By T.J. Tranchell

Good news for Brian Evenson fans: even after nearly thirty books, the short story writer, novelist, translator, and teacher still has plenty to say. His latest, Good Night, Sleep Tight, marks his ninth book with Coffee House Press. The new collection delves into Evenson’s unique space between science fiction and horror, while exploring what a post-human world might look like. Many of the stories confront ideas of parenthood and how that might be present in artificial intelligences. Each explores the meaning and mystery of being human, leaving readers satisfied with having more questions than answers in a way only Evenson can. The award-winning author, who currently teaches at California Institute of the Arts, grew up in Utah and in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which influenced much of his early work.

Evenson spoke with the Coachella Review about the differences between short stories and novels, the influences of growing up in the Mormon church, and resisting the desire to explain things away. This interview has been slightly edited for clarity.

The Coachella Review: What is the process like when you’re starting a new novel?

Brian Evenson: I tend to write more stories than novels. I see myself as more of a story writer than a novelist, but every once in a while an idea will come along that feels like it needs a larger canvas to be explored. So it’s usually pretty gradual. I get an idea for something, and then I first almost consciously push it away and don’t work on it—just see if it will stick around and see if it will develop in my head. And if it does, eventually I’ll start writing. For instance, I recently had an idea for a possession novel, which is a genre I haven’t worked in before, though I’ve published a couple of short stories in that vein. It’s coming very slowly: I wrote about ten pages and then I let it sit. And then I went back to it and I’ve written another twenty pages or so, and slowly I’m starting to get a sense of how I could do this particular sort of novel in a way that’s my own and doesn’t feel too much like treading ground that other people have trod.

TCR: So do short stories tend to come more fully formed, or is it just a faster process for you?

BE: It’s a much faster process. I’m one of those people who is lucky enough to have more ideas than I could ever possibly write, which I know is not the usual thing. So often, when I’m reading or I’m just letting my mind wander, an idea will come to me, and a lot of those ideas are the story-length ideas. I know pretty quickly if an idea is going to be something I’ll do in a very short piece or in a normal story length, or a novella or a novel. Stories can start for me from anything. Sometimes a story comes fully formed, and I just put in on paper. That’s less fun for me because I don’t feel there’s as much discovery in the writing itself. But also sometimes I’ll be reading something, and whatever I’m reading will take an idea a certain direction, and I’ll think, Huh, it could also have gone this other direction… that will be a seed for a story that I might start writing shortly after I finish reading the other story, just to see what happens if I pursue that other direction.

And then also at this point in my career, I’m not afraid of the blank page. I can sit down and have no idea what I’m going to write and know that something will eventually come. The twenty or forty or fifty minutes it takes for that to happen are interesting for me now. They used to be anxiety-provoking, but they just no longer are. They’re almost meditative.

So yeah, I feel like stories come to me all the time. It’s more a question of what ideas are calling to me at this particular moment. I keep a long list of broken and partial ideas for stories, and sometimes I go back to them. In some cases, I’ve had ideas for stories that I won’t write for a decade. But then something will come up, and I’ll go back to those fragments of ideas and go from there.

TCR: So you’re not someone who deletes anything? Nothing’s in the recycle bin, everything’s just sort of hanging out somewhere?

BE: I don’t really delete anything. It’s always somewhere. There are scattered jottings in my Notes app on my phone, and I have bits on pieces of paper as well. All those things will eventually serve something. Often I don’t go back to them, but then I’ll write something and later realize that’s similar to something I’m looking at now in my file of some ideas that I hadn’t written.

TCR: Do you have a preferred way to take those notes? You said you have some in your phone and some on scraps of paper, but is there one [method] that you’ve seen more success from?

