Story by Story: Brian Evenson's Fugue State (7) 'Girls in Tents'
Seventh in the order of stories in Brian Evenson’s Fugue State (forthcoming July 1 from Coffee House Press) is ‘Girls in Tents,’ which originally appeared in Conjunctions.
This story begins, in contrast to all of the stories thus far in the collection, with an image—and not quite an expected one, given the previous terrain: two sisters building tent fortresses inside their divorced mother’s home. It is a calm, if meditative, beginning, and one leading quite pleasingly from the ‘book inside a book’ image of the previous story ‘Dread,’ mirroring that previous meta-combing with another, gentler idea of a room inside a room: “…a substitute house within the larger house, for now that the father was gone the house no longer felt like it was her house.”
The four houses here, in textual but also spatial replication, in party with the other light echoes of previous macabre (the divorcing, the unsettlement, etc.), set us up in less than one page for the next fork in our heart, the deepening of our darkly corridored queue.
What occurs, then, as ‘Girls in Tents’ continues for the reader who has already come through the six prior stories’ cerebral terror-pleasure, is a wholly different sensation of waiting for the blow. While the propagation of the story is rendered mainly of the two daughters, younger and older, contains element such as in the earlier ‘Younger’ in which the characters’ mental demeanors and conditions make them suspect for some sublime collision, as the sentences continue coming, tunneling deeper into the head spaces of the daughter and their shared and shifting air, we await the dark unleashing.
In this way, it is the expectation of the horror that wields the horror, resulting in a different sort of circling of the void. The sentences progress with a certain potential energy, building, building, and on the way shifting the whole manner of the book.
The effect is similar, to reference recently similar textual terrains, to the underground storehouse found in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, another author with whom Evenson certainly shares DNA, a bond more often crossed to McCarthy’s chilling Child of God or cold violenced Blood Meridian. In The Road’s storehouse scene, however, when the father and son continuously on the threat of harm or destruction finally come to find a place of rest buried in the earth, even in the calm and soothing air that is that stronghold in the midst of such black lines, we can’t help but await what comes.
Likewise here in Fugue State, we can not help but be haunted by the sentences that have come before (and are certainly to come again). And yet, held in this strange grip, as the story continues to softly worm with its safe haven made of child-hoped-held resolve, as the potential energy continues to ride within the body, we find that what might be here, for these few pages, is actually a true light—a light than its care and heart and clean resounding not only gives us a moment’s reprieve, but also in its ominous ends seems to imply that what has come before now is just the beginning, and oh god, shall we fear the thing still on its way.