Evenson was raised a Mormon and served in his community clergy. I'm not sure the book achieves that purpose more than intermittently-but regarding the rituals of the temple, I'm utterly convinced.
Call it a slasher story seeking a higher purpose. There's plenty of bloody dementia in Curtain, in particular murder by knife. Not that Evenson has left behind the horrific imagination on display in his previous six works of fiction. In his afterword to The Open Curtain, Brian Evenson goes so far as to invite a search of the Internet to check his facts. The rituals are those of the Latter Day Saints, and though the passage comes from a novel, the author assures us the details are accurate. The passage would seem to describe the rites of some Stone Age tribe, but the setting is Utah, and the time is the middle 1960s. A wedding! And later the groom goes behind a curtain, where he assumes "the role of God." He reaches through iconic slits in the veil to imbue his bride with righteousness only then can she can open the curtain. Later still, the back of her thumb traveled symbolically from one hip to another, slitting open her loins. She was made to pull her hand across her chest and then let both hands fall, as if she had opened her chest to let blood spill down her ribs. was made to draw her hand across her throat as if it were a knife. If you were put in a position where you were forced to reveal the signs, you were apparently supposed to kill yourself. But I doubt there's a memoir that's revealed something so twisted as the following-the more so for being part of a wedding ceremony: They moved from signs and tokens to the penalties-promises that one would never reveal the signs and tokens, even at the peril ofone's own life. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:īOOK REVIEWS Violence and the Sacred John Domini The Open Curtain Brian Evenson Coffee House Press 218 pages paper, $14.95 Publishing these days can seem like a twelvestep meeting, everyone sharing their pain.
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