The Dark Fiction of an Ex-Mormon Writer

When Brian Evenson was seventeen, he awoke one night to a figure sliding open the door to his room. Then it stood watching him. The sliding door was jerry-rigged between bookshelves to create a small bedroom for Evenson within the living room of the house he shared with his parents and four siblings, in Provo, Utah. As the figure stood there, “motionless, mostly enshadowed,” Evenson couldn’t move. Nor could he see the figure’s face, though he was sure it belonged to “someone malevolent.” “Eventually, and seemingly suddenly,” Evenson told me by e-mail, “it was morning, my door was closed, and nobody was there. Yet the impression that someone had been there was so powerful, so strong, that it wasn’t something I could deny. That’s an experience that I’ve remained uncertain about to this day.”