Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Last Days
    Unavailable
    Last Days
    Unavailable
    Last Days
    Ebook230 pages3 hours

    Last Days

    By Brian Evenson and Peter Straub

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    Listen to the audiobook instead

    About this ebook

    To find a cult leader’s killer, a former detective must literally give up his body in this award-winning work of literary horror—“A dark treat” (AV Club).
     
    Nominated for the Shirley Jackson award and winner of the ALA/RUSA Best Horror novel, Brian Evenson’s Last Days is an intense, profoundly unsettling down-the-rabbit-hole detective noir. Kline is a former detective who’s cool head in the face of a brutal amputation makes him the perfect candidate to infiltrate a dark cult that believes amputation brings one closer to God. Kline is tasked with finding the cult leader’s killer. But to get to the truth, Kline must lose himself—literally—one body part at a time.
     
    Last Days was first published in 2003 as a limited edition novella titled The Brotherhood of Mutilation. Its success led Evenson to expand the story into a full-length novel. In doing so, he has created a work that’s disturbing, deeply satisfying, and completely original.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateFeb 1, 2016
    ISBN9781566894241
    Author

    Brian Evenson

    Called "one of the world's foremost authors of books about programming" by International Developer magazine, best-selling author Brian Evenson has written about programming for over three decades. His books have sold millions of copies worldwide and have been widely translated. Brian is interested in all facets of computing, but his primary focus is computer languages. He is the author of numerous books on Java, C, C++, Python etc. Brian holds BA and MCS degrees from the University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign.

    Read more from Brian Evenson

    Related to Last Days

    Related ebooks

    Literary Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Terrify Yourself with These Ten Horror Novels

      Jun 19, 2019

      A list of books so scary you definitely won't keep them on your nightstand. The post Terrify Yourself with These Ten Horror Novels appeared first on The Millions.

      4 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Paul Tremblay

      Dec 3, 2020

      For the first time in weeks, I was swept along into that trance, that magic inner space where stories live. The post A Year in Reading: Paul Tremblay appeared first on The Millions.

      7 min read

    • Article

      Paul Tremblay

      Jun 17, 2020

      IT’S ALWAYS BEEN ONE OF MY BIGGEST FEARS that I would live to see the end of everything,” says Paul Tremblay, speaking to SFX from his Massachusetts home in the middle of lockdown. It’s a singularly peculiar time, and a peculiar interview for him to

      3 min read

    • Article

      Tender Is The Flesh

      Jan 29, 2020

      RELEASED 6 FEBRUARY 224 pages | Paperback/ebook Author Augustina Bazterrica Publisher Pushkin Press This is a pretty unpleasant book. It’s clearly meant to be, but knowing that doesn’t make it any less unsettling to read. It’s set in a near future wh

      1 min read

    • Article

      Stoker Winners

      Jul 1, 2021

      The Horror Writers Association has announced the winners of the 2020 Bram Stoker Awards. The winners were: Superior Achievement in a Novel: The Only Good Indians, Stephen Graham Jones; First Novel, The Fourth Whore, EV Knight; Young Adult Novel, Clow

      1 min read

    • Article

      A Year In Reading: Garth Risk Hallberg

      Dec 18, 2021

      Simply put, Yoon Choi is the most ambitious and accomplished practitioner of the Chekhovian short story to appear in many years. The post A Year In Reading: Garth Risk Hallberg appeared first on The Millions.

      9 min read

    • Article

      Shelf Life

      Sep 2, 2021

      Shelf Life
      4 min read

    • Article

      The World The Book Can Build

      Oct 13, 2021

      The World The Book Can Build
      12 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Kyle Winkler

      Dec 22, 2021

      The book is a blister. It’s fun to touch, mess with, and you eventually want to see it explode. But when it does, it’s more of a mess than you expected, hurts, and takes a while to heal. The post A Year in Reading: Kyle Winkler appeared first on The

      6 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Daniel Levin Becker

      Dec 17, 2019

      This year, I read in twos. Maybe this is always happening and I just started noticing. I also have a brain that’s unrepentantly hungry for patterns, so who knows. The post A Year in Reading: Daniel Levin Becker appeared first on The Millions.

