The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Dark Property, by Brian Evenson
reviewed by Alex DeBonis

Brian Evenson. Dark Property. Black Square/Hammer, 2002. 132 pp. Paper: $14.00.

Brian Evenson appreciates the discordant beauty of Old Testament verse and appropriates it in his novel Dark Property. In what might be called neobiblical language, Evenson alternates between the story of an unnamed woman carrying a dead infant and the story of a bounty hunter, Kline. Both characters journey through a postapocalyptic desert landscape teeming with menace. The novel tells of their encounters with the denizens of this blasted landscape and separate pilgrimages to a walled compound filled with grotesque resurrectionists. The interwoven narratives ask readers to compare the two travelers, each of whom carries human cargo over a shoulder—in his case, a woman bound for slave life in a brothel, and in hers, a dead infant. Readers of Evenson’s other books, like Contagion, will find familiar subjects. What incites these characters to dark acts is left inscrutable for much of the novel—a hook pulling readers along to find out what lies behind their deeds. Evenson does not portray violence to shock or mortify (though a reader may be both shocked and mortified) but to illustrate the principle that murder is an adjunct to moral authority. Kline’s conflict with the resurrectionists can be understood in abstract terms as a clash between religious practices—is the word or the deed stronger? Evenson dramatizes a struggle between truth communicated with language, as in saying something true, and truth communicated with deed, as in a death sentence. When the resurrectionists breach the divide between life and death, Evenson’s Kline reflects that “Truth cannot be imparted. . . . It must be inflicted.” Using sparse dialogue and almost no psychological reflection, the novel invites readers to reflect on the limits of language, which is a revealing—and sometimes unsettling—artistic endeavor.