Brian Evenson’s fantastic new collection of stories, Good Night, Sleep Tight, is easy to recommend. It’s a showcase of classic Evensonesque genre-merging, with stories that tie horror to fantasy and SF, and tones and structures that resemble fairy tales. These nineteen stories address several themes: escape and loss, free will and destiny, curses and revenge. But the most overarching subject studied by this collection is the relationship between parents and children. The title itself evokes images of books a parent might read to their child just before lights out, only one full of stories that will keep them both from sleeping.
No doubt Freud would be delighted at the uncanny bonds that the families in these tales display; the title also hints, after all, at a blurring of the lines that separate our interpretation of dreams and reality. Take for example “The Thickening,” whose protagonist, Greppur (Evenson’s characters rarely have boring names), has a disturbing sleep life. As a child, he goes into his parents’ bedroom on the bad nights.
“What is it?” his mother would whisper. “Another bad dream?”
“No,” he would whisper back.
But his mother did not understand that what he meant by this was not that there had not been a bad dream. What he meant was that it hadn’t been a dream at all. That it had been real. (pp. 63-4)
The innocence of a boy sleeping with his parents after a bad dream is twisted by the possibility of him trying to escape reality. When Greppur sleeps on his own, there’s sometimes a thickening in the air, a nebulous formation of something that’s observing him. There’s no direct violence, just quiet terror.
Though this scenario is unique, all the hallmark setups for a coming-of-age story are there. It’s a trap! In case you’re new to the presence of the uncanny in Evenson’s stories, let me clue you in: It doesn’t get better. When Greppur is a college student and his roommate leaves, the presence comes back. Later on in his life, after twenty-five years of marriage, his wife dies. He falls asleep alone for the first time in decades, having completely forgotten about what could happen.
It was just like it had been when he was a child. He had been dreaming that the air had become thick around him so that it was hard to breathe and even hard to move. He had come gaspingly awake, only he wasn’t sure if he was awake or just dreaming he was awake. Was there time to get up and go find his parents’ room? But no, he suddenly realized with something akin to wonder, I’m not a child anymore. His parents had been dead for many years. His wife too was dead, and now he was alone.
“Greppur,” the thickening in the air crooned. “Greppur?” (p. 65)
This story plays with the night terrors anyone, young and old, could experience: the feeling of sleep paralysis with the night hag sitting on your chest. We expect stories like this to confirm the idea that, as a child becomes an adult, they will discover that their childhood anxieties were mostly illusions. But Evenson’s stories dash those expectations and refuse to give us any false comfort. Instead, they force us to ask questions. What about our childhood anxiety of being alone? Of sleeping alone? To what lengths are we willing to go in order to avoid confronting these primal, ever-returning fears? This story shows how what we’d do as children is only a hint of how we’d react as adults.
Many of this collection’s stories deal with this theme of childhood fears becoming lifelong ones. In “Untitled (Cloud of Blood),” the narrator tries to get rid of an almost certainly cursed painting that he’s disliked all his life. He inherited it “after the suicide of [his] father” (p. 52)—not exactly an innocuous detail, though the narrator’s tone is creepily blasé when he mentions it. In the title story, “Good Night, Sleep Tight,” the main character finds a book of ghost stories from which he remembers his mother used to read to him as a child. But when he confronts her about it, she denies ever telling him a scary story.
Other stories in the collection have fearless children, which makes for a nerve-wracking read. In the opening story, “The Sequence,” twin sisters Sidra and Selene (more great names) learn to pass into a parallel world by enacting a specific series of jumps, turns, and claps.
It was Sidra’s twin who started it: Sidra never would have thought up the game on her own. At the time, she was not sure exactly how Selene had come up with it. Later, she thought perhaps her twin hadn’t thought it up on her own after all. Perhaps something had whispered the rules of the game in her ear, and though she had not consciously heard them, she had still taken them in. Perhaps her twin had felt she was making up a game from scratch when, in fact, she had been tricked into playing it all along. (p. 1)
Literally from page one, then this story sets up questions about innocence and agency. The use of past tense narration allows Sidra’s later reflections to naturally mix with the story’s action. As she follows her twin through the steps of the game, we can see that both girls assume Selene made the game up, that she’s in control and also that she’s to blame for any negative consequences. But later Sidra wonders if her twin hadn’t been subtly manipulated by outside forces. Is Selene innocently leading her sister into this other world?
When they play the “game,” the world begins to look to the twins “as if a pane of dirty glass lay between them” and everything else. The “hum of insects, the soughing of the gentle breeze, the chirping of birds all vanished” (p. 4). When Sidra later asks her sister where they went, Selene replies:
“We were … between things,” [Selene] finally offered. “At least I think so.”
