Brian Evenson w/ Nghiem Tran, "Phantom Limb"

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The books that got under your skin worst were never the ones with monsters in them. They were the ones where the body quietly stopped being reliable, where something was missing and the narrator could not say what. Evenson has spent thirty years writing in that exact register, and the people who love him love him the way you love a band nobody at work has heard of. He holds a World Fantasy Award and a Shirley Jackson Award and still reads to rooms of forty in Los Feliz. This one is the long-awaited return to the world of Last Days, picking Kline back up after he dismantled an underground amputation cult and went to prison for it, now tangled with a splinter faction of the same church. Tran, across from him, is a Vietnam-born novelist whose debut landed on NPR's year-end list, which makes this a genuine pairing rather than a publicist's. If you have ever handed someone a paperback and said only that they should read the first thirty pages, this is your congregation, in person, free, on a Tuesday. Bring the beaten-up copy. He will sign it.