The Unwelcome Calling: Brian Evenson’s Phantom Limb

John WM Thompson Under Review:Phantom Limb. Brian Evenson. Coffee House Press, October 2026. A Brian Evenson sequel is an odd proposition. Evenson is one of our great practitioners of what M. John Harrison has referred to as “one-shot epistemes.” Over more than thirty years of prolific output, he has not so much as gestured toward a reader’s potential foreknowledge of what came before the first word of a story. They arrive as complete kits or ready-mades. Evenson’s worlds, lean and tightly wound with fate, erect and collapse as cleanly and quickly as the most skeletal stage sets. When the curtain falls on a story, one is not meant to linger in further possibilities behind it. This is part and parcel of its destabilizing effect. And yet now, with his newest novel, Phantom Limb, Evenson invites readers into the same air for the first time, returning to the bloody affairs of Kline, the maimed and unwilling detective of 2009’s National Library Award-winning Last Days. To recap the events…

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