The stories in Good Night, Sleep Tight are unsettling, weird, and sometimes downright terrifying. Each story engages tropes of sci-fi and horror, weaving humanoid robots,  themes of mothering and familial relationships, and characters trapped in their own minds and bodies in ways that push past the boundaries of reality. Altogether the stories create a pervasive feeling of unease while surfacing questions about what it means to be human.

In Evenson’s previous collection, The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell, a character remembers tales told to him by his father: “Sometimes you think you know the world,” one of those had begun, “and that’s your first mistake.”  Readers should heed this warning. Evenson’s worlds may look familiar, but they are never quite what they seem. Evenson’s reality is slippery: it warps and shifts in every single story in Good Night, Sleep Tight.

The horror in the title story comes from its ambiguity. In “Good Night, Sleep Tight,” a grown man wrestles with memories of his mother’s bedtime ritual of telling him horrible stories and worries that she will do the same to her grandson. The story can be read as a classic horror tale in which a monstrous version of a normal mother visits at night, or as a story in which the protagonist is losing his grip on reality. Either option is disturbing. But something bubbles up that’s even more troubling: Whenever the man suggests that his mother might do this horrible thing, people react with total disbelief, insisting that she’s a sweet, mild-mannered woman. With this conflict Evenson raises a question, maybe the most terrifying of all: How much can we really know about others, even about those closest to us?

Other stories, equally unnerving, pursue the family theme. In “The Sequence,” a twin coaxes her sister into an in-between world devoid of anything. Sidra senses the journey will end in disaster but her sister knows just how to manipulate her into participating: “Indeed, everything her sister said, she realized later, was carefully constructed to ensure that Sidra would play the game again after all.” In “Vigil in the Inner Room,” another girl repeatedly acts out a bizarre ritual to bring her father back from the dead even though she knows she can’t trust him. Even though many deaths drain the family, he’s unable to do anything but keep dying: “‘There is no afterlife,’ he said absently, as if to himself. ‘At least none that I could find. I buzzed around like a fly and then came back. There was nowhere for me to go.’” 

Several stories are set in a post-apocalyptic world ravaged by climate change. In these, Evenson takes a surprising turn because all the humans are dead or nearly so while a humanoid lives on. The AI evolves when their purpose changes, and this evolution permits Evenson to explore what caring for others might look like when humans are no more. In “Never Little, Never Grown” a woman has a humanoid AI created in the likeness of her dead child—who will, of course, live long after her on a decimated planet. Perhaps the truest parenting story of them all, the story touches on what it means to create, to try to explain what it means to be alive in the world, to care for and depend on each other while knowing that all our relationships are temporary.

Other stories, like “The Cabin” and “The Rider,” focus on humans encountering frightening new realities. Evenson often reminds his readers that they are at the mercy of their fragile bodies and minds. This fragility isn’t lost on the AI, who points out the contrast with human frailty: “[W]e are like humans but sturdier, larger, sleeker, less breakable. In many senses we are better than humans, resistant to heat and cold, without need of water or food. Unlike humans, we are built to last a very long time.”

Good Night. Sleep Tight illuminates strange and dark parts of our fragile existence. If any hope is to be found in these stories, it is in the ability to tell them—to warn others, to say this happened to me, to raise questions about the consequences of our actions. Without a doubt, the stories are frightening, but they are so gripping, so unexpected, that one can neither look away nor avoid seeing things differently. That is the power of an Evenson story: No matter how warped, grotesque, and strange his worlds and characters are, they are always recognizable.

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Praised by Peter Straub for going “furthest out on the sheerest, least sheltered narrative precipice,” Brian Evenson has won the World Fantasy Award, The International Horror Guild Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award. He is also the recipient of three O. Henry Awards and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and he was a finalist for the Ray Bradbury Prize.

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Emily Webber has published fiction, essays, and reviews in the Ploughshares Blog, The Writer, Five Points, Split Lip Magazine, Hippocampus, and elsewhere. Read more at emilyannwebber.com