      7 min read

    • Article

      Secret Sex Lives In Victorian England

      Jan 26, 2023

      NEW YEAR, NEW LIFE. As we march under cover of bravado into 2023, the first piece of good news is an impressive debut novel whose achievement largely matches its ambition. The New Life by Tom Crewe, an editor at the London Review of Books, is a story

      6 min read

    • Article

      Shelf Life

      Apr 6, 2023

      Shelf Life
      6 min read

    Reviews for Last Days

    4/5

    31 ratings10 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      Wow...where to start? Probably by saying that there will be some spoilers, so caveat lector. Last Days begins with Kline, a former undercover cop who recently had his hand cut off by a criminal, being engaged by a cult to investigate a crime that has been committed at their compound. The Brotherhood of Mutilation takes the biblical passage " if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off" literally and believe that the more amputations one has, the closer they are to God. They have chosen Kline for the job specifically because of his recent amputation. As Kline investigates, he discovers that the crime he has been tasked with solving hasn't been committed and that he is meant to be the fall guy.After fighting his way out of the compound, Kline falls in with the Pauls, a splinter group of the Brotherhood who are all called Paul and think it's only necessary to amputate one's right hand to demonstrate devotion. The leader of the Pauls convinces Kline that he will only be safe from the Brotherhood if he kills them first, thus setting the stage for a finale that makes a Tarantino film look tame in comparison.Evenson has created a strange, twisted, and utterly compelling story. Last Days is in many ways a critique of religions taken to extremes, and the lean prose gives the book a realistic feel that makes it all the more chilling. Ultimately, this is one of the most thought-provoking books I've ever read and it will continue to haunt--in a not unwelcome way--for a long time.
    • 5/5
      Kline, suffering from depressions after forcible cutting of his own hand is dragged against his will to investigate a murder of the head of a religious cult, one that follows the precept that you should cut of your hand if it offends you.Whoa this books intense, I could just not read it in one sitting. That's partly due to my feeling on amputation but mostly its just Brian Evensons extreme story and hard hitting style. Its almost pared down to the minimum, there are no long descriptions here, no out of place word (no surnames!). There is a perfect balance kept between the extremity of the story and the brotherly matter of fact tone. Its violent but never gratuitous, its characters deeply unlikeable but always interesting and never unbelievable. You are too dragged into the labyrinth of fleeting and changing facts unable to leave until till end. This is book is expanded from the "The Brotherhood of Mutilation" novella but it doesn't seem to suffer, thematically its suits being cut into a few sections, keeping you unsettled.
    • 4/5
      What to say.... I picked this one up due to the quality of the limited edition by Underland Press, beautiful book from an aesthetic point of view. Story wise this book certainly sets itself apart. Composed of two sections, "The Brotherhood of Mutiliation" and "Last Days", the novel tells the story of Kline, a detective who loses his hand. This results in Kine becoming an object of interest for a crazy "the more body parts I remove the closer I am to God" cult. While the story stars a detective there is no mystery to solve, it's basically just the evolution of Kline himself that takes center stage. For me, reaching the end wasn't a monumental relief or feeling of accomplishment, just a sort of "Well THAT happened" feeling. The plot felt more geared for a short story/novella (alas that's what the first half of this novel originally was) and I didn't feel too captivated by it. It isn't poorly written though, so it earns a place on my "Quick summer reads" list.
    • 3/5
      3.5 stars
      The bloodiest book I ever read. It's only fiction, though, and they do way worse things to animals"brought to life for food."
      This book is about an undercover cop who, against his wishes, becomes involved in a cult where the more of your limbs you chop off, the holier you are.
      1/2 a star for originality. You'd be surprised how many different parts of yourself you can chop off, and still live, as long as you CAUTERIZE lol.
    • 1/5
      A crime has been committed in an underground religious cult. Kline, a one-handed detective, finds himself forced into solving the murder. Hard-boiled detective tale? Not really; Kline seems to miraculously come to conclusions without the reader being privy to any of his actual investigating. There’s nothing deeply satisfying or profound or even particularly original about a narrative that dishes out page after page of consummate violence at the hands of completely non-relatable characters. Plot? Characterizations? The point of the narrative? Despite having read this often-repetitive tale, there’s nothing to say other than it takes more than violence and shocking events to make a good story. This wasn’t scary, just repulsively violent . . . definitely not my definition of horror.
    • 3/5
      This book is certainly a quick read--I read it in one day--and Evenson is a skilled writer, but I think I would have traded some of the nonstop violence and body horror for more character development and plot.
    • 4/5
      Gory and gruesome, with a terrible momentum, held together by troubling philosophical musings on subtraction, identity, and fate.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Strange, profoundly unique, and unsettling. There is some of Evensons peculiar dream-logic at work here, and the setting is bizarre to the extreme; a cult which is dedicated to self-mutilation and glorifies amputation. Here Evenson employs distinctly terse prose, which starts out enhancing the noir, detective-novel like plot, but begins to serve as an increasingly strong counterpoint to the convoluted directions the story moves in. I very much enjoyed the strange ride this story took me on. 5/5

