By the time Miss Pickaver returns, Hovell is no longer really Hovell, although he greets Miss Pickaver with a sinister grin. Miss Pickaver ventures out on her own, while Hovell stays behind in their rented French apartment, struggling to understand the language, the landscape, and the strange amorphous shapes he sees outside at night. In “Seaside Town,” a man named Hovell and a woman named Miss Pickaver go on a European vacation. His characters flounder in essential confusion, grasping at straws of experience or perception that seem familiar, only to sink beneath them. Evenson is interested in philosophy and semiotics, the impossibility of ever truly knowing or naming the world, and our fundamental, helpless dependence on what our senses tell us. How many children does he have? What kind of accident did he suffer? Is the woman who visits him really his wife? Did he really try to burn down the family home? Did his family really die in the fire? If not, why does he believe it? And what does it mean that “horse” and “house” are only one letter apart?Ī Collapse of Horses is preoccupied with the uncanny, the unsettling, and the unknowable. The implications of his uncertainty grow until the narrator’s world starts to collapse. In his mind, the horses “remain both alive and dead, which makes them not quite alive, nor quite dead.” And at the same time, he tells us, “I would awaken each day to find the house different from how it had been the day before.” Does the house have three bedrooms or four? Were the horses alive or dead? Unable to decide, he picks obsessively at these questions.

In the title story of Brian Evenson’s collection A Collapse of Horses, the unnamed narrator is obsessed by his confusion about two seemingly unrelated things: the house in which he convalesces from a workplace accident, and a group of horses he’s seen lying down in a nearby paddock.

A Collapse of Horses by Brian Evenson