“The wasp is making sure that her sting has [the spider] completely under control before going on. She’ll dig a hole and pull the spider into it, then lay her egg on his body. The spider won’t be able to do a thing but lie in the home of his enemy and wait for the egg to hatch and start eating him.” He smiled his unpleasant smile.
— from “Bug House”
A Nest of Nightmares by Lisa Tuttle is one of the titles Valancourt Books has reissued in conjunction with Paperbacks from Hell written by Grady Hendrix with help from Will Errickson. According to Errickson in his introduction, publishers were unwilling to take chances on story collections from relatively unknown writers until Clive Barker’s Books of Blood became hugely popular in England. Not long after, Barker’s editor offered Tuttle the chance to compile this collection. First published in England in 1986, it’s a shame American readers have had to wait thirty-three years to read this collection.
The stories herein remind me less of ’80s horror than of Twilight Zone and even more of what is now called Domestic Suspense or Domestic Noir (see the anthology, Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives, or the two volume Library of America publication, Women Crime Writers), a sub-genre that flourished from the 1940s into the 1970s and which, at least peripherally, would include some of the work of Shirley Jackson. Like Gothic, Domestic Suspense has transformed itself to fit the current culture, as in the work of Gillian Flynn. And if you read none of it, you should still read these stories.
Tuttle features women, married or not, young or old, in their pursuit of daily life – a writer attending her first s. f. and fantasy convention; two sisters buying a house together; one married couple on vacation in England; another married couple and their children settling into a new house – and meeting up with something they struggle to understand, and maybe don’t survive.
Tuttle isn’t a flashy stylist, but she puts together quiet, well-paced, direct sentences the cumulative effect of which is at least equivalent to any of the better-known ghost/horror stories I’ve read from the period. As with any collection, there are stories I’m less fond of than others – for instance, “Flying to Byzantium,” which was good, but did not engage me as much as others, even though Errickson singles the story out for praise.
Of the stories I enjoyed most, the first, “Bug House,” is a good introduction to Tuttle’s voice and perspective. The protagonist visits an ailing, elderly aunt who seems not quite aligned with the reality of her dilapidated house. Tuttle conveys the niece’s escalating anxiety and confusion, the reader seeing the threat but wondering at its nature and how it will strike. “The Nest” may or may not be a story of the supernatural — there’s something there that surely seems supernatural, but the relationship between the sisters was waiting for a catalyst to spark a confrontation and a reckoning of long-standing contention. And then in “Treading the Maze,” only the outline of the old maze remains, hard to see, and yet the young wife feels like she might lose her husband there.
I cannot recommend these stories highly enough. The quietness of Tuttle’s approach lends them a greater impact as time after time someone who innocently enters a situation, someone no more guilty of trespass or bad intentions than the reader, meets something that affects their life. Or ends it.
A NEST OF NIGHTMARES by Lisa Tuttle (2019; Valancourt Books)
237 pages
ISBN: 9781948405515
