This is not a review. Having finished Brian Evenson’s A COLLAPSE OF HORSES (Coffee House Press, 2016), I find myself thinking about how much or how little footing writers can grant their readers. A great many writers, especially genre writers, aim to provide a good amount of footing for their readers, by which I mean that even in the most bizarre moments of a character’s encounter with the unknown, the reader is comfortable with their knowledge that what the character sees is more-or-less what is before him or her. The character’s experiences are true. Yet, with Evenson’s work, I find that footing not just minimized but often removed completely. This isn’t dream-logic, where the connections between moments are subconscious, but rather a wholesale implied state of disreality, where it’s impossible to understand what is real for the characters at all. Can a story succeed when it’s impossible to know this truth? Apparently so, as Evenson does so here time and time again. Funny enough, one of the most straightforward tales in the book is “A Seaside Resort”, the story I selected for AICKMAN’S HEIRS. The story had to be more concretized to make it hew closer to Aickman. It’s fascinating stuff. I know not everyone reading this sort of liminal fiction is a writer, but speaking as a writer it’s of the utmost value to me to read a work that makes me reconsider my tools and how I might deploy them differently. Fiction that reminds or clarifies just what the written word can do. That sort of fiction you keep close, bury it inside you in hopes one day it will sprout into something wondrous.