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Last Days

Last Days

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In his wonderful introduction [which you read after or you will be entirely spoiled], Peter Straub compares Evenson’s snappy dialogue to not only the Marx Brothers and the “patter of 1930s” vaudeville and burlesque, but to comedic teams like Abbott and Costello and their “Who’s on first” routine. One of the factions (where every acolyte is named ‘Paul,’ no exceptions) believes that only one body part should be removed whereas the other one is intent on chopping off as many as possible and making a contest out of it. As in The Trial, the two men eventually show up at Kline's place, and it becomes clear that he has no choice in this matter; he's dragged into a situation which is so bizarre and riddled with ill logic and seemingly unsolvable. This indirectness, not just in “The Brotherhood of Mutilation”, but also in “Last Days”, is significant. At the same time, there is, in the mutilates’ microcosm, in a bloody denial of the functionality of the body (which also implies a blind and strictly normative concept of a perfectly functioning body, one of many exclusionary tactics pursued by the brotherhood), a strangely functionalist thinking involved.

But now a short word on the dark heart of Last Days, because in some respects what we have here is a non-supernatural horror novel. The world doesn’t become more rational, more sane once Kline leaves one of the two brotherhoods which have set their eyes on him. Which, not to belabor the point, Kline doesn't want to do but does, in the process meeting an old friend, killing an old enemy, and causing a degree of mayhem only describable as Biblical. I blasted through this book in a two days, starting deep into the night and finishing just minutes ago. He looked at the first picture for some time before realizing the girl was missing one of her thumbs.It’s one of those books that starts out with a premise that’s pretty out there and progressively delivers on its weirdness. In religious contexts, acts like the brotherhood’s are frequently viewed as sacrifices, but sacrifices have a goal, while these particular ‘sacrifices’ are not for anything. And who could ever forget poor old Lawrence being forced to hack through his own foot in the original Saw movie?

Intense and profoundly unsettling, Brian Evenson’s Last Days is a down-the-rabbit-hole detective novel set in an underground religious cult.No detail in Evenson’s book feels extraneous, to the extent that I was tempted to make a table of all the body parts curt off and find out how they are arranged within the book. They appear to believe that there is something metaphysical that is inherent in the very act of mutilation. Por un lado, tenemos a Kline, quien recibe de improviso una llamada de lo más extraña donde lo instan a resolver un asesinato acontecido tras las paredes de La Hermandad de la Mutilación, un culto que promueve la amputación como forma de estar más cerca del creador.

In Last Days, his latest novel, he manages to do the exact same thing and the resulting book is a completely satisfying, if gruesome and amazingly bloody read. Sure, the thriller elements are most definitely present, and the novel is inspired by the classic noir detective fiction (the blurb mentions the author's fascination with Dashiel Hammett's Red Harvest). a mutilation cult, that believes knowledge and enlightenment comes with the more parts one severs from their body.When the tale begins, Kline is minus a hand courtesy of a gentleman with a meat cleaver on his last undercover job.

The first one, Brotherhood of Mutiliation was so popular that the author decided to expand on it and wrote a part two, Last Days. Finally, I want to give a shout out to Maciek and his spectacular review without which I never would have picked up this book, and that would have been my great loss. What does is the brutal mutiliation he was forced to perform on himself during one case; an attacker forced him to cut his own hand with a cleaver.

Just as the bloody mess of the brotherhood directly mirrors actual religious practice, so do other aspects of the book, such as its use of space: most of the book takes place in rooms or compounds, whether in a hospital or elsewhere. In The Last Days, Brian Evenson uses the tried and true hard-boiled PI template to tell one hell of a horror story. Kline is a private eye who never loses his cool, and the dialogue he engages in is straight of the hardboiled fiction of the past. Turns out, that was the easiest, and most normal incident that he goes through following that moment. We ask all users help us create a welcoming environment by reporting posts/comments that do not follow the subreddit rules.



  • Fruugo ID: 258392218-563234582
  • EAN: 764486781913
  • Sold by: Fruugo

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