“Between what things?”
“I don’t know how to explain,” said Selene. “I’m still figuring it out.”
And so they stopped talking about it. (p. 5)
This seems to be a reference to the two girls growing up: being “between things” that you have to figure out could easily be a euphemism for reaching puberty. Upon arrival at that delicate age, few things are more common than teenagers clamming up and refusing to talk—an end to dialogue when it’s desperately needed, when ending it can even be dangerous.
But it isn’t always children that stop discussions. In “Vigil in the Inner Room,” a mother and her two children repeatedly resurrect their dead father with a vigil ceremony they perform in exactly the same way each time. When Gauri, the protagonist, says she’d switch roles with her brother Gylvi (these names are giving me life), she gets her hitherto absentminded mother’s full attention: “‘It doesn’t matter what either of you wants,’ [her mother] said. ‘What matters is how it is. And this is the way it is.’” (p. 105)
It isn’t clear why the mother won’t explain herself. But we know she has her reasons. When she taught Gylvi the ritual, she only mimed the actions he was to do.
Similarly, when she had first shown Gauri how to sit in vigil, she had not sat in vigil herself, not even for an instant, almost as if she felt it to be dangerous for her. What am I to learn from that? wondered Gauri, and then thought: That each must be in their rightful place. The mother at the window, the brother at the door, the sister by the bed, and the father dead, dead, dead.
Or perhaps she was meant to learn something else. Or nothing at all. (pp. 106-7)
It’s hard not to feel a chill when reading the line ending with “and the father dead, dead, dead.” It’s like a nursery rhyme for the children of witches and ghouls. It’s so creepy because its Baa-Baa-Black-Sheep rhythm accentuates Gauri’s innocence while also showing her curiosity about a ritual so powerful it defies death.
In one of the handful of Evenson’s futuristic pieces, “Imagine a Forest,” Evenson also gives his protagonist childlike reactions mixed with adult reflection, again, using past tense narration. Vetle is an android with the mind of a child who is asking his mother to help him make sense of his environment and himself. When he first tells his mother that he realizes that he’s different from the other children, his observations on the conversation are telling.
I was very young then. I had not yet learned that I should be listening not just to my mother’s words but also to the tone of them, and that I should be paying close attention to her eyes and to the muscles of her face, that meaning would reside in all of these places as well as in her words. Since I did not yet see these as important, I did not always record them. I have no memory of what her tone of voice was when she spoke or how her face held itself. (p. 123)
He notes that his inexperience resulted in a loss, the sadness of which comes in the tone. It’s understated but it’s there, shining out from the prose like a tear shed in a dark cinema.
But this story is also noteworthy for its stylistic choices. Firstly, I think the protagonist’s name is fantastic—are you surprised?—I’m not certain how it’s pronounced, but it seems to rhyme with Metal: a great example of a name subtly reinforcing traits of a character. Secondly, there are the narrative choices. While many of Good Night, Sleep Tight’s stories are in third-person narration, this one is up close and personal in first person. The effect of having an android narrate their own story accentuates the story’s Uncanny Valley effect: We can no longer see Vetle as an information-processing and -analyzing machine; we’re given proof of thinking. We are inside their mind and, though it’s notably different, it feels almost human. This naturally leads us to think about our own thoughts and how many of them are simply instinctual reactions, how many of them have been programmed into us from millennia of natural selection.
In the stories where Evenson uses the first person, he typically does so in this way, bringing us closer to protagonists that we might have trouble relating to: androids, vastly wealthy heirs to art collections, and people capable of extreme violence. Following that logic, the stories in third-person narration often follow characters to whom it is easy to relate: that is, regular people who find themselves in exceptional situations. Perhaps it’s a coincidence that every story starting with “The” in the collection is in third person: “The Sequence,” “The Cabin,” “The Rider,” “The Thickening,” and so on. But, coincidence or not, the third person adds to the feeling that these are fairy tales narrated by an Evil Stepmother Goose.
Lovers of the horror, fantasy, and SF genres often expect narrative and stylistic innovation, but they can just as often be extremely conservative in their tastes, demanding that writers stick to a set of codes and norms. Good Night, Sleep Tight just might satisfy all these readers and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to horror fans of any stripe. These stories are immensely entertaining and they strike an elegant balance between subtle and direct narrative. Evenson manages to tell stories that are fresh and new while remaining anchored firmly in the rich history of genre traditions. His work is thoughtful, touching, intelligent, and terrifying—perfect for tellings around a campfire … assuming you don’t first get lost in an eternally recurring woodland while looking for kindling. Read this. It will scare you. Then read it again. It’ll be scarier the second time.