“Around me all was dark with the darkness of the world in the night of language, words eating at my skin.”

—From “The Polygamy of Language,” by Brian Evenson

When Brian Evenson’s first book, Altmann’s Tongue, came out in 1994, it made barely a ripple in the centers of established literary might. It swiftly created a small and cultish buzz, but critics didn’t seem to know what to do with this bizarre collection of twenty-eight taut, almost relentlessly brutal short stories—here a boy finds his stepfather dead, his mouth stuffed with bees and sewn shut with carpet thread, there a cheerful skeleton named Bone Job rattles down the road in search of God—and a cerebral novella that seemed to borrow as much from the nouveau roman as the stories did from Hieronymus Bosch. When not ignored completely, Evenson was judged a slightly distasteful curiosity. In a capsule review, the Los Angeles Times nervously conceded that “there is a talent here,” albeit, “an eldritch one.”

In faraway Utah, though, Altmann’s Tongue was taken quite seriously. For Brian Evenson is something of an odd bird, an eldritch one even. Not only the author of fictions whose emotionless violence mocks human flesh, Evenson was also a Mormon of no little piety. Raised in quiet, conservative, church-going Provo, he was at one point even a member of the high priesthood of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. To thicken the brew, Evenson is also a scholar with a Ph.D. in critical theory. He was one of the main players in the brief flap over Gordon Lish’s influence on Raymond Carver a few years back, and has just published a monograph on Robert Coover’s fiction. Quotes from Kristeva and Artaud introduce stories in Altmann’s Tongue, and an accolade from Gilles Deleuze adorns the back cover of Dark Property, Evenson’s latest book.

It was in Provo, where the then twenty-seven-year-old Evenson had just begun teaching in Brigham Young University’s English department, that Evenson would receive his harshest reviews. In the fall of 1994, a few months after its publication, a Brigham Young student wrote a letter to Mormon authorities labeling Altmann’s Tongue “a showcase of graphic, disgusting, pointless violence.” She only made it to page eighty four—the conclusion of the aforementioned death-by-bees-in-the-sewn-up-mouth story, called “Stung,” which ends with more than a suggestion of incest—before she had to quit, feeling “like someone who has eaten something poisonous and is desperate to get rid of it.” She was, she wrote, “terrified to think that a man who is capable of creating and perpetrating this kind of mental imagery on...