Nonfiction
Book Reviews: April 2022
This month Terence Taylor reads two works centered on identity: Ally Wilkes’ new polar horror novel, All the White Spaces, and Aaron Durán’s new comic book, Season of the Bruja.
This month Terence Taylor reads two works centered on identity: Ally Wilkes’ new polar horror novel, All the White Spaces, and Aaron Durán’s new comic book, Season of the Bruja.
I’ve always been fascinated by rising waters. I grew up moving between Goleta, California, a minute’s walk from the Pacific Ocean, and Kolkata, India, where the monsoons regularly turn the city’s streets into rivers. More recently, I’ve been having long conversations with my mother (she’s a historian) about the role of rivers in Bengali history over the past few centuries. The swelling of rivers with rain is absolutely essential to the life and livelihood of the people around it.
Somewhere along the way we have lost our patience for the slow, unfurling depth of horror. And I think that’s a problem. I’m a member of several film groups on social media, and I constantly see complaints about the slow pace of The Green Knight, or the arthouse vibe and weirdness of Under the Skin, or frustration and boredom at the pie-eating scene in A Ghost Story. No, my friend, no. I disagree. We need to let these stories unfold, we need to sit in the space of that telling.
A few days ago I was writing something about the 1980s, and a bit of mental math made me stop in my tracks. Somehow, despite all the birthdays I’ve celebrated over the years, I hadn’t put it together that the ’80s are now forty years ago. Yes, Fast Times at Ridemont High is officially middle aged, as is The Thing, Poltergeist, Beastmaster, and The Dark Crystal.
I don’t have much of a writing routine, but this story started with an image—120 of them, actually—my classes of black boxes in 2020. One day, a box turned on her camera and asked if we were real and also if she was real. She sounded panicked and I understood why. I wrote the story in one day, then edited it the next. It was the easiest and fastest story I ever wrote.
Adam-Troy Castro delves into the ghostly realm as he reviews the haunted space novel Dead Silence, by S.A. Barnes, and the haunted apartment film Last Night in Soho. Want to get your ghost on? Find out if these works are for you!
Social media has become such an “integral” part of our lives that it’s hard to imagine a time when people weren’t sharing everything, from an aesthetic shot of a bagel, to birth announcements, engagements, and promotions. My mother used to lug out the family photo albums on my birthday and show bare-assed baby photos of me to all my friends. I shudder to think what she might have accomplished on a more modern platform.
When I’m watching a horror film, I always know something good is coming when we step off the beaten path. We might be campers who trudge through the snow to a nearby cabin, going to push the door only to find that it creaks open of its own accord, revealing bad taxidermy and dangling fetishes which look disturbingly like they’ve been made from human teeth. We might be a team called in to investigate signs of distress at a remote outpost.
Welcome to Nightmare’s 114th issue! Thank you for joining us in our uneasy corner of the world. Pull up a chair and rest yourself. I’m sure you’re tired. Aren’t we all tired these days? Maybe it’s the kind of tired that makes you lean against the wall in the afternoon, your legs like sacks of sand, heavy but formless, your spine pulled low by their weight. Maybe it’s the kind of tired that makes you wake in the night and find yourself breathless.
Personally, I find monsters far more interesting if they share the same desires and pains as we do, if they are not so opaque or one-dimensional in their motivations. That touch of commonality evokes a different response than an alien or unexamined threat.