Last Days – A Mercurial and Mesmerizing Metaphysical Mystery

“Says here”, he said, “missing a hand. I’d say that’s an understatement, wouldn’t you, Kline? How’d you lose your hand?”

I let someone cut it off,” said Kline.

“Now why would a man go and do a thing like that?”

That’s one of the many unanswerable questions strewn throughout Brian Evenson’s madcap literary horror Last Days (published in 2009), whose simple and straightforward prose is infused with apocalyptic tension and grotesque humor. Last Days follows former undercover cop Kline as he wades through ocean of uncertainty that begins with his hand getting chopped off by a ‘gentleman with a cleaver’. Kline self-cauterizes the wound and then shoots the ‘gentleman’ between his eyes. While Kline is caught under depression, thinking about retirement and the missing limb, a couple of low-level cultists start badgering Kline in order to recruit him for a job. In fact, Kline is chosen by the cult because of him losing an appendage and the audacious thing he did immediately after. After weeks of repeated phone calls, the cultists forcibly take Kline out of his apartment to meet the limbless top-tier saints of ‘The Brotherhood of Mutilation’.

Last Days draws a lot from hard-boiled detective genre, proving to be a twisted descendant of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. At the same time, Evenson’s minimalist and precise writing style elegantly disperses a tone of suggestive horror, pushing his readers to be deeply entrenched within his elusive reality. This damn funny as well as terrifying spiritual journey of a condemned man is my first Evenson novel, which I would definitely say redefines the horizons of horror literature. Brian Evenson was a devoted follower of Mormonism, who taught literature at the Mormon church-owned Brigham Young University till his publication of Altmann’s Tongue: Stories and a Novella (in 1994). Given the choice between writing and religion, Evenson chose the former, and ever since has discharged his mesmerizingly symbolic dark fiction to wreak havoc on the senseless self-sacrifice and blind obedience that bookends organized religion.

Novelist Peter Straub in his introduction of Last Days (better read after finishing the novel) describes it as a ‘novel made of two novellas joined at the hip, where they share a common seam’. The first part ‘The Brotherhood of Mutilation’ was originally published in 2003. The 2^nd part ‘Last Days’ is an extension of the 2003 novella, taking up the extremities and weirdness of the 1^st part to whole new levels. Once inside the cult’s campus Kline encounters its absurdly horrific dogma: amputations as the path to reach God (not just meta-physical shedding). The supreme leader of the brotherhood is just reduced to a torso, whose eyes are gouged, ears slashed off, and tongue partly severed. Kline is kidnapped to the place to investigate the murder of this alleged saint. But the limbless guy may not actually be dead and Kline might be recruited for some other sinister purpose by the hierarchy of multiple amputees.   

Brian Evenson

Last Days was addictive enough for me to read in a single sitting. But it is also unflichingly dark (bucket loads of blood and mutilations) and frustratingly obscure at times, which wouldn’t suit for readers expecting a more conventional mystery/horror narrative. The genre make-up (PI in search of answers) serves as a good hook to draw in the reader. But very soon, Evenson trades suspense and formal plot for parade of compelling allegorical notions, associated with religious abuse and apostasy. The author writes with a taut, impassioned voice (he calls it, ‘writing with an ethical blankness’). He doesn’t detail the atmosphere or inner conflict with flowery prose. This brings in a sense of narrow perspective (a suffocating reality), which diffuses great intensity to the proceedings.  What starts as a detective novel teeters on brink of uncertainties as our anti-hero keeps contemplating the loathsome things in the world and within him. Moreover, the foremost conflict in Last Days is the one that happens between his ever-changing consciousness and his perception of collapsing reality. And for all its visceral and repetitive violent actions, Evenson eventually constructs quite a few ‘big’ questions. Altogether, Last Days is a profoundly polemical and multilayered work on the unspeakable uncertainties in human life.