Also by Brian Evenson
Altmann’s Tongue
A Collapse of Horses
Contagion
Dark Property
The Din of Celestial Birds
Fugue State
Immobility
Last Days
The Open Curtain
The Wavering Knife
Windeye
Copyright © 1998, 2016 by Brian Evenson
First published in 1998 by Four Walls Eight Windows
Introduction © 2016 by Samuel R. Delany
Cover illustration and design by Sarah Evenson
Book design by Ann Sudmeier
Author photograph © Valerie Evenson
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Coffee House Press is a nonprofit literary publishing house. Support from private foundations, corporate giving programs, government programs, and generous individuals helps make the publication of our books possible. We gratefully acknowledge their support in detail in the back of this book.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Evenson, Brian, 1966–
Father of lies: a novel / by Brian Evenson.
pages ; cm
ISBN 978-1-56689-423-4 (eBook)
1. Pedophilia—Fiction. 2. Church officers—Fiction. 3. Obedience—Religious aspects—Fiction. 4. Psychological fiction.
I. Title.
PS3555.V326F38 2016
813'.54—dc23
2015010555
222120191817161512345678
Contents
Introduction: Brain Evenson’s Fathers of Lies
Acknowledgments
Part One: First Anamnesis
Part Two: Man of God
Chapter 1: Blessing
Chapter 2: Breakfast
Chapter 3: Bus
Chapter 4: Interview
Chapter 5: Funeral
Chapter 6: Nights
Chapter 7: Therapy
Part Three: Further Research
Part Four: Fochs
Chapter 8: Holding Cell
Chapter 9: Approval
Chapter 10: Confessions
Chapter 11: Hearing
Chapter 12: Church
Chapter 13: Collapse
Chapter 14: Final Session
Chapter 15: Court
Chapter 16: Drive
Chapter 17: Hospital
Chapter 18: Recovery
Chapter 19: Threat
Part Five: Finish
Chapter 20: A Chaste Little Kiss
Chapter 21: Rebirth
INTRODUCTION
Brian Evenson’s Father of Lies
by Samuel R. Delany
Father of Lies—Brian Evenson’s first novel—might be called “patriarchal horror fiction.” It deals with a situation conceivable in any hierarchical society where the head male has unquestioned institutional support for anything and everything he does, no matter whom he comes in conflict with, especially women and children. That authority derives from the fact that he is a man—regardless of what kind of man he is.
The book begins with a disturbing epigraph from the Kenyan novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, in which a demon or god exhorts a father to slaughter and drink the blood of his favorite son. As I read it over, I asked myself: “Will Evenson be writing about a situation whose closeness in both space and time paradoxically enough emphasizes his and Thiong’o’s cultural differences—in genre, in intent, in assumed psychology; in accessibility to one another and in politics—which is, in any case, a reading equally as ideological as the most traditional and racist, so that both of them must be interrogated with the greatest skepticism?”
But the fact is (partial disclosure . . .) I am re-reading Evenson’s novel; I first read Father of Lies more than a decade back. I liked it then; I liked it this time. Sixteen-odd years ago I first heard Evenson read—in a white second-floor gallery room on Second Street, just below Market across from the Arden Theatre in Philadelphia. While we sat on our white enameled benches and black plastic chairs, Evenson read us a funny, moving, astutely observed story that was also an incisive dramatic analysis of an order of redneck buddy nutsiness—in the skids of Salt Lake. My response to his tale was one I’ve only had to a dozen-odd writers in my life: I want to know this one. Evenson has written a number of books between then and now, which I’ve also read and liked. Making it clearer where he has gone since makes it easier to see things that must have been important to him about the place he started out. And by this reading of the novel, I’ve learned a little more about him, both as a writer and as a person. Here’s a bit of dialectic you can make of what you will. When, a couple of years after that first gallery reading, I finally read Father of Lies, page by page it did not produce as much pleasure as the earlier story. But the memory of the pleasure he’d produced and the skill he’d displayed were clear factors in making me trust what seemed a colder work to pay off by intellection what it lacked in laughs. The book rewards that trust. As well, in memory the first story was no less loaded with its own intellection. By now, as well, I’ve dedicated a novel of my own to Brian. (Disclosure, as they say, is full.)
For two years Brian Evenson served as a Mormon missionary in France and Switzerland. His BA was from Brigham Young University (BYU) in Provo, Utah. Then he went on for his MA and PHD at the University of Washington. In late 1993, with his wife and two daughters, he was again in Provo, preparing to teach at BYU. Earlier that year, five scholars from a group dubbed the “September Six” by the Salt Lake Tribune were excommunicated or disfellowshipped from Utah’s Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—generally known as Mormons—for publishing scholarly work allegedly criticizing or disagreeing with Mormon doctrine or church leadership. Evenson was friends with some in the group and sympathetic to many of their views.
