Brian Evenson left the Mormon Church sixteen years ago, but he continues to look back, writing tales of the macabre that interrogate the language of religious belief. Photograph by Maurizio Cogliandro / contrasto / Redux

When Brian Evenson was seventeen, he awoke one night to a figure sliding open the door to his room. Then it stood watching him. The sliding door was jerry-rigged between bookshelves to create a small bedroom for Evenson within the living room of the house he shared with his parents and four siblings, in Provo, Utah. As the figure stood there, “motionless, mostly enshadowed,” Evenson couldn’t move. Nor could he see the figure’s face, though he was sure it belonged to “someone malevolent.” “Eventually, and seemingly suddenly,” Evenson told me by e-mail, “it was morning, my door was closed, and nobody was there. Yet the impression that someone had been there was so powerful, so strong, that it wasn't something I could deny. That’s an experience that I’ve remained uncertain about to this day.”

Many of the novels and stories that Evenson has written in the decades since deal in this kind of creeping uncertainty. In “A Collapse of Horses,” the title story in his new collection—out this month, alongside reissues of three of his novels—an unnamed family man is walking in the country when he comes upon a paddock where he sees “horses lying in the dirt, seemingly dead.” He then notices “a man on the far side of the paddock filling their trough with water, facing away from them,” and he wonders if this man, too, has seen the horses lying on the ground. The indeterminacy of the tableau paralyzes the narrator with dread. He flees. “I was leaving them forever in my head as not quite dead but, in another sense, nearly alive,” he explains to the reader. By the end of the story, the uncertainty will consume not only his waking hours but also, in a sinister turn, the lives of his family. “Not knowing is something you can only suspend yourself in for the briefest moment,” Evenson writes. “No, even if what you have to face is horrible, is an inexplicably dead herd of horses, even an inexplicably dead family, it must be faced.”

Evenson’s writing is often described as “literary horror.” Elsewhere in “A Collapse of Horses,” estranged childhood friends reënact a sadistic game; space-miners harvesting minerals from the core of a faraway planet find themselves at the center of a half-glimpsed, murderous conspiracy; a man travelling by car through the Nevada desert to claim his inheritance, in Utah, meets with an object of terrible portent in a diner bathroom; and—in a scenario that recalls Evenson’s unshakable experience in his childhood bedroom—a light sleeper banishes a shadowy intruder from his house in anticipation of its inevitable and vengeful return. Evenson’s fiction is equal parts obsessive, experimental, and violent. It can be soul-shaking—for the reader, but also for Evenson, who says that, while he was writing the story “The Munich Window” in a grad-school computer lab, someone else in the room asked him if he was “O.K.” “Only then did I realize I was shaking,” Evenson said, “that typing in and revising that story was a kind of harrowing for me.”

Evenson was born in 1966 in Ames, Iowa, but grew up in Provo, where his father taught physics at Brigham Young University, which is owned and operated by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Although both of Evenson’s parents were devout Mormons who raised him and his siblings in the Church, they were also, according to Evenson, “great and productive doubters.” In addition to being what Evenson describes as a “hard scientist,” Evenson’s father was in the local leadership of the Democratic Party. “A pretty thankless job in Utah,” Evenson attested, “where the vast majority of people were Republican.… I became very aware of the gaps between what people claimed to believe and how they acted, the moments when their ethics would get blurry or their perspective would warp reality to make it fit a preëxisting model within their minds.”

Photograph by Ulf Andersen / Getty

Evenson attended B.Y.U. as an undergraduate, and then the University of Washington, in Seattle, where he served as the leader of a student congregation. He was “deeply involved in Mormonism,” he told me, “working with interesting, liberal individuals who cared deeply for the people in their congregations.” “There was a moment in the late nineteen-eighties,” he said, “where it seemed like the Church was opening up, becoming more liberal.… But then everything went the other direction, tightening down, becoming much more conservative. In retrospect, I don't think it was ever going to open up much more than it had then, but at the time, inside it, I couldn't see it.”

He got his first academic job teaching creative writing at B.Y.U. Not long into his appointment, he also published his first book, a collection of stories titled “Altmann’s Tongue.” The collection features characters who chew their way out of coffins, are commanded to eat the mutilated tongues of other characters, and try to amputate their own gangrenous limbs. Following the book’s release, a graduate student complained anonymously to Church leaders about the “enjoyment” of violence that she felt the book condoned, which forced Evenson, young and untenured, to defend his art and his right to “academic freedom.” He issued a statement to the B.Y.U. administrators and senior colleagues overseeing his case, saying that the purpose of his fiction was to “show violence for the horror that it [is] and thus allow it to be condemned.” He never received a direct response. Evenson was, however, informed later on by the senior colleague overseeing his case that his statement had been tagged with a memo that said, “The bottom line is that he knows that this book is unacceptable coming from a BYU faculty member and that further publications like it will bring repercussions.”

In 1995, Evenson resigned his position at B.Y.U. and took a job at Oklahoma State University. His churchgoing dwindled throughout the late nineties. During that same period, Evenson recounted, “I'd be periodically called in by the leaders of my local congregation and challenged about my writing. Nothing aggressive, just them saying that I needed to really consider what I was doing and ‘the effect it might have on young uncareful readers.’ ” In 2000, he resigned his membership in the Church. “When I did that,” Evenson said, “they were suddenly resistant.” His bishop tried to talk him out of leaving the faith, and Evenson was encouraged to pray. But he was done with Mormonism. After about a year, he received the letter acknowledging that his resignation had been accepted and that, as he puts it, his name “had been blotted from the records of the Church.” “I didn't know how I would feel about it until I got the letter,” Evenson said, “but I was incredibly relieved.”