Bennett Sims on Style, Sebald, and His New Collection

Last month, I attended a boozy party at the Brooklyn apartment of the novelist Mark de Silva. A group in the backyard fell into a round of the classic parlor game: who is the most talented writer of our generation? The host—most recently, the author of the 1,000-page epic The Logos, and thus no slouch in his own right—and I both gave the same answer: Bennett Sims. With his debut novel A Questionable Shape, and his first short story collection, White Dialogues, Bennett established a reputation as a master of psychological horror. He is, in my view, one of the most successful importers to contemporary American fiction of the narrative techniques of European late modernism—the sensibility of David Lynch crossed with style of W.G. Sebald for the age of digital media.