Out on a Limb: Brian Evenson's <i>Last Days</i>

Abstract Brian Evenson's horror detective novel Last Days demonstrates an exhaustion with epistemology—the desire to know, and the cultic schisms between guardians of knowledge that it produces—and a turn toward ontology—specifically, a consideration of worlds in which things might not be the same from one moment to the next and a certain kind of knowledge therefore becomes impossible. In such worlds, in which “the future constancy of the real is not guaranteed” and moreover “contingency is necessary” (to recall the work of philosopher Quentin Meillassoux), the project of detection evidently comes under pressure—as do the literary practices of representation and narration. In this article, I develop a close reading of Evenson's novel in order to pursue the philosophical, political, and ultimately literary critical consequences of such a situation.