A Collapse of Horses

A Collection of Stories

By: Brian Evenson

Narrated by: Neil Shah

A provocative collection of literary horror stories by one of America’s most acclaimed and inventive writers whose unique prose “can be soul-shaking” (New Yorker).

“Preoccupied with the uncanny, the unsettling, and the unknowable” (The Los Angeles Review), Evenson’s seventeen stories in this collection “evoke Kafka, some Poe, some Beckett, some Roald Dahl, and . . . Stephen King” (The New York Times Sunday Book Review).

Whether it’s a stuffed bear’s heart that beats with the rhythm of a dead baby, or the city of Reno that keeps receding to the east no matter how far you drive, or a mine on another planet where the dust won’t stop seeping in, the astonishing stories in A Collapse of Horses range from horror to science fiction to noir and all the weird, edgy places in between. Wherever Evenson takes you in his minimalist horror, he “doesn’t shy away from blood, murder, apparitions, surrealism, dreams, torture, and weirdness, but he also refrains from letting those elements take over” (Electric Lit).

©2016 Brian Evenson (P)2022 Audible, Inc.

Terrific uncanny horror

I didn’t love a song for the unraveling of the world, but I really, really liked this one. The common themes of uncanny and dread really stand out throughout all of these stories, making this one of my favorite short story collections I’ve ever read. Will definitely listen again at some point!

Brian’s 1-of-a-kind voice

I’m addicted to this author. If you want something weird and uncomfortable, and adventurous, and macabre in the extreme… you have found it.

Another amazing collection of stories

The thing with Brian Evenson is you either love the weirdness of this his stories or don’t. He sits the reader down into bizarre worlds and situations and lets the obscurity of it all sink in. The narrator on this collection does a fantastic job of bringing them all to life.

It was ok

There were a few good stories that kept me interested and quite a few that didn’t quite keep my attention.

Ambiguous Territory

Brian Evenson’s A Collapse of Horses was my introduction to the author, and it accomplished one of the best things a book can do: it made me immediately go out and buy another book by the same writer.

That alone says a lot.

The collection is made up of short stories that live somewhere between psychological horror and something stranger and harder to pin down. Most of the stories land slightly above the typical horror anthology standard. Evenson has a real gift for creating interesting characters and dropping them into unsettling or unusual circumstances. Often the premise itself is enough to keep you engaged, even when the story begins drifting into more ambiguous territory.

And ambiguity is really the defining feature of the collection.

Evenson has a noticeable fondness for vague endings—sometimes deliberately unresolved, sometimes so abrupt that they almost feel like the story stops mid-thought. That doesn’t make the stories bad, but a few of them left me feeling less satisfied than I hoped, still wanting to know what happened next. For readers who enjoy tidy conclusions, that tendency might be frustrating. For others, the lingering uncertainty may be exactly the point.

Where the collection truly shines is in the story “Click.”

“Click” isn’t just the standout of the anthology—it’s one of the best short horror stories I’ve read in a long time. The story leans heavily into a kind of liminal-space horror, where the rules of the world feel slightly off, like a dream that refuses to behave logically. The physics of the space itself feels unstable, almost feverish, and the tension comes not from overt scares but from the creeping realization that something about the world no longer makes sense.

The protagonist is compelling enough to anchor the surreal events around him, and the story keeps you engaged the entire time, constantly wondering what is actually happening and where it’s all going. It’s the kind of story that feels unsettling long after you’ve finished it.

Even with the occasional frustratingly vague ending, A Collapse of Horses succeeds at what the best horror collections try to do: it leaves an impression. Some stories linger more than others, but the atmosphere and ideas are strong enough that I’m already interested in exploring more of Evenson’s work.

And in the end, that might be the best review a book can get.