There’s no denying that author Brian Evenson has never been particularly concerned with bodily integrity or the comforts of a stable reality.
In the Shirley Jackson and World Fantasy Award-winning author’s latest novel, Phantom Limb, he returns to the gruesome theological logic of Last Days, where the path to spiritual enlightenment is paved with severed limbs and the pursuit of transcendence proves a decidedly flesh-and-blood affair.
The novel follows Kline, the battered survivor of Evenson’s Last Days, who is left badly burned after destroying the headquarters of an underground amputation cult and now finds himself behind bars. Hoping to secure a shorter sentence, he enlists the help of an ex-cop, only to become entangled with a splinter sect carrying on the cult’s work. As a series of ritualistic murders draws him deeper into its orbit, Kline must investigate a world he thought he had left behind without becoming part of it once again.
ADD TO GOODREADS
To celebrate the book’s release today, CinemaChords sat down with Evenson to discuss returning to Kline’s world and the disturbing logic of a cult that equates physical loss with spiritual advancement, the unlikely buddy-cop dynamic between Kline and Frank from the original book, and the challenge of following up a novel as distinctive as Last Days.
