A Nest of Nightmares

INTRODUCTION

The horror fiction genre that we readers hold so dear to our dark hearts did not spring forth from the ether fully formed. Its genesis was as an outgrowth of its literary predecessors, an embryonic gestation that slithered about beneath labels like science fiction, fantasy, gothic, suspense, thriller, mystery. Not even the authors themselves were privy to what lay beneath the works they were producing: ‘I didn’t think my stories were “horror stories” even when they were obviously not “science fiction”,’ Lisa Tuttle remarks about her earliest writing. ‘Pre-­Tolkienesque fantasy boom, pre-Stephen King and mass market horror fiction, science fiction kind of encompassed everything that was not the here-and-now or mundane or realist mainstream fiction.’ A lifelong reader of supernatural tales, by the time Tuttle was twelve years old she had devoured her father’s collection of Poe, Bierce, Saki, and ‘anything with the words “ghost” or “supernatural” in the title.’ This is the fertile earth from which horror writers are born and bred, and one can see its fruit in the stories collected here in A Nest of Nightmares, Tuttle’s 1986 book that has, until now, been unavailable to most readers.

While in the very early Nineties I read some of Tuttle’s output in various horror anthologies, it wasn’t till reading Stephen Jones and Kim Newman’s essential Horror: 100 Best Books in 1994 that I became aware of A Nest of Nightmares, and soon after learned that it had never been published in the United States. I had virtually no way of obtaining the book, and I didn’t for nearly twenty years. When I did find it in a used bookstore in New Jersey, I devoured it at once, and was immensely pleased that each story slaked my horror fiction cravings. Her stories could be mean but not cruel, random but not meaningless, violent but not cheaply so. And the deliciously creepy birds on the cover – what an eye-catcher! (Artist Nick Bantock went on to create the bestselling Griffin and Sabine Saga.)

Tuttle began having her stories published in the very early 1970s, at the beginning of the Paperbacks from Hell era. Published in science fiction and fantasy magazines, it is obvious they had more in common with what would become the horror genre in a few short years. While she may not have thought she was writing horror, early tales like ‘Dollburger’ and ‘A Stranger in the House’ foreshadow the understated, realistic work that would come to be known as horror as the 1970s ended. Tuttle states that ‘although I accepted it, I was not enamoured of the term “horror” for the genre’ – a common enough objection by many a genre writer! ‘My preference was for ambiguity,’ she continues, ‘and when dealing with “impossible” or supernatural elements I always felt that the further you pressed it, the more likely it was to start seeming ridiculous, and stop being genuinely disturbing or scary.’

Fortunately for us, Tuttle made sure she did not press too far with her scenarios, and virtually all of the stories end on a note of chilling realization that horror lurks beneath the domestic façade.

Born in Houston, Texas, in 1952, Tuttle moved to London in 1981. Her writing continued, including works with future Game of Thrones author George R. R. Martin, with whom she’d collaborated on a science fiction novel. At the very dawn of the 1980s she appeared in Kirby McCauley’s earth-shaking tome Dark Forces, which showcased an all-star dream team of horrific talents of past and future: Robert Bloch, Ray Bradbury, Karl Edward Wagner, T.E.D. Klein, Dennis Etchison, Robert Aickman, and the King himself (the only other woman on the roster was the doyenne of literary mainstream fiction, the eternally prolific Joyce Carol Oates, whose own taste for and appreciation of horror has only grown). Tuttle’s first novel, Familiar Spirit, was published by Berkley Books in 1983, a supernatural work about a demonic possession that slotted easily into the new paperback horror boom.

In late 1984, an editor from Sphere Books named Nann Du Sautoy approached Tuttle about putting together a collection of her short stories. Du Sautoy, horror fans should note, is credited with discovering Clive Barker, whose Books of Blood Sphere had published earlier that same year. The era-defining success of Barker’s six-­volume collection was unprecedented. Suddenly one-author short story collections, the bane of fiscally responsible publishers everywhere, were hot stuff, and Du Sautoy offered Tuttle an opportunity to pick her best stories for publication; thus was A Nest of Nightmares born. Although not a barn-burning success like Books of Blood – most likely, Tuttle supposes, the reason it was never published in America – it did have several European printings and was almost part of the fabled Dell Abyss horror line.