BE: No, I think it’s either way, whatever’s handy. If I’m around a pencil and a paper, or a pen and paper, or a notepad, then I can scratch something down and have it. In my office where I am now, my office up at school, I have a couple of notepads, and each contains a weird mix of stuff. So I don’t have one that’s exclusive to story ideas. There’ll be notes about things I need to do, most of which are no longer relevant, and one or two moments that are starred or circled as ideas I could explore. But also on my phone.  Like many people these days, I have my phone on me almost all the time, except maybe in the shower, so it’s very easy. If something comes to me and I’m busy with other stuff, I just jot it into my phone.

TCR: You said sometimes you’ll see a story, and it goes one direction but you think maybe it was going to go another direction. How do you notice, especially in this new collection, Good Night, Sleep Tight, that a lot of the stories feel like the same story but segments that went slightly different directions?

BE: Interesting. There are some thematic similarities between many of the stories in that book, maybe more so than my other collections. So there [are] a lot of stories about mothers, very broadly defined, and a lot of stories about post-humans and what it means to be post-human. But I think one of my big fascinations is genre and how narrative works. The way in which genre directs us to write in particular ways and the way it makes us expect things as readers. A lot of my work has been about challenging those expectations and seeing what I can do with genre that moves it in different directions. Sometimes I do something with a story, and there’s another facet that I can do in a different way, and so I do another story. Other times, I’m reading a book by another writer, and [I think], Well, why didn’t they do this? and usually the reason they didn’t was because they are working in the genre in a very deliberate way, and this is what the genre expects. I tend to read critically. I have the freedom, because I have a teaching job, to experiment. And experimentation in genre is what I really, really love.

TCR: Are those thematic elements on the surface, or something you notice in collecting these stories—like going, Oh, these all kind of do that same thing?

BE: There’s a moment when I’m putting a collection together where I start to think of it as a collection. So I’ll have a bunch of stories, around two-thirds of the stories, and then I’ll begin to think about connections, how there are these thematic concerns that keep coming up, ideas that keep coming up. At that point, I deliberately begin writing stories to fill in the gaps and make the connections. Sometimes that comes easily and the gaps fill in well. And other times, something happens that I don’t expect. There’s a moment when I go from “I have a bunch of stories” to “I have a collection.” And during that process, I’m writing new stories, and I’m looking at stories that I didn’t use in previous collections, thinking, Does this actually belong here? And then I’m also dealing with the stories that I’ve written in the last year or two.

TCR: In the process of putting Good Night, Sleep Tight together, at what point did you see that theme? From what I see, most of the stories had their original publication in 2020 through 2022, but then you added “Maternity” from 2014.

BE: That was a late addition. “Maternity” is a weird story for me in that it’s not weird, if that makes sense. It’s straightforward [and] fairly realistic. It’s based very, very closely on a story [about] when [my and my wife’s] son Max was born [and] the nurse who was attending my wife. Since we’re both writers, we tend to ask people questions. So the nurse told us a story that is not exactly like “Maternity” but similar enough that it stuck in my head. It’s a story that I’ve put in previous collections. I think the first collection I tried to include it in was A Collapse of Horses. I had it in there, and I wasn’t sure about it, and my editor said, “Nah, let’s take it out, save it for another book.” I had it in Song for the Unraveling of the World, and it just didn’t feel like it fit there, so I took it out. And The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell had different thematic concerns, so I didn’t even try to include it there.

Then as I was writing these stories, I’d almost forgotten about that story because it had been written long ago. As I was starting to put them together and had things like “Imagine a Forest” that are dealing with motherhood and the relationship of a parent to a child in a very strange/weird way, I thought it would be interesting to have a counter to that—something that people will have that they can hold onto in a different way.

TCR: How much input, then, does you editor have in putting together a collection?

BE: It varies. It’s book to book. There are moments when I’ve asked for input and then there are moments when I’m pretty sure of the collection. They, of course, have their opinions, but I’ve found if I say, “No, I don’t want to take that out” or “No, I don’t want to add this one in,” my editors are usually open to what I want to do. The tricky thing is that, as you become more well-known as a writer, people are more willing to let you publish what you want to publish. That’s tricky because then you have to be a little more critical of yourself in terms of what you are doing. You can’t rely as much on the editor having a critical eye.

