Sometimes the malleability of the truth works well. Even though it can be enjoyable to be left wondering who lives and who dies or what is reality, at times the ambiguity begins to feel a bit predictable. These characters often end up back where they started, though their understanding of their situations can change drastically.
Much like Dante’s layers of hell, the stories in The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell tend toward making the readers feel trapped by the situations the characters are facing. Should she maintain the necessary materials and instructions on how to revive the human race, painstakingly compiled for future discovery by the last of humanity? Throughout the collection choices don’t always work out in favor of Evenson’s characters, but they are a reminder that because something is anxiety-provoking doesn’t mean one shouldn’t try to move forward in the face of a difficult –– or impossible –– situation. In the story “Curator ,” a giant human-made poison cloud is killing everything in its path, while the last woman left on Earth must decide whether preserving human history is best for the world. He finds himself trapped inside his house left with the choice of following the voices in his head urging him to find her or fighting to keep his head above water for just a little longer. In “Up for Air,” a man’s wife disappears, and alone in a town where he’s considered a suspect for her disappearance, and suffering a debilitating insomnia, he becomes increasingly paranoid. The characters in The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell are always on high alert and that comes with choices that aren’t always simple. As residents from the lower city-referred to as ”guests”-are rarely if ever allowed in the upper one, he decides to use this chance of a lifetime to finish what his late father could not: to free the people from the lower city from external control. “You are wearing it beneath your skin,” a citizen tells him. Startled to find himself maskless, he is informed that a permanent mask has been surgically implanted. In “To Breathe the Air, ” an inhabitant of a domed “lower” city awakes in the upper one where he must wear a mask in order to breathe. In many of these stories, characters must be masked in order to survive. The air is poison, the people in charge are not what they seem, even one’s internal voice is deceptive. No matter the setting, there is an ever-present sense that things are off. Brian Evenson’s new collection of short stories, The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell, is set in a not-so-distant future where the environment has unsurprisingly degraded even further than what we face now, as well as in fantasy worlds entirely unlike our own.
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