A year later, still not thirty, Evenson’s own first story collection, Altmann’s Tongue (1994), appeared. A BYU student lodged a complaint with a Mormon church leader about the tales’ violence and sexuality, which elicited a request from Evenson’s department chair to Evenson that he write a response. When he did so, the chair sent it to university authorities and church leaders with an accompanying letter saying that Evenson had now been made to realize his stories were inappropriate and that he understood continuing to publish such work “would bring repercussions.” When Evenson was shown the letter purporting to explain “his” feelings and what he now “understood,” he began to feel that what he had thought was an honest request to explain his work was in fact a warning to stop writing what he was writing. This and similar incidents centering on two women colleagues at BYU prompted Evenson to end his relationship both with the educational institution and with the religion that supported it.
Before the Altmann’s Tongue affair was over, Evenson began Father of Lies, aware it meant a break with a large part of his previous life and shifting beliefs till then. The idea for the novel had come as far back as his first term teaching at BYU, though he had been uncertain he would write it until he actually began.
Hearing from another writer about an opening at Oklahoma State that had not been filled because they were not happy with the candidates, Evenson sent in a late application, got the job, and left Provo, Utah, for Stillwater, Oklahoma, with his wife and daughters.
In 1996 in Oklahoma, Evenson completed Father of Lies. Not long after, he would resign from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Most horror fiction is about evil—in much the same way most modern pornography tends to be about pleasure. But the horror or the porno
graphy that does not end either as mindless uplift or with the most predictable condemnation of the transgressions, while it may or may not have some literary staying power, is pretty much excluded from any kind of broad or statistical mass popularity. Both are genres where, whether they know it or not, readers arrive wanting to know they’ll be reassured at the end, one way or the other.
Evenson’s novel is one where the boundary between them—horror and pornography—is unclear. Both are more implied than displayed.
When, observing the story or its organization from one direction, we turn up our critical focus, we can recognize that what is horrible is that someone or ones get pleasure from things most folks would find unpleasant or, even more, cruel and destructive—if not simply yucky.
When we move that heightened focus around to the other side of the same order of events, to look at the text’s style or its emotional effect on us readers, it’s equally clear that pleasure itself is a complex business. When we experience it ourselves, we recall certain biological reactions coupled with the ability to remember some of it, but we always emerge from it, even with the aide-mémoire of language and whatever sensory recall we can summon up, forgetful over time both of the experience and what we understood of it, a situation which appears to create a yearning to repeat. (Though it is introspective, this is still Freud’s initial empirical evidence [see The Ego and the Id, 1915] for an Unconscious.) Here, what we experience and can observe, both in ourselves and in others, is desire, which Lacan describes as what remains when need is subtracted from want.
If we bring this critical focus back around to the evil itself—cruelty, destructiveness, the yucky—what we can see is the biological centrality of pain, discomfort, suffering; as well as the fear of them all and what they can grow into and what they all inevitably do grow into: death. Among the first questions experience leads us to ask is, in large institutional matters, how much of the same forgetfulness shapes not desire as a drive but as a barrier that resists any such drive and that must be overcome in order for the desires of most of the people to be achieved? What happens to the values of kindness and compassion of a small village church that will feed both the local indigent and the hungry wayfarer when they are displaced to a huge hospital in an undeveloped country—or, indeed, to an equally large hospital in a thriving capitalist city? “You can even come in—some of you—but we can’t treat you, because we don’t have the technology or you don’t have the insurance or the money to pay us. Besides, we all die anyway, so what does it matter if it happens on a sidewalk outside because you are the wrong color or too poor or we don’t have enough doctors: at any rate, we can make any of these excuses because the society we live in says they are acceptable ones, so why not tell lies to make your death more bearable to everyone but you . . . ?”
How quickly what was intended as a great, welcoming utopian construct devolves—under hypocrisy, economic pressure, sloth, and inefficiency—into a sprawling nightmare of exclusion, suffering, and inequity. We watch the local virtues that, moments ago, we were praising, transformed or unveiled as the manicheanisms that simply demand of us that we forget the suffering and pain of others if we are to effect the displacement and growth that was the initial motive for the movement from country to city, from small to big, from rural to urban (from low-density population to high-density population) in the first place. Can this be as true of churches or of schools as it can be of hospitals? Is it more or less likely to happen in schools supported by churches—such as the one Evenson taught at when he began this book? Is it more or less likely to happen in churches that have arranged supportive relations with the state?
Lots of history lie behind these questions. Sometimes it seems that history is nothing else but an attempt to answer them; and, under the pressures of weather, harvest, technology, and natural resources, different political decisions made to deal with their abuses mark the differences between freedom and oppression.
(One of the first facts of my language I remember learning as a child in the 1940s was that its longest legitimate word was “anti-disestablishmentarianism.” It meant to be against the separation of church and state. For at least a century now it seems to be—more and more—what we’ve suffered from. And the weather, crops, capital and banking interests, paper products manufacturers, oil interests, and transhumance a succession of political decisions try to respond to [or just the pig and chicken farms and privatized jails, along with attendant big pharma] have more and more to do with that shrinking separation, marked by things like the re-establishment of the death penalty, the defunding of Planned Parenthood, and the opposition to health care, not to mention opposition to the message of the current Pope himself.)
