A Nest of Nightmares

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.