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A review by sisteray
A Nest of Nightmares by Lisa Tuttle
5.0
CW: Sexual Assault
This horror collection came out in 1986. At the time, it felt that bookshelves were filling up with mass market horror novels. I can totally see how this might have been buried beneath the white noise, and never got traction. This book really should have a bigger audience. But as someone that lived through the 80s, I can't help but feel that the fact that almost of these stories have female protagonists internalizing their social anxieties might have something to do with it.
These stories are all horrors spun out of the pressures and expectations that are put upon women, the specific dangers that women face and the emotional burdens that become personified or used against them. These masterfully written pieces require an audience that wants to give a crap about what women think/want/desire/fear. I'm not sure that the dudes in the 80s that were picking up random horror paperbacks were going to be the right audience for these stories.
Thankfully now by way of expanded speculative fiction and YA, more women are given the chance to tell their stories, and thus more women are being marketed to.
So I'm hoping that this collection finally has the chance to fall into the right hands.
Reading these stories 25 year after they were released really gives me a lot of perspective. There were a lot of revolutionary approaches to contemporary horror fiction. I feel that a big direction of present day horror is to tell personal stories with the horror as the frosting on the top of the character's internal struggle.
Frequently, while reading these I couldn't help thinking that Laird Barron or John Langan read these and figured they could write these kinds of stories.
This book still feels fresh. I loved almost all of it and what I didn't love, I still really liked, there isn't a dud story here.
So I guess I should talk about the content warning. There is a rape of a character in one of the stories and an observation of a rape in another story. I felt that she included them for specific purposes of storytelling, and they made sense in context. They didn't feel gratuitous or sexually exploitive to me. But if you had been curious to read this, you should be forewarned.
The big standout stories for me were: Flying to Byzantium (an author struggles with her past), Treading the Maze (British folk eeriness), The Horse Lord (Seriously Laird Barron must have read this), The Other Mother (The struggle of a single mother), A Friend in Need (adolescent loneliness), The Nest (sisters trying to patch things up). But really all the stories were quality material.
I can't recommend this enough.
This horror collection came out in 1986. At the time, it felt that bookshelves were filling up with mass market horror novels. I can totally see how this might have been buried beneath the white noise, and never got traction. This book really should have a bigger audience. But as someone that lived through the 80s, I can't help but feel that the fact that almost of these stories have female protagonists internalizing their social anxieties might have something to do with it.
These stories are all horrors spun out of the pressures and expectations that are put upon women, the specific dangers that women face and the emotional burdens that become personified or used against them. These masterfully written pieces require an audience that wants to give a crap about what women think/want/desire/fear. I'm not sure that the dudes in the 80s that were picking up random horror paperbacks were going to be the right audience for these stories.
Thankfully now by way of expanded speculative fiction and YA, more women are given the chance to tell their stories, and thus more women are being marketed to.
So I'm hoping that this collection finally has the chance to fall into the right hands.
Reading these stories 25 year after they were released really gives me a lot of perspective. There were a lot of revolutionary approaches to contemporary horror fiction. I feel that a big direction of present day horror is to tell personal stories with the horror as the frosting on the top of the character's internal struggle.
Frequently, while reading these I couldn't help thinking that Laird Barron or John Langan read these and figured they could write these kinds of stories.
This book still feels fresh. I loved almost all of it and what I didn't love, I still really liked, there isn't a dud story here.
So I guess I should talk about the content warning. There is a rape of a character in one of the stories and an observation of a rape in another story. I felt that she included them for specific purposes of storytelling, and they made sense in context. They didn't feel gratuitous or sexually exploitive to me. But if you had been curious to read this, you should be forewarned.
The big standout stories for me were: Flying to Byzantium (an author struggles with her past), Treading the Maze (British folk eeriness), The Horse Lord (Seriously Laird Barron must have read this), The Other Mother (The struggle of a single mother), A Friend in Need (adolescent loneliness), The Nest (sisters trying to patch things up). But really all the stories were quality material.
I can't recommend this enough.