A Nest of Nightmares (Paperbacks from Hell)

Rating: ★★★★¾ (4.75/5)

This quietly devastating collection took me by surprise with its emotional honesty, psychological depth, and restrained but persistent dread. Lisa Tuttle doesn't write horror that jumps out and grabs you—she writes the kind that seeps in, unsettling your sense of normalcy and making you question what you've taken for granted.

Each story centers around a female protagonist in some form of crisis—emotional, relational, maternal, or existential. The horrors are often ambiguous and deeply personal. You won’t find gore or monsters here in the usual sense, but rather the creeping horror of suffocating relationships, unlived lives, and the silent bargains we make to survive.

Tuttle’s writing is sharp, show more clean, and deceptively simple. The stories often feel like character studies where the horror emerges slowly, growing organically from the characters’ own fears and denials. Some protagonists are victims; some are, chillingly, not. And that complexity only makes the collection more rewarding.

There's a cumulative effect to reading this in order. As themes begin to repeat—sisters, controlling mothers, women isolated in remote houses—you realize Tuttle is building something larger than the sum of its parts: a psychological landscape where the most terrifying thing isn’t what’s outside the house... but who’s inside.

A standout feminist horror collection. Quiet, eerie, and emotionally bruising in the best way. show less

This collection of short stories was originally published in 1986, but none of the writing feels dated. Normally with collections like this the term "mixed bag" come up, but in this case, it's a consistently creepy bag. Several stories gave me the absolute crawlies, especially Flying to Byzantium and The Horse Lord, but even if they didn't all give me goosebumps, they did all create some king of visceral reaction in me. I liked it very much.

First off Happy Thanksgiving to those in the USA
This is likely to be my only review this week due to the baking frenzy I'm currently in. My reading time has been drastically reduced at the moment.

I love that Valancourt Books is re-releasing all these great horror classics from the 70s and 80s. I have been on a mission to read the ones I have missed the first time around. If you also missed out or were too young back in the heyday of horror I strongly recommend checking out all that is available from Valancourt.
A Nest of Nightmares contains 13 short stories originally published in 1986. They feel surprisingly timeless other than one person's desperate need to make a phone call which made that particular story feel dated, though anyone show more who survived the years without a cell phone will still understand what it was like to not have constant and instant access to make a call.
The stories are quite dark and more than one tale focuses on the dissolution of a relationship, where the horror is perhaps the feeling of being left out, abandoned, forgotten and lost. There is the conventional creature feature type horror, and haunted objects and a weirdly current feeling in the tale of a woman looking forward to the fence she's heard they are building to keep people from getting into the country from Mexico. There were only a couple of stories that missed the mark with me. I would recommend this to all who enjoy short horror stories with unexpected endings. show less

Each story is gripping, eerie, or thought-provoking in its own way, sometimes all three at once.

Out of print for years until recently (thanks to the Paperbacks From Hell series) this collection of 13 short weird horror stories by Lisa Tuttle is absolutely essential.

3.5/4 stars! RTC