frump:
http://www.centerforbookculture.org/review/bookreviews/01_1/contagion.html

Brain Evenson. Contagion and Other Stories. Wordcraft of Oregon, 2000. 152 pp. Paper: $11.00.

With this new collection of short stories Brian Evenson further stakes out his own disturbing, sometimes hilarious, and always bizarre narrative terrain. The stories here often take place in an abstract western landscape that grafts John Ford’s sweeping vistas to Samuel Beckett’s stark stage sets. In the barbwire-inspired title story, two fence checkers follow a ceaseless fence line across a vast plain, cataloging the victims of a mysterious and deadly contagion as they advance. In “A Hanging” sophist horsemen force a stranger into killing another and then himself. In “Prairie” a Corronado-like party of explorers takes a gory trek across a waterless plain in which “at times one discovers the living hidden among the dead.” The characters in Contagion effuse a severe Old Testament sensibility and enunciation that has a strong Mormon bent. Polygamists, patriarchs, and self-proclaimed prophets abound here. In “Two Brothers” the patricidal Theron rebels against the Holy Word of God as revealed to Daddy Norton, while his placid brother Aurel watches. In “By Halves” two half-brothers enter a suicide pact to resist the strong-arm father who “preached them awake” each morning. In one of the most powerful stories, “The Polygamy of Language,” a renegade linguist (of sorts) attempts to solve “the problem of all possible language,” beginning with killing his two polygamist neighbors. Throughout Contagion, various written texts and acts of writing appear regularly, as if language itself were an inescapable contamination, an ontological quandary that each character must unravel, as the narrator of “The Polygamy of Language” says, “not from a distance, but from within.” Contagion and Other Stories challenges readers in daring and unexpected ways. [Peter Donahue]