The Mirror of Everything: A Review of Brian Evenson’s Glitch

by Luke Dylan Ramsey

Who is the best living American writer? My pick would almost certainly be either Don DeLillo or Thomas Pynchon; however, both are in their late eighties, and their production of new works has greatly slowed over the course of the last decade or so.

I had a friend in grad school who, when manic, would extoll Laird Barron’s virtues as if Barron was Jesus Christ and my friend was John the Baptist. Real talk, he was crazy for the guy. Out of the generation following Pynchon and DeLillo’s, I think choosing either Barron, Jeff VanderMeer, or, ahem, Brian Evenson as the best living American writer would be picks I could definitely respect and admire.

Speaking of Evenson, his new novella, Glitch, arrived at my door yesterday (8/8/2026) and I devoured it in its entirety almost immediately. Did not take me more than an hour or two, either, as Glitch is a small book, even for a novella: it runs less than seventy pages. Now, I know what you are thinking: the book is listed as containing over eighty pages on Amazon and Bookshop.org, but the page count is padded by the inclusion of three short stories from a forthcoming collection by Richard Kadrey that will be put out by the same publisher as Glitch: Pink Beam Press.

Pink Beam Press is a new press (Glitch is one of its debut releases) that is apparently devoted to publishing books that are at least somewhat reminiscent of the works of Philip K. Dick (!) and, with Glitch at least, I would say there is at least some overlap between Evenson’s new novella and the works of PKD. Indeed, a plot summary of Glitch—a man’s consciousness is digitally uploaded but there is a, cough-cough, glitch in the process that serves as the plot’s main MacGuffin—might bring to mind works by Dick such as The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch or especially the short story “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” (the basis for the movie Total Recall).

Out of what I have read by Evenson so far, I would say Glitch is most similar to The Warren, another novella. Glitch is not quite as visceral as Evenson can be at his best, but that could just be because most of the action takes place in a digital realm. The novella is a mix of literary fiction, sci-fi, and horror: Evenson’s typical mode; it could serve as a relatively easy introduction to Evenson’s oeuvre, I would say, although if you are new to Evenson, I would probably start with the story collection Song for the Unraveling of the World (his best collection, in my opinion, and one of the finest story collections of the 21st century so far) or the novel Last Days (Phantom Limb, a sequel to Last Days, will be published this fall by Coffee House Press, who have put out a number of books by Evenson).

Glitch can be read as a sort of villain origin story. The final pages of the book are fairly open ended. The novella could certainly have been longer: its sixty-odd pages could have served as a sort of prelude or introduction to a narrative I cannot outline for fear of spoiling the ending, a finale that definitely implies much more than it states about the possible futures the characters may or may not be set to experience.

The world Evenson built for Glitch is both subtly and unsubtly futuristic. There are details that bring to mind the world we live in right now, just aged up a decade or two; there are also details that make me think the book could be set as far in the future as a hundred or more years.

Although Evenson does not explore his sexuality really at all, the novella’s main character is a bisexual man; it is always nice to see some representation for that particular category of human, as you do not really see such depictions all that much.

Overall, Glitch is more than solid but less than perfect. I would give this novella an 8/10.