Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2021 October 13 • Wednesday

Feeling the Halloween spirit over here, I decided to read Lisa Tuttle's short story collection, A Nest of Nightmares.

The title is apt, to say the least. And kudos to publisher Paperbacks from Hell for doing such a wonderful job reprinting a lot of great horror fiction in beautiful editions with thoughtful and well informed introductions. Really a class act all around.

Here's the Gutbrain guide to the stories in this book.

First up is “Bug House”, a creepy and ultimately savage story about a woman fleeing a foundering marriage and seeking refuge with her aunt who lives in an old house by the sea. The title might signal some of Tuttle’s intentions, and she spins the web artfully, with a termite infestation that’s much more visceral and dreadful than are the mere words that describe it. A battle between a spider and a wasp gives a more prominent clue and conveys crucial information. When the story reaches the point where what we’ve learned is to be deployed, Tuttle hits hard and viciously. It’s haunting and horrifying and while no hunt of an explanation for how any of this could happen, it’s easily acceptable since the author matter of factly presents it as in line with the ways of the natural world, red in tooth and claw and with survival and reproduction as the primary imperatives.

“Dollburger” is a shorter story about a young girl terrified by a tale her father invents about men who prowl at night looking for dolls that have been carelessness left outside of their owners’ rooms so that they can throw them in a bag, take them away and make dollburgers out of them, to eat. Young Karen takes this to heart and the disappearance of her favorite doll, only one blue eye remaining, adds credence to the notion. Further evidence presents itself but what’s actually happening is more fantastical and closer to home. By the end of the second story, it should be clear that Tuttle is a writer of great imagination and exquisite control of atmosphere, psychology and image.

In “Community Property” Tuttle sketches a picture of a bad marriage that leads to a nasty divorce with an irreconcilable conflict over the family dog. This sting-in-the-tail story doesn’t surprise much but the precisely and economically rendered presentation of the main character’s thoughts and feelings give it substantial emotional force. This could have been an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents if it weren’t just a bit too far over the line for television.

The next story is the third out of the first four to have a cyclical structure or theme. In “Flying to Byzantium” an author travels to Texas from Los Angeles to be the guest of honor at a science fiction convention. She feels a bit like a fraud because she only wrote one book and it was a means of escape from a depressing, claustrophobic, hopeless life in another small Texas town where she lived with her mother. The book allowed her to effect a complete personal transformation and start over again in California. But she doesn’t think she can write another book as the first one was created by a person she no longer was in an environment she no longer inhabits. But as soon as she gets off the plane and approaches the small town of Byzantium, both her past and the book it produced come shimmering into reality and bit by bit her identity starts to revert, accompanied by dread of inchoate danger.

The next story is another circular one and the first to be told in the first person. In “Treading the Maze”, Amy is exploring the English countryside with her British husband, Phil. At an old inn, Amy sees a figure standing in a field and is inexplicably frightened. Just as puzzling is its immediate disappearance. That night she and Phil see people apparently dancing in the same field under the moonlight, then quicky realize that instead of dancing they’re walking a turf maze, a pattern in the soil. Phil is drawn to it and Amy wants to get the hell away from it. Where it goes from there is reminiscent of both M. R. James and the Eurydice myth.

“The Horse Lord” is also somewhat circular, concerning a family’s move to a forbidding house in a desolate part of upstate New York, locus of an ancient curse and gruesome massacre of an ancestor many generations ago. The denouement is in harmony with the first two stories in this collection and, interestingly, the married couple in the story are both fiction writers.

In “The Other Mother” Tuttle combines a vivid and chilling classic ghost story concept with a Welsh legend and the struggle of a divorced woman to be a single mother to two children while also fulfilling herself as an artist, in this case a painter, a charge that demands as much of her as her son and daughter do.

“Need” is a simple tale about someone’s return from the dead, distinguished by the quality of Tuttle’s writing and the ease and efficiency with which she creates believable and distinct characters with authentic-seeming inner lives.

A haunted piece of furniture is at the center of “The Memory of Wood”, a perfectly crafted story that uses the sense of smell to generate fear much as Shirley Jackson did in The Haunting of Hill House. As in “The Other Mother”, the main character is a woman with a very young son and younger daughter, a baby here, and a useless husband (ex-husband and absent in the earlier story). Helen does just about everything that would probably occur to most readers, and perhaps that’s where real horror begins, with an intrusion of supernatural malevolence into the world we know and live in, destroying people we recognize as ourselves and those around us.

Tuttle uses first-person narration for a second time in “A Friend in Need”, a much gentler story than the others in the collection, though it does involve trauma caused by child abuse. Cecily is in an airport waiting for her mother to arrive on a delayed flight from New York when she runs into her childhood friend Jane. Except that Janes was her imaginary friend. Yet here she is, for real. And Jane’s recounting of how she came to be Cecily’s friend in the first place is weird and fantastical and ultimately mysterious. The story has the feel of a classic ghost story, such as M. R. James again, but ends on an ambiguous and very contemporary and undemonstrative note more in tune with, say, Haruki Murakami. And is Tuttle making a sly reference to Mary Shelley, the creator of the horror genre, when Cecily begins her list of names of childhood friends with “Shelly, Mary”…?

The next story, “Stranger in the House”, is similar to the Twilight Zone episode “Walking Distance”. Sharon is having a fight with her nasty and abusive boyfriend while revisiting her childhood home and ends up, after an apparent off-the-page car crash, back in time and sees her nine-year-old self. Both stories flip the ghost story to be about the future haunting the past rather than the other way around. Both stories also build to a painful and tragic conclusion but for Sharon, the main character in Tuttle’s story, this is a cruel and monstrous culmination, exploiting childhood fears she’s outgrown as an adult in order to satisfy a deranged and presumably impossible impulse.

Ancient mythology makes an appearance in “Sun City”, in which Nora, wishing she could return to North Carolina from El Paso, where she’s stuck working the night shift at a motel while finalizing her divorce, remembers a brutal assault she witnessed and fled from while on her honeymoon in Mexico years ago. Then comes a daily occurrence of an overpoweringly foul stench and a figure wearing human skin as if it were a cloak. As well written as it is, this is the only story that didn’t quite come together with a satisfying click for me but seemed a little too loose and unfocused. The ending, while disturbing, didn’t seem to be possible and perhaps imagining that impossible occurrence is where the horror should lie, the groundwork wasn’t laid as persuasively as in the other stories.

The last story, “The Nest”, and the third to use first-person narration, also ends in an anti-climax and while the main characters, two sisters sharing an old house in a remote area after the death of their mother, are well drawn, we seem always to be on the fringe of the story. Pam worries that her sister Sylvia is being drawn into something sordid, inhuman and unnatural up in the attic. She even sees the weird shape of something large and winged but unidentifiable flapping from a tree to their roof, presumably to enter through the large hole that hasn’t been repaired yet. There’s a nice echo of an incident from their teenage past in this and that’s the high point of the tale. A Nest of Nightmares begins with a brutal sucker punch of a story and ends with what feels like too much held back.