I repeat: Father of Lies is a horror novel. It is about both large institutional evils and about hidden personal horrors: and what happens when they meet. One sign of its intelligence, complexity, and nuance is that neither is presented as a simple, uncritical extension of the other. There is conflict between them. But there is support, too. It uses its genre to ask, what happens when those institutional evils come into conflict with evil that is well along into the hallucination and forgetfulness of individual psychosis?
In Father of Lies this conflict becomes the occasion for a set piece that gives us a kind of surreal trial—or rather a debate—between two parodic representations of Job-like proportions, the doctor, who is a stand-in for God, and the bloody-headed man, who takes the part of an ersatz Satan. (The writer of that initial faux Greek comedy concluded it with a happy ending that strikes many modern readers to be as inappropriate as that of Huckleberry Finn when Sawyer appears to take over at the end. Even so, we assume today we are supposed to read the debate in Job—and the positions of its debaters—seriously.) Evenson’s is presented with the conviction of the most skillful narrative so that its surface seems more or less reliable: the difference however is that, in Job, not only Job but possibly Job-and-Satan as well exist in the mind of God. What does it mean, Evenson’s novel asks us, when both God and Satan exist only in the mind of Job—who in this version exists as a psychotic murderer on the order of Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, Patrick Bateman. What does all this mean about the social institution that gives Evenson’s Fochs his power as well as access to the institutional margins in which he commits his atrocities. As well it impels the institution’s final gesture. (I can’t believe it’s a serious spoiler: it is the anticipated ending of a certain kind of horror tale:) Fochs is displaced to another location where he will still be free to do what he does or even worse. Both the ending and the development toward it are entirely entailed with the moral warning for which we traditionally we read them.
But Evenson gives us something more—something to trouble that so familiar warning: Evenson’s novel might quickly be described as turning on that single debate between devil and doctor. But he gives us several others—and they work to destabilize each other and the ends they lead to. One involves the compassionate therapist Feshtig, who is willing to challenge those above him in the institution in order to protect Fochs, until, with research, field-work, and careful inquiry, Feshtig can find out from Fochs’s half brother, Myra, what is really going on. For me, this is one of the most powerful scenes in the book. In the Myra/Feshtig confrontation, about the nature of Fochs’s childhood, we learn (one) it was probably the nightmare we might expect, if it was (two) not a good deal worse. But Myra gives us only fragments from which to extrapolate, and finally refuses to divulge “all.” The coherent backstory we might expect from another kind of writer that would explain “all” is not forthcoming. Rather, Evenson gives us a far more realistic and believable portrait of Myra, in which we learn (three) he doesn’t understand all of what happened to them as children himself, and (four) he feels a loyalty to what produced him and his insane half brother that he can see no reason to share with even the best intentioned stranger, such as Feshtig, who is so far from such a life there is (five) simply no way he can understand it. (From Feshtig’s own di
ction and account of the meeting, I can understand that, even as Feshtig is the easiest character to identify with.) Myra has survived (or possibly not; or not as well as we might at first assume) what we expect and what Myra suggests was a nightmare for his half brother and only slightly less so for himself, much of it repressed on both their parts. The scene ends with the strongly implied understanding that Feshtig can either use what he has in a positive way if he can, or he can forget it. It’s Feshtig’s call. Myra has done what he can. Further details would only put more mud in water already unclear. A continuing irony, of course, is that while Feshtig—the closest the novel comes to a portrait of a traditionally “good man”—is trying futilely to get more information from Myra, Fochs is free to continue his enormities, whether committed on his family or in his community’s night-alleys, jail cells, and hotel-hovels.
I point out here one other thing: for me the traditionally female name on the gruff male-appearing farmer and working-class half brother is the same order of sign for the unsettling of our sense of the culture he (and Fochs) hail from, which comes from the unknown insides of that culture, as the quote from Thiong’o that heads the book. Rather than the cliché reading you might give either (that is, what you already know about the way such signs are traditionally read in “our” culture), you might let both function as signs of what you do not know about the way they actually function in either culture (African or Mormon). That’s how I prefer to read what Evenson is pointing to with both signifiers. To develop either reading responsibly, you would have to read more Thiong’o to find out what it meant. You would have to undertake a personal study of rural Utah culture even a born Mormon such as Feshtig (or Evenson) does not (or did not at the time) have access to.
Here is one of Evenson’s most effective strategies. In many ways this is an anti-Stephen King horror novel: Evenson evokes what Hannah Arendt did in her 1960s coverage in that decade’s New Yorker of the trials of the Nazi war criminal captured by Israel, Adolf Eichmann: the banality of evil. Rather than utilizing a Baudelairean or Paterian attempt to raid evil for the beauty it may contain or pick over the cascade of minute perceptions of the world in all its variety—evil or good—for what can enrich life, Evenson takes on the more austere task of comparing only the banality of evil (Fochs’s over-quick description of the murder of a young girl out in the street one night; over-quick certainly because Fochs assumes the reader might find it too horrible to dwell on) with the banality of the everyday (an ordinary description of a bacon, egg, and cheese breakfast at the kitchen table with his family the next morning).
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