I was reading Joanna Howard’s lovely book of stories, On the Winding Stair, and thinking about the setting. And thinking about setting in general. And—for pretty obvious reasons, I suppose—was thinking about Brian Evenson’s book Dark Property. And thinking about his settings. And I was wondering if books could have soul-mates, if they could be made for each other.

My favorite work by Evenson is the stuff placed in a minimally rendered, hot, choked with dust, empty of all but the most barren of trees, flat desertscapes. His Beckett-ian Utah. His Old Surrealist West.

A dark shape erred to and fro before the gate, She kicked the dirt apart, loaded her pockets with fresh stones. She unclove her tongue from the roof of her mouth, cleared the rheum of her throat.

Climbing the slope, she followed a trace no more than a susurrus upon the stone, The rocks flattened down to soft lumps. The stones grew hot, heat seeping through her soles.

She attained the top of the plateau. Beyond rose the gate, a tower and running wall to either side.

—Dark Property

And from my favorite Howard story, “The Black Cat”:

In unseasonable torrents, the car overturns on the road at the foot of a long, curling driveway…

In the hilltop mansion, the bell rings Rachmaninoff. Behind the poster bad’d veil, the elemental doctor rises to touch the forehead of his child bride…

…This place is swank, he tells the Hungarian. It’s Deco, the Hungarian corrects, we’ve got that here, too…

Behind the Japanese screen the two men are alone in silhouette…

In the library, misgiving huddles in the stacks. Again her frills are bristling. The electric candelabra portends a crushing blow from overhead…

Howard’s hilltop mansion is straight out of Agatha Christie. Evenson’s desert, from a Western dime novel. Both, though, reduced to precise enough sentences that work the way a single, finely drawn plastic line in the sketch of a face follows the contours without drawing every bit of it.

Not the same approach to different spaces, but complimentary approaches to different spaces. Made for each other.

Can you think of any other examples?