Last Days

ABOUT THE BOOK

Last Days began its life in 2002, when Paul Miller of Earthling Publications approached Brian Evenson about writing a limited-edition novella. At the time, Evenson had just read Red Harvest and was fascinated by Dashiell Hammett's relentlessness. He had rediscovered Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly, and loved how Dick grafted noir to science fiction. Then he stumbled onto Jonathan Lethem's Gun, with Occasional Music, re-read Peter Straub's beautifully crafted The Throat, and started looking at Joel-Peter Witkin's photographs. With all that whirling in his head, he sat down, had a few false starts, but eventually arrived at the idea for "The Brotherhood of Mutilation." Earthling published the book, and very quickly it sold out.

Everybody thought that was the end of the project. But somehow a few prints of the original 315-copy print run of the novella got into the right hands. One went to Claro, the French editor of a series called Lot 49, who decided to publish it in translation. Another made its way to Denmark, to the filmmaker Karim Ghahwagi, who wrote a screenplay. Another went to Victoria Blake, then an editor at DH Press, the prose division of Dark Horse Comics.

Almost immediately after the initial publication, Evenson wanted to continue the story, but he knew it needed to hold its own against "The Brotherhood." He was still reading noirs-work by Fredrick Brown, Dan Marlowe, David Goodis, and Richard Stark was most important. Then he saw Odd Nerdrum's painting One Story Singer. When two friends separately mentioned that Ludwig Wittgenstein's brother Paul was a one-handed piano player, the elements of "Last Days" suddenly fell into place. By that time, Victoria Blake had started Underland Press, and wanted to publish both of the novellas as a single novel. The first edition was published as an original trade paperback in February 2009.