A Nest of Nightmares

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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.

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