My reading diet is varied — a little romance, a little literary fiction, a little sci fi, and a little horror works its way into the stack. “Good Night, Sleep Tight” by Brian Evenson straddles the horror and science fiction categories, with more than a little touch of the weird.
Many of the stories revolve around children (or child-like beings of indeterminate nature), so the bedtime blessing title fits and makes it that much more ominous. My favorite creepy children, I think, are Sidra and Selene from “The Sequence,” twins who have figured out a way to bend reality and slip into a sort of stateless in-between realm. This one (and many of the others) feels a bit like a Robert Aickman story: inconclusive and multi-faceted and unsettling without being directly horrifying.
“Good Night, Sleep Tight” is strange, dreamlike, and haunting — just what I’ve come to expect from an Evenson collection.