I assembled this collection pretty slowly, even though the stories were written in a certain grouping of time. Coffee House [Press] went through some structural changes, and we ended up pushing the publication date back. As a result, by the time we were looking at proof pages, it was what I wanted it to be and it was what they wanted it to be, too. [There are] other collections I’ve added a story [to] at the very last minute; Collapse of Horses and Song for the Unraveling of the World were both this way. I thought [each book] was done, I turned it in, the editor was happy with it, and then I just kept thinking about it, and felt it needed something else; I just didn’t feel like it was connected up all the way.

One of the things that I do that’s tricky is that I don’t really write in just one genre. A lot of my stories have a horror mood, but not every one of them does. And that horror mood is applied in different scenarios and different milieus. [As] I’m putting together a collection, I’m thinking about how these stories can support one another, how these stories can justify their inclusion. And how can I—since this isn’t a literary collection or a horror collection, per se, or a sci-fi collection—how can I put things together in a way that makes people feel like all these stories belong?

TCR: In your publication experience, what constitutes “last minute”?

BE: I’d have to go back and look, but I have added stories after [being] told it was the last possible deadline. I added one story when we were about two days away from going to the printer. And they were like, “We’re willing to do it, but you’re making us crazy.” And if you [could] get ahold of a proof copy of A Collapse of Horses, you would see there [are] a couple stories included [there] that were not in the final collection. I had in the galleys a story called “And Yet” and maybe “Mother,” as well; I don’t remember. There’s at least one, maybe two [extra] stories in it. And at the last minute, even after the galleys had been printed, we made the decision together to pull those stories and save them for something else. “And Yet” came out in a collection I did for Weird House last November called And None of You Shall Be Spared. It made it into a book, but it’s a very different book than the one I first thought it’d be a part of.

TCR: In other words, some of those versions feel like they fit the milieu again of the thematic stories, where they feel like parts of the same story but they aren’t the same story. I find that fascinating.

BE: Sometimes I’ve kept a story out of a collection because it strikes me as doing something too similar to another story in the collection. But it’s a balancing act, because sometimes there are stories in which I’ll deliberately use a bit of language from one story in another story to create a communication channel between the two and cause something to happen for the reader.

TCR: I love that. Sometimes the way you do that is through names, or characters that don’t have names that behave the same (as characters with the same name). One thing that comes to mind are the early Bosephus stories [from the collection Altmann’s Tongue]. Were those linked in the writing process or were they separate? Was this name or this character still bouncing around in your head, and you had to do more?

BE: It’s hard for me to remember because those were written in the ’90s, but it was a question of I’m not done with the character, or I’m not done with the character like this so I want to something more. Another example is I have a bunch of characters named Kline, and sometimes it’s very clearly the same character and sometimes it’s not. They all have a kind of affinity, I guess. The name Kline is almost more like a species name: when I use it, I have a sense of the characteristics of the animal attached to it. And then there are moments when, for instance, at the beginning and ending of The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell, there are some echoes in terms of names and what’s going on with some of the stories. Those sorts of things can be really fun to play around with.

TCR: How do you choose names? Your naming conventions are fascinating.

BE: I don’t know. I’ve always liked unusual names. I kind of collect them, so if I run across them, I write them down. I really like Scandinavian names and Germanic names, names with hard sounds. Sometimes, I’ll pick a name that has a meaning attached to it, even if that meaning is only obliquely connected to something going on in the story. And other times, it’s that I like the sound of the name. There is something about opting for names that just do not sound familiar to most American readers that allows me to do something in the stories that’s useful. There’s a slight disorientation that comes from that even though I imagine that, when my work is translated into German, it might not have the same level of disorientation.

TCR: Do you think some of your own work as a translator has influenced that? Like, you have a greater exposure to sounds and language, especially more than the average American?

