The Wavering Knife - Reviews

"Brian Evenson, one of America's darkest and most pungent comic writers, prods with the tip of his verbal knife at all our assumptions… He finds the alien in the archetypal, marrying strangeness to intimacy and creating, via syntax, an ever-imploding universe of consciousness. Insidiously and elegantly, Evenson's language claims its prey: the reader's seduced psyche."

—Mary Caponegro

"The prose is thuddingly sad and inexplicably, weirdly comic, full of Evenson's allegiance to the unpleasant, the true."

—The Stranger

"As you might expect of any book that provides no simple explanations for its characters' behaviors and contains figures who attempt to find metaphysical meaning in everyday images and acts, the back cover...calls up comparisons with the European visions of Kafka and Beckett...however, I am more comfortable placing Evenson's work within the long tradition of the American grotesque, beginning with Edgar Allan Poe and continuing with modern and contemporary figures such as Flannery O'Connor, Stacey Levine, and Gilbert Sorrentino."

—Rain Taxi