      1 person found this helpful

    • 1/5
      So terrible I couldn't finish and returned it to Audible. Protagonist is an idiot among idiots. The "investigation" makes no sense at all, even if you are insane which, clearly, the amputation freaks are. They are incapable of bringing the set up to fruition. Why do they think he gives a shit about their depravity or the caste system that organizes it? The writing is meh and I just didn't want to listen to any more of the creepy narration (I think the guy was supposed to be conveying horror, but it just came through as breathless awe). Yuk.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      The Book Report: Kline is a PI who doesn't need clients to hire him so he can live. This is because he stole money from a man who was trying to murder him. To make sure the man couldn't murder him, Kline bought time by lopping off his own hand before killing the murder-minded malefactor.All of this takes place before we meet Kline, and is the very least awful, least repulsive, and most understandable stuff that happens in the entire 201pp of this book. Still interested? Then on we go.The book is two connected novellas, “The Brotherhood of Mutilation” and “Last Days,” comprising the adventures of Kline in the weirdest subculture that christian imagination has yet to throw up: the mutilates. These are two sects of people who amputate parts of their bodies to align themselves with scripture: “And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out: it is better for thee to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye, than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire...” Mark 9:47 First and smallest of my anti-xian rants here commenceth: Srsly y'all can any sane person in possession of even modest decoding skills think this crap is meant literally? And if so, how can that morally defective person claim this horrifying religion is a force for love and peace after reading just this one passage?Back to the book. Borchert, leader of the mutilates and a twelve (number of body parts amputated), has Kline kidnapped and forces him to investigate the death of Aline, the leader and founder of the mutilates (a seventeen, as we horrifyingly and disgustingly learn later in the story), despite handicapping Kline by refusing to let him, a mere one (the hand that's gone), meet with any witnesses or ask any questions or see any evidence. Now old hands in the groves of noir know that this is a set-up so classic that one wonders if those blinking neon signs are visible from the parkway. Kline certainly knows the danger he's in, and has in fact been boringly repetitious in his demands to be let go, let out, left alone. And then evil, evil Borchert gives Kline just enough to compel him, as a PI, to address the itch of curiousness. (Bonus points for following that reference back to its origin.)All ends in tears, as Kline oversteps the rope he's been given to hang himself in a nefarious plot to rid the world of a bad “holy” man; the body count mounts; and Kline doesn't escape without losing yet more body parts to the Brotherhood of Mutilation. Escape, however, he does; and then we launch into “Last Days.”Oh my heck. Kline wakes up in the hospital, missing an entire arm now, to find a blond man with no right hand (go look that Biblical quotation up again) determined to kidnap him again, this time taking him to meet Paul, leader of a schismatic amputee group called “The Pauls” because they're all blond men with amputated right hands. Paul, the leader, wants Kline to go finish the job he thought was done, ie killing the unholy holy man.Which, not to belabor the point, Kline doesn't want to do but does, in the process meeting an old friend, killing an old enemy, and causing a degree of mayhem only describable as Biblical. Kline is seen as the Mutilate Messiah, the burning brand that will cleanse the filth and degradation of error from the mutilate community.I have to stop now, or I will vomit.My Review: This part will be short. It took me three weeks to read this book because I couldn't do much at a time. It is grim, grisly, and gruesome; it is horrifying and horrible; it is strong, strong stuff for even seasoned veterans of de Sade's revolting works.Brian Evenson was raised as a Mormon; he was told by the Mormon Church that he would have to stop writing if he wanted to continue being a Mormon. I don't know what happened after that, but I know there are more books by Evenson to be read. And, I cannot believe I'm typing this sentence, I will be reading them.One day.Evenson's vicious critique of christian religion is spot-on with my observations of the religion's effects on the world over the past two millennia. A more potent force for evil has never been unleashed. From the christian thugs burning the Library of Alexandria to the Westboro Baptist thugs condemning fags to burn in hell because their narrow-minded bigot of a gawd hates them, this religion should, in a properly run world, be closely monitored as a hate group and membership in it should deny a person all civil rights.Only recommended for the reader who seeks out the dark side.

      1 person found this helpful