BE: I probably do, but I also read a lot, and I read a lot of stuff from all over, and I think that naturally exposes you to a different range of names. The way I translation has been helpful to me is that it allows me to think about language differently. If you see how language is working in French, which is the language I translate from the most—I’ve done a little Spanish and a (very) little Italian as well—if you look at the way sentences are put together and how they function, it can make English feel very strange. But it can also give you strategies to estrange the English language, if that makes sense. In my fiction, I’m often introducing moments that slightly warp the more standard uses of the sentence, or the more standard uses of English.

TCR: Do you think some of the fascination with weird names comes from growing up in an area where everyone basically has the same four last names?

BE: That’s definitely part of it, but since I grew up in Utah, as you know, I also grew up around kids with first names that were not like any names anybody else in the country had. So somebody named Alma, someone named Nephi, someone named Mahonri, for instance. Growing up, those [names] just seemed normal to me. If you are in another context, around someone who didn’t grow up around Mormons, and you say, Oh, my friend Nephi, they’re like, What? People don’t know quite what to make of those names. But if you grow up in a religious culture like Mormonism, you grow up around Biblical and Book of Mormon language that uses English in a slightly different way, and in the way people talk in church, the way they talk in sacrament meetings, there’s a different register. All that made me attentive to language and the power of language to be more than a transparent way of conveying a meaning.

TCR: Do you think you’ll write anything about the LDS church again, or are you just kind of done with that?

BE: You know, I don’t know. I have a fellowship to the American Academy in Berlin from January 2025 to July 2025, and the project I proposed was a sequel to The Open Curtain—a very loose sequel but still connected to Utah and Mormonism. But we’ll see. I can see myself doing that—or at least could see it enough to propose it. I’m enough at a different place from that culture that it could be fun to explore.

TCR: Let’s talk more about craft and the differences in working for specific markets. In your own work, you’ve done tie-in novels. What’s your approach? You’ve been given a world to work in and now you have to do it. Is there any difference in that?

BE: When you’re writing a tie-novel, the biggest difference is that you are working in a sandbox that somebody else has already arranged. So you have all these things in place and rules that you have to abide by. It’s almost like working in a poetic form in that you have these constraints that you have to be willing to go along with. I’ve done several tie-in novels. I did two Dead Space videogame books, I did a Halo novella, as well, and then I did an Aliens novel set in the world of the Alien movies. With all those, it [varied] in terms of how much the people who owned the property wanted to be part of it.

When I did the Aliens book, [Dark Horse, the publisher] sent me a bible of what I could and couldn’t write. It was like a twenty- to thirty-page document that would say things like, “Do not mention the Berserker suit because the Berserker suit will have us pay an extra small amount in royalties to Fox if we use it.” They’d have, “You can’t use Ripley; there’s been too many books about Ripley, so you can’t use her.” And they’d say, “Aliens don’t have feelings; you cannot tell your story from the perspective of the alien.” So I had all those things that I had to look at, and then I wrote the novel I was interested in. I had to write a proposal for it. Victoria Blake, who was the editor at the time, wrote to me and [said], “I want you to either do an Aliens novel or a Predator novel. I know you think it sounds crazy, but I just want you to write up a one page summary of what you would do.” And I was like, “Okay, I’ll do that.” It was early in my career, and I had a sense of myself being much more on the literary side of things even though my fiction was about as weird as it is now. So I was like, Just for kicks, I’ll go ahead and do a page and see how I’d do it. So I wrote a proposal for Aliens: No Exit. As I started working on it, I became really interested, and the outline ended up being ten pages.

Once you do a tie-in, once people know you are willing to do a tie-in, you get contacted by other editors. The next person who wrote to me was Eric Raab, who was an editor at Tor. He’s since left Tor and gone into the gaming world. He asked, “Do you want to do a Dead Space novel?” I did the same thing as with the Aliens book: I wrote up a proposal for a book that took place before the first game and was about the lore of the game. It was about a character named Michael Altman, who was key to lore of the game. I felt like that was a great person for me to write about, since I’d written a book called Altmann’s Tongue—it felt meant to be. I was writing my proposal, and toward the end I realized I could do this thing that would totally change the lore of Dead Space but would be really cool. And I thought, They’ll never let me do it. It’s a multi-million dollar franchise. But I put it in the proposal anyway. I assumed it would get cut, but they were like, “Yeah, we love this. Let’s do it.” One of the pleasures of that was just being able to change what everyone thought they knew about the game and doing it in such a way that it gave the conspiracy aspect of the game even more depth.

