Samuel Beckett, Brian Evenson, and Contemporary Horror Fiction

Abstract Beckett’s works inspire highly generative, if oblique, legacies in the field of contemporary horror. This article explores Brian Evenson’s 2009 novel Last Days as a particularly concentrated site for Beckett’s influence. Detective Kline is abducted by members of a sinister cult dedicated to shearing off parts of their own body—a morbid inversion of the quasi-Beckettian dictum ‘less is more.’ Supplemented by Evenson’s own body of Beckett criticism, this essay reads Last Days alongside Beckett’s Molloy as a sustained study into the affect (or lack thereof) of extreme violence. In a 2014 interview, Evenson states “I tend to think contemporary American fiction would be more interesting if more writers knew Molloy ” (Evenson, Winnette 2014).