It turns out that he wasn’t as lucky as he’d imagined. He thinks he’s in luck when he meets two English women on holiday as well as an exotic woman from parts unknown. In “Skin Deep,” Danny, a young Texan, vacations in France after being unceremoniously dumped by his girlfriend back home. That’s part of the reason that I enjoyed Lisa Tuttle’s “Skin Deep.”Īfter finishing all of her stories in A Nest of Nightmares, I found another of Tuttle’s collections, Memories of the Body: Tales of Desire and Transformation. In some cases, they do things I never anticipated a monster of doing. While classic monsters are great, I enjoy the unusual ones, monsters I’d never heard of before. It updates old, forgotten monsters from older editions of Dungeons and Dragons. As I get closer to the end of A Nest of Nightmares, I see more and more parallels.I recently found a YouTube channel called Monster of the Week. I brought up connections between Tuttle’s A Nest of Nightmares with Thomas Ligotti’s Songs of a Dead Dreamer. That kind of horror doesn’t lend itself to jumpscares but more deep pondering in the dead of night. “Stranger in the House” continues with the sense of dread coming from the protagonist’s awareness of her own identity, not a monster or guy with a knife. When I wrote about Tuttle’s “A Friend in Need,” I referred to it as “existentialist horror.” I was half-joking but I think I was onto something. Night Shyamalan-type twist ending but Tuttle downplayed it into something not as jarring but more central to Sharon’s being. –she hides under her old bed, accepting the role of monster. However, how can you live outside your true time? With nowhere else to go and nothing else to do– Remembering the last time her family was happy, Sharon is transported back in time to watch herself in childhood, back when her only worry was the monster under the bed. In “Stranger in the House,” Sharon, the third-person protagonist, is abandoned by her snide significant other while traveling through the neighborhood where she grew up.

The last two examples were grim but Lisa Tuttle’s take spun the concept to a another type of strange horror. This happened to Bruce Willis in The Kid, Binkley in Bloom County, and in a Twilight Zone episode and a Harlan Ellison story that I can’t remember the titles of. Other times a character meets his childhood self, usually to the younger self’s disappointment and disgust. Alfred Bester in “5,271,009” treats it as absurd.

In Ken Grimwood’s Replay, the concept is played straight. Many writers have created scenarios where their protagonist returns to their youth.

A nest of nightmares by lisa tuttle