While she considers herself a Second Wave feminist, Tuttle did not write female-centered fiction as a reaction to the male-dominated horror genre (‘Fiction is not and never has been about propaganda,’ she states). In the late ’80s she was infuriated by a high-profile horror anthology which contained only stories by men; in a genre pioneered by women, how could that be possible? She then edited her own title featuring solely women writers, Skin of the Soul, published by The Women’s Press in 1990 and by Pocket Books at Halloween 1991 with a decidedly unsettling cat-woman gracing the cover. No surprise, then, that virtually all the stories in A Nest of Nightmares feature women as protagonists.

An astute chronicler of the female psyche, Tuttle peoples her stories with the lonely, the lost, the heartbroken; even those who are in relationships seem to have some chasm beneath and between. These are real women, scarred by the past and uncertain of the future, who bear the emotional burdens of domesticity. One may be reminded of Ramsey Campbell’s unfulfilled protagonists going about their dreary Liverpudlian lives in damp, gloomy apartments; or of those wanderers and dreamers who populated Clive Barker’s first fictions, when characters find meaning in their sudden doom or the appearance of the monstrous other (not for nothing then did George R.R. Martin team up Tuttle, Barker, and Campbell for the excellent third entry in the Night Visions anthology series). Tuttle is a master of the formula horror story, but not in a way that makes her work obvious, creaky, or clichéd; the recognizable scenarios – a traveling couple, a harried single mother, a woman’s workaday drudge, a niece visiting her ailing aunt, two sisters buying and restoring a house – perfectly conceal a darkness our author sets about revealing.

One of the criticisms leveled against the horror genre is that it is too often a fantasy land of adolescent male aggression, obsessed as it is with the extremities of life and limb, madness and fear, sex and death, of killers and outcasts, monstrous egos and unstoppable rage. Horror becomes an endurance test, a game of one-upmanship: how far can the writer go, how much can the reader take? None of this for Tuttle. Here horror tiptoes, glides, smothers, appears in tiny details, climbing in at the corner of the page, lying in wait till the final sentences, then springing forth fully formed yet all too recognizable. Tension and suspense are present, but not unbearable; Tuttle’s work is appealing, not off-putting.

A ghostly premonition of grief haunts ‘Treading the Maze,’ in which a husband and wife witness a seemingly harmless pagan ritual, and the wife will come to realize it wasn’t so harmless. In ‘Horse Lord,’ ‘The Memory of Wood,’ and ‘The Other Mother,’ children are a woman’s undoing (ancient myths and possessed equines also appear). Can one be a mother and a full individual person at the same time? ‘I don’t know if I can manage it, not even with all the good examples of other women, or all the babysitters in the world,’ says a woman in the latter story. These are words mothers must not say aloud, for once spoken those forces will manifest themselves in otherworldly ways. Tuttle unleashes them, those inchoate fears at the bottom of women’s minds, and lets them do their worst. These feelings are not fit for idle chat over coffee. The grotesque, flayed horrors of ‘Sun City’ appear in daylight, terrifying a woman already exhausted by her all-night employment. ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ is surely one of the most distressing portraits of the writing life, a nightmare of humiliation, indignity, and vulnerability: as mother always said, ‘Don’t think you’re different, don’t think you’re special.’ The final tale, ‘The Nest,’ is a wise and heartbreaking account of loss about two sisters who are fixing up their new home. The haunting imagery – of a rubbish-strewn attic, of something black and unrecognizable flapping in a tree – perfectly encapsulates this collection’s title.

Often the horror is all too recognizable: sadness, alienation, a not-belongingness, modern anxieties and disappointments that grow too large. Lisa Tuttle’s characters suffer not just these pains but also the ineffable and unpredictable slings and arrows of the supernatural, the unexplainable, the uncanny. The sometimes predictable nature of some of the stories to me works not against them but in their favor: no matter how cozy we are in our rooms and our homes we are still most naked and vulnerable, and we cannot hide from the waiting world; no matter how well we tend our nests for ourselves and our offspring, certain doom awaits within and without. All that is uncertain is when.

Will Errickson

October 2019

Will Errickson is a lifelong horror enthusiast. Born in southern New Jersey, he first encountered the paperback horrors of Lovecraft and Stephen King in the early 1980s. After high school he worked in a used bookstore during the horror boom of the ’80s and early ’90s, which deepened his appreciation for horror fiction. Many years later, in 2010, he revisited that era when he began his blog Too Much Horror Fiction, rereading old favorites, rediscovering forgotten titles and writers, and celebrating the genre’s resplendent cover art. With Grady Hendrix in 2017, he co-wrote the Bram Stoker Award-winning Paperbacks from Hell, which featured many books from his personal collection. Today Will resides in Portland, Oregon, with his wife Ashley and his ever-growing library of vintage horror paperbacks.