Last Days by Brian Evenson

How do you know the moment when you cease to be human? Is it the moment when you decide to carry a head before you by its hair, extended before you like a lantern, as if you are Diogenes in search of one just man? Or is it the moment when reality, previously a smooth surface one slides one's way along, begins to come in waves, for a moment altogether too much and then utterly absent? Or is it the moment when you begin opening doors, showing each man behind each door the head of his spiritual leader before killing him with the cleaver tucked into your belt? Or is it the moment when all the dead begin to talk to you in a dull, rumbling murmur? Or is it the moment when these same voices suddenly fade away and stop talking together, leaving you utterly alone?

Kline, an ex-cop, goes through a shocking ordeal: an intruder cuts his hand off with a cleaver, and he is forced to cauterize his own stump with a hot plate--before shooting the intruder in the eye. Somehow, this is the beginning of his troubles. When it makes the news, the story of Kline's self-cauterization catches the eye of a cult of "mutilates" who believe that the more body parts you lop off, the closer you are to God. They kidnap Kline, ostensibly to help solve the murder of their leader (although how you can tell a guy with no legs, arms, eyes, genitals, or tongue is alive is a central question). Kline resists as far as he can, but the mutilates see him as one of their own--which mean they want to "honor" him by mutilating him further--while the cult's second-in-command seems to have a secret intention of his own.

It must be said, the premise of this book is bonkers. Evenson has a skill for taking a single image--the lopping off of a limb, with its suggestions of violation and loss, of the diminishment of the self--and extending to the point of logical and imagistic extreme. It borrows from the body horror-genre, of course, but Last Days seems actually to have more in common stylistically with noir: Kline is hard-boiled, terse, and the novel is framed, though suspiciously, by the need to get to the bottom of a crime. That these two genres don't end up together more often seems like a real oversight that Evenson intends here to fill.

Evenson ratchets up the intensity when Kline, realizing that he's being set up, makes his escape. The mutilates vow to follow and kill him, and they try their best, but he's saved at the last second by another group of amputees, all calling themselves Paul and missing their right hand--like Kline. As it turns out, the Pauls are the original group, and the mutilates are a splinter group that decided to take the Pauls' logic to a more extreme conclusion. Kline finds himself caught between these two groups, and the Pauls perhaps are worse, because they see in Kline a kind of Christ figure, reasoning that he seems to be immune to being killed. It also means they plan to crucify him (because that's what you do to a Christ figure, I guess). Kline ends up going on a killing spree that makes him confront the nature of his own humanity.

This is where the book lost me a little. The scene of a man drenched in the blood of others, asking himself how far he goes before he becomes human no longer, perhaps even to the point of embracing the ubermensch fantasies about himself--it's a little edgelord, isn't it? A little Deviant Art? There's a great parallel between Kline's growing sense of himself and the literal loss of his limbs, the physical shrinking, but in the end I'm not sure it was enough to overcome a feeling of melodrama that kept the book from totally working for me. Brent recommended some of Evenson's short fiction, and I think if I try again, I'd like to try something like that, because Last Days struck me as a book that sort of stumbled under its own need to keep the horror growing until the last bloody scenes.