TCR: So how did you end up writing with Rob Zombie? [Evenson co-authored the novelization of Zombie’s film The Lords of Salem.]

BE: This is another thing that just randomly happened. This may sound like weird advice, but just being in a position where people think you are the kind of person who might be open to things can lead to them asking you to do stuff. One of the agents trying to put the Rob Zombie book together had seen my work and seen the tie-ins, and there’s not that much of a gap between tie-ins and this kind of project, so they reached out, and I was of course interested.

TCR: Were there any differences in that process of co-writing versus just doing something on your own?

BE: If I’m doing something on my own, I can do whatever I want to do. But this was something before the movie came out. So most of Lords of Salem was written before or while the movie was being shot. As a result, I was kind of in the position of approaching the process differently. Initially, they sent me the three-page treatment and told me to go ahead and write a draft based on that, and then they’d get me together with Rob. I felt maybe it’d be better if I saw the script. So they sent me the script, and then it was really a question of thinking about how to keep the events in the script and have them work within the framework of a novel. Where can I expand, what can I do with the book that is not really possible to do with film, or is difficult to do. I took the script and preserved as much as I could, but also expanded and tried to increase the creepiness and atmosphere.

And then I went to New York and saw the rough cut of it at the producer’s office. It was two and half hours long, and then they ended up cutting it down to an hour and a half. [The script and the movie] are quite different. The book preserves much of what the script initially was. And I think it works in conjunction with the movie in an interesting way.

TCR: Is there anything else on the horizon like that for you or are you focused on just your stuff?

BE: At this point, I’m mainly doing my own fiction, but I’m also doing various film and TV projects. I’m working with a pretty well-known director on something. He had a script he’d partly written that he got stuck on, which may or may not get made. The difference is that you get paid more in that film and TV world, but people rarely see what you’ve been working on. The percentage of things that get made is pretty small. In the film and TV world, you’re always juggling five or six projects, hoping one gets made. Usually, none [of them] get made.

TCR: One thing that I aspire to that I see in your work is this lack of explanation: moments when you’ve put just enough on the page and then you’re leaving the reader to do what they have to with it. When you have those moments as the writer, when there’s specifically no explaining, do you know the answer or are you just stepping away?

BE: It depends. One of the ways I revise is by taking things out. So when I finish the draft of the story, the final draft may be ten percent shorter than the original draft. But I don’t take out that much. At the end of things, I sometimes have a notion of what it might be or mean, but I usually don’t know exactly what it was. Trying to occupy that space of what I think of as productive ambiguity as a writer as well as a reader can be really powerful, because you’re playing on your own and other people’s fears. One of our biggest fears is the fear of uncertainty.

So keeping things unknown or unfamiliar can potentially be really interesting. I’d say I probably know a little more than the reader in terms of what’s going on, but I don’t know that much more. I often stop—deliberately stop—before I would learn more or know things too definitively. I don’t want to make a commitment necessarily to something concrete. The stories I love are stories that, when you ask, “Is there something supernatural going on, or is a person’s mind going?” you can kind of answer “yes” to both questions. And that’s enough. You don’t need to know which is happening.

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T.J. Tranchell was born on Halloween and grew up in Utah. He has published six books, including The Blackhawk Cycle, a hardcover omnibus. In October 2020, The New York Times called his book Cry Down Dark the scariest book set in Utah. He holds a master’s degree in literature from Central Washington University and is pursuing an MFA through the UCR-Palm Desert Low Residency program. Tranchell has also published work in Fangoria. He lives in Washington State with his wife and son and teaches at a community college.