Riding the Nightmare by Lisa Tuttle

 

Over a fifty-year career, Lisa Tuttle has earned a reputation as one of the greatest modern authors of horror and weird fiction. Her most recent collection, The Dead Hours of Night, was a finalist for the Stoker Award, and now she is back with a new collection of twelve unsettling tales, several of them never previously collected, including the long out-of-print and hard-to-find tale 'The Dragon's Bride'.

This volume contains the following stories: Riding the Nightmare, Bits and Pieces, ‘The Mezzotint’, After the End, The Third Person, The Wound, The Man in the Ditch, The Last Dare, A Home in the Sky, Voices in the Night, The Hungry Hotel, The Dragon’s Bride. Also included is a new introduction by Neil Gaiman.

Riding The Nightmare had me galloping through the pages, It is loaded from cover to cover with delightfully dark and disturbing tales from one of the best storytellers in horror, Lisa Tuttle.

A secret weekend tryst will haunt a happily engaged woman in The Hungry Hotel.

A picture is worth a thousand words in The Mezzotint, but only if the warning is heeded in time. Home ownership is part of the American dream especially if you are an adult stuck returning to your childhood bedroom but a room in your parents' house may be safer than A Home In The Sky.

The Man In The Ditch is another story of a warning that went ignored when a woman who should have trusted her own instinct lets her husband convince her that there is nothing to fear.

Two old friends reconnect on Halloween in The Last Dare and forgotten memories return too late.

The title story Riding The Nightmare is a chilling play on words when the actual mare shows up at the window for a night ride.

These were my favorites in the collection but all of the stories are wonderfully weird and unsettling. It was also a refreshing change of pace to have so many stories from a female main character's point of view.

5 out of 5 stars

My thanks to Valancourt Books

Available for pre-order

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