it that way is, “Imagine a Forest”, where he is making a decision, and he knows that no matter what the decision is, it's going to be terrible, and he's taking on the weight of everything as he does that. To be honest, that's probably my favorite story in the collection, because it does something different than other stories I've written.
SC: Okay, my final question is: are you scared of twins?
BE: I am. I am scared of twins. People used to ask me this. My previous girlfriend used to ask me, “Why are you afraid of twins?” And the answer I'd always give is because there's two of them.
…I’m not really scared of twins, in real life, but there is something really curious about [how] twins both seem like separate people and not at the same time. So there's something that thematically I can play with that really ties into doubles more than twins. I don't have anything against twins. There's something about doubling, characters that seem to reflect one another, or characters that seem to almost be taking one another over, that's really interesting to me. The very first class I had in graduate school when I was at University of Washington was called, “The Doppelgänger,” and it was all about doubles in literature. I feel like that's something that has stayed with me throughout my writing career. So there's a lot of doubles or twins, or a lot of moments where one character swaps identities with another in my fiction as a whole, and definitely it's here in this book as well.
SC: I thought it was interesting, especially with the overlapping theme of parenthood and children, because so many people want that. They're like, ‘Oh, I want to recreate myself.’
BE: That seems like a very bad idea, but yes, people do want that. I understand both the desire to want to do that, and I also understand that if I was to do that, it would be terrible. The whole cloning thing is so intriguing [because] this thing has your same DNA, but because of the differences in RNA and proteins and things like that, it wouldn't be exactly like you, but it would be enough like you to be weird.
SC: That's actually the best endorsement of parenthood that I think I've heard.
BE: I think with parenthood, you're like, all right, I want someone who's kind of like me, but now there's this other person I'm going to do this with, and it will keep [them] from being too much like me. And so that kind of works. I really like having three kids, and I really like being a parent, but I'm also constantly aware of my fallibility as a parent.
SC: I think that’s a really healthy place to be.
BE: I hope so, yeah.
