It’s easy to simply classify the Brotherhood as evil, and it often seems right to do so, but they are often more alien than wrong, more amoral than immoral. Taking Mathew 29 (And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out…) to the extreme, they’ve developed a religion out of the process of self mutilation, glorifying in disfigurement to the point that their leader is nothing but a tongue-less head and a nipple-less torso. That cult, The Brotherhood of Mutilation, is the center of this story. And yet he is also depraved in their own way, caught up in the cult until it is more powerful than right or wrong, life or death, to him The reader feels sympathy for Kline but should they? Gous is nice, companionable, even. In the same vein, every sympathetic character is also a monster, every simple decision a potential moral abyss, every simple task labyrinthine and difficult. Was it true, they wanted to know ,that he hadn’t flinched? That he had simply watched the man raise the cleaver and bring it down, his hand becoming a separate, moribund creature? (p. read about his so-called heroism and how, even when faced with the man with the cleaver – or the “gentleman with the cleaver” as they chose to call him – he hadn’t flinched, hadn’t given a thing away. Kline’s past is heroic, but it’s taken to such extremes that the reader can’t read it without feeling a tad queasy, the sort of victory that the celebrants will always wonder if it might have been better for everyone involved if it had been a defeat, instead: It is impossible to get over a feeling of unease while reading these two novellas, impossible not to feel dirtied with each word that passes beneath your gaze.

The tone is fast and fevered throughout, events always accelerating towards a conclusion that promises to be anything but neat, the resolution of plot threads anything but surgical. There are no wasted words here, no auxiliary threads to subtract from the main thrust, nothing to prevent Evenson’s ideas from shooting directly into your skull. Last Days is a streamlined punch to the gut.

Last Days by Brian Evenson