In classical music, the term “fugue” is defined as a composition in which a particular theme or voice is repeated within the same piece, though changed in form so that the voice repeats over itself, like a ghostly echo.
A single voice opens the piece, establishes its theme and pattern until it is recognizable to the ear, and then, when it seems as if the world is stable, a second voice enters, an alteration of the same theme but morphed, twisted, distorted, and both play on simultaneously until a third, a fourth, or a fifth voice madly dashes in and violently disturbs an already transmuted landscape. And finally, at the crescendo—the explosive end.
This frantic and perverted pattern is precisely what Brian Evenson’s Fugue State accomplishes through its series of short stories lingering on the psychotic and amnesiac voices of characters harrowed by violence, disease, and paranoia. Evenson, a writer of literary acclaim with a credit of ten books of fiction to his name, begins Fugue State with a young woman’s look back at a seemingly normal childhood event that has changed her life irrevocably. This is “Younger,” a story in which the author employs the frequent use of repetition to establish a state of instability veering on lunacy for the young sister. Evenson’s use of repetition becomes the clear key to his haunting storytelling; it is a tool so precisely used, it is able to raise the hairs on the back of the neck, able to make the reader hearken back to childhood terrors hidden deep within the closets. When Arnaud, in the titular story “Fugue State,” begins experiencing the same porous bleeding of his patient, it is with sickening dread that the reader begins to become aware of the neurosis that awaits him. The story takes an even more agitated tone when Arnaud’s friend, Roeg, develops the same symptoms, and the story continues to spiral into a torment so affecting, it leaves behind the acrid taste of a truth too dark to swallow.
The only criticism offered is perhaps that too much is made of the contributions of illustrator Zak Sally. Although his pen-and-ink drawings at the opening of each story are marvelous and mysterious altogether, and they reference that beautiful bygone era of illustrated novels of the 1800s—a clear influence on Evenson’s work as well—the single story “Dread,” which is entirely illustrated as if it were a graphic tale, falls, in some sense, short of the quality of the other stories in the collection. This is possibly due to the fact that the story was not entirely visual—too much of the story was simply the words of Mr. Evenson drawn out in Mr. Sally’s hand, and these drawings themselves, the ones purely contained in “Dread,” did not exhibit the same skill of the other pen-and-ink drawings enclosed within the two-hundred page book. In fact, it seemed that this story would have been better served in text form, since the drawings did not much enlighten the text, and one of the other stories, a far more visual story like “Wander,” a reimagining of the mythical Beowulf, could have been illustrated by Mr. Sally instead with greater success.
Regardless, Fugue State is a fascinating read. It is a book best enjoyed in the dark at a time when our most human of fears take shape before us, fears this book summons vividly out of our own deluded imaginations so that no manner of restful sleep can be reached when the candle has at long-last burnt down to a stub, and the wind outside rattles the trees and carries, of course, our own emitted screams back to us.
