‘The World is a hell because we have made it so.’Horror often thrusts your gaze into the path of oncoming doom, be it a chilling end to everything or a fate that makes death seem like a mercy. And what can be more chilling then the idea that humanity itself may all succumb to a ghastly demise. Sure, every era has it’s apocalypse criers, but even paying marginal attention to the news lately has one wondering if we have already crossed the precipice of doom and just hang over our doom like that cartoon coyote chasing the roadrunner, suspended in the air so we can all mock him for his self-inflicted mistakes before taking the plunge. Brian Evenson’s latest collection of short stories, The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell, thrives on positioning it’s characters in this sort of suspension above doom in a wide variety of horrific and spooky situations. With already a fantastic back catalogue of books and stories, it feels like sheer mastery that he delivers a seemingly inexhaustible variety of fresh ways he finds to unsettle you. The most common way in this collection is end of humanity scenarios and frightful futures of a decaying planet. With only minimal world building that often leaves your imagination to brew its own terror and prose sharp enough to bleed you dry, The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell is a wickedly fun cavalcade of dread.If you are looking for frights, Evenson delivers in droves. With Song for the Unraveling of the World only 2 years old I worried this would be like a B-sides collection but it is just hit after hit. And the shrieks are torn out of you from so many different and imaginative angles. A prosthetic leg can come alive and devour your enemies, a strange tree might steal your face and wear it around on a path of devastation, there are eerie cities, portals, a genocide by strange alien visitors, monsters, ghosts, and very often here, the planet being rendered unsustainable for human life. This collection is an excellent example of the many avenues speculative fiction can travel hand in hand with horror. While this collection is less psychological horror than the previous—stories like Come Up being an exception with a narrator who realizes how his every action following his wife’s disappearance makes him look increasingly guilty—Evenson’s storytelling is marvelous, leading you through his stories as if down a dark passageway with only the light from a match to see. Most often you have a vague idea of what is going on and what is to come and then the shock arrives. And, like the final line in the story Palisade, ‘by the time he managed to get another match lit it was already too late.’Evenson has an excellent grasp on the notion that less is more in horror. Most of these stories have fantastic settings and seem to be screaming the existence of backstory, worldbuilding and supernatural lore that never reach you. Which, for short fiction, really works as it cuts right to the heart of matters and leaves you feeling disoriented along the way. Monsters and creatures are rarely given much detail (with the exception of one), and most encounters are told to be ‘vaguely human’. Choose your own trauma, I suppose. Your mind can illustrate your own landscapes of worldbuilding which keeps the stories lingering in your head with the unknown always more terrifying than the known. This also invites the reader to collaborate with the story, creating their own hellish lore and making oneself complicit in the story. Evenson helps bring the reader into several stories by having them told to a “you” in the narrative that might as well be you, done most effectively in Extrication where ‘you’ are hearing the rantings of a man about to perform an experiment on you after falling helplessly into his trap. It is chilling and really just a ton of fun.However, our complicity becomes the biggest point of terror in the many stories around the idea of climate change and environmental destruction (or rebellion, in several stories). ‘‘The world was changing,’ one narrator says, ‘we had ruined it.’ In these stories we often see the gruesome results of not caring for the planet, with multiple stories involving watching the slow and pathetic extinction of humanity due to the air becoming toxic or similar situations. Even stories such as Justle or the longest (and one of the best), To Breathe the Air, show a horrible quality of life living under a rapidly dying planet. One of my favorites, Elo Havel, is a fairytale-like story using the common motif of discarding aging citizens into the forest to be devoured by a monster. When the monster is finally seen, Evenson describes it as ‘an odd amalgam of dead forest and city refuse...at once so hideous and so marvelous,’ and reminds us that our pollution and unsustainable growth makes us the monster to the natural world. The effect is powerful.‘As the world sickens further, as the air grows poisonous, as the oceans die, so too must we shift and change if we care to survive. We must extricate ourselves from humanity and become something other than ourselves. Something that can adapt to the harshness of this new world.’Change becomes a key theme in the book, a reminder we must make a change for the better or the changes forced upon us will be terrifying. In these stories there are some who want to save the human race, but more often than not they decide the extinction of humanity may be the best result. Curator features the chronicler of humanity deciding we should be forgotten right as the world ends, while Nameless Citizen has us follow possibly the last living human as he rejects an offer to rebuild humanity (this latter story veers a bit uncomfortably close to eco-fascism but like, that isn't the message either). The silence at the end of the world becomes the horror soundtrack for this collection, a whole orchestra of silence to bring goosebumps on your skin.Brian Evenson is a delight and The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell is a success. While I may have preferred his previous collection only slightly, this one is a hell of a lot of fun. From traditional hauntings like in My Haunting (one of my favorites) to weird science fiction parallel worlds fun as in The Shimmering Wall, Evenson crafts an amazing tale no matter what the situation. Definitely pick this up for Spooky Season, but this is sure to deliver frights all year long.4/5‘I am rooting for you.Whether you survive the change or perish, I will be here with you, I swear, until the bitter end.’