I did it anyway. After reading the first several stories in Brian Evenson's Altmann's Tongue, I read the author's afterword. I didn't want to find out about the stories as much as I wanted to find out about Evenson.
Why? Because the first several stories in the collection (maybe all of them) deal with killing, not in a typical murder/slasher/psycho sort of way, but in a detached, unemotional, yet oddly disturbing manner. Says Evenson,
So violence is depicted but then superseded by style operating as a kind of violence toward the reader: the two working sometimes concertedly, sometimes in tension, to create a world that feels at once stark and yet stylized, in slant relation to the actual world.
Would you guess that Evenson was a Mormon? Not only that, he taught at BYU and got in a lot of hot water over this book. Read it and you'll understand why. But it's great stuff filled with stories that demand a second (or third) read. In fact, a little later in the Afterword, Evenson states,
Altmann's Tongue is meant to be a challenging book, is postulated as a challenge to the reader. The stories in it are meant to function beyond their initial reading, in the way readers choose over time to process the reading experience and supply their own moral response to the absence of response within the text proper. A sort of virus, as it were.
Can't wait to finish this one, then read it again.
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Started a new story this morning - only got a couple of hundred words down, but I'll have time to think about it while I'm in the dentist's chair later today. Wish me luck. (For my teeth and the story.)
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