Blood meridian

Brian Evenson—whose new novel, The Open Curtain, contains this line: “She put her mouth to his mouth and blew, hearing the air hiss out of the slit in his throat as he coughed blood into her mouth”—is a nice guy.

Over the phone, his voice is genial, and when asked about his controversial past, his shrug is almost audible as he says, “No, it’s fine. I can talk about it.” And so we talk about it. It goes like this.

Evenson’s first book, Altmann’s Tongue (1994), was a collection of stories filled with scenes of grisly violence. A devout Mormon and professor at Brigham Young University, Evenson ran into some trouble with his faith’s elders, who were alarmed by the book’s bloodiness and his refusal to apologize for it. The melee eventually led Evenson to write an eviscerating letter of resignation in 1996 that reads like a manifesto for academic freedom (Google it). It also ended his marriage with his devout Mormon wife.

“I realized I could potentially lose my job, and my marriage was collapsing, and I had to think very seriously and very carefully about every word I wrote,” he says. “At the same time, anything that’s powerful, that has an impact or is transgressive, I didn’t want to shy away from. For me, I did feel like I had reached a particular point where I had to make a choice between my marriage and my writing, but that was also part of a larger lifestyle choice.”

Since then, Evenson, 40, has gone on to write six fiction books of increasing complexity and sophistication, taken a job as the director of Brown University’s creative-writing program, and built a reputation as one of his generation’s most arresting, invigorating and, yes, frightening writers. Some have called him an heir to Poe and Kafka. In 2000, he asked to be excommunicated from the Church of Latter-day Saints. The church obliged.

Which brings us to The Open Curtain (Coffee House Press, $14.95), Evenson’s latest work, which addresses his straying from the faith in the most oblique terms. Rudd Theurer is a boy growing up in a repressive Mormon home, where his dad has committed suicide and his mother refuses to acknowledge it. As he enters adolescence, he becomes obsessed with a 1903 murder committed by William Hooper Young, grandson of Brigham.

At the same time, Theurer begins suffering blackouts. He is found in the woods, alongside a brutally slain family, near death himself and unable to remember any of it. As he recovers, he moves in with the lone survivor of the dead family, a girl his age whom he eventually marries—though it becomes increasingly clear that Theurer is frighteningly violent during his blackouts.

“There has been a kind of leveling of people’s reactions to violence,” Evenson says. “If you see a lot of people shot on TV, you get used to it. What I’ve tried to do is reinstate a power to violence, partly because violence is so crazy and dangerous, and a lot of media that use violence just don’t acknowledge [that].”

Though it centers around a murder, it would be wrong to describe The Open Curtain as a violent book. It’s more an exploration of the ways violence and religion are tied, particularly in Mormonism. The Blood Atonement ceremony, a ritual the Church of Latter-day Saints has long denied existed despite rumors, purportedly calls for the spilling of sinners’ blood. Until recently, Mormons entering the temple for the first time had to mime brutal suicide cuts, lest he or she should ever reveal temple secrets.

“I didn’t want this book to be about me attacking the church,” he says. “It’s about a boy who has fallen through a lot of cracks, and trying to figure out what has happened to him within this repressive structure.”

When it comes to his writing, Evenson admits to being “stretched between two poles.” He has two daughters, 13 and 15, who are Mormon and who have never read his work, though he’s set aside copies for them.

“The 15-year-old is almost ready,” he says. “I think I’m nervous and she’s really nervous, because she knows there’s a conflict between my ex-wife and I over the writing.”

Taking that step is perhaps the one thing that gives a writer of such chilling tales goose bumps.

Evenson will read as part of the Bookslut series Wednesday 27.