Nightmare“An Unavoidable Consequence of . . .” by Kurt Fawver
“The Taker” by Mari Ness
“Shambling Groaning Brain-Dead Endocannibal on Exeter Street” by Ferdison Cayetano
Reviewed by Markus Weimer
Our first story is “An Unavoidable Consequence of . . .” by Kurt Fawver. It begins with the sudden, violent death of a child. Beatrix Middleston, five years old, is skipping to her family’s car in a fast-food parking lot when she explodes. There is no explanation for this, or for any of the five deaths that follow, occurring at a soccer match, a birthday pool party, a school drop-off. Each child is introduced the same way: a name, an age, and a parenthetical list of what they loved. Then they are gone. This, seemingly, is the price of an idyllic suburban neighborhood.
Between these set pieces we follow a teacher and his wife, Erin, whose kindergartner, Malcolm, has not yet exploded. The narrator’s first question on hearing the news is not “how” or “why” but “Who?”, and he is honest enough to tell us what that question is for: establishing enough distance that he will not have to feel anything. Fawver grants him that remove while denying it to the reader. We are intimately aware of the children, present for their final moments, and before long we begin to anticipate a grisly demise the instant a new one is introduced. The expectation of violence becomes the story’s real engine.
We are accustomed to saying that violence is normalized and accepted today. What is unsettling is how this story makes the reader participate in that normalization. You are the one who expects something terrible to happen when Emma Hightower puts a toe in the pool. The parents’ protective instinct and the reader’s appetite are in direct tension, and the story asks us to notice that we keep reading anyway. Our anticipation becomes part of the machinery of the horror.
The second half widens this into something closer to civic horror. Phones are confiscated at the soccer field. A man in a black suit tells a packed auditorium that the children are “as safe as they ever were.” The narrator’s Reddit post vanishes; so do everyone else’s. Officials eventually describe the explosions as an unavoidable cost of living in our world, like colds and bruises, which is where the title comes from. That framing lands harder than any of the gore. Nobody is going to study this. There is not enough money, and someone, the narrator suspects, is benefiting.
The ending is quiet. A father raps his knuckles on a patio door, judging the thickness of the glass, and lets his son smell the fallen leaves through a crack for a few seconds. In trying to anticipate every danger, the parents have already begun to surrender the ordinary experiences of childhood. The story leaves us with the cost of that bargain: not just the lives lost, but the lives narrowed by the expectation of catastrophe.
I was not immediately shocked by this story, as I have no doubt some readers will be, but its effect remained with me for days afterward.
Our second piece of fiction, “The Taker” by Mari Ness, is flash, under five hundred words, and it wastes none of them. The premise is laid out in the first paragraph as if it were a set of house rules. People bring the title character offerings from their own bodies. Most give a single eye, which is within the rules; she accepts and issues a quiet warning they do not understand. The clever ones try to get away with a spleen or an appendix, and she does not bother warning them, because they will be back with a hand or a leg soon enough. A very few offer everything, and those she invites into her home.
What follows is a portrait of hospitality: fine tea and wine, elaborate meals, card games, walks beneath the trees, boat rides on the lake. And conversation. She makes certain her guests understand that she promises nothing, that she has taken everything before and given nothing in return. They understand. They have heard the stories. They give her everything anyway.
The story’s horror lies less in its graphic final paragraph than in the logic that permits it. Its protagonist has transformed exploitation into an obligation owed to her; she tells herself she deserves every morsel “for all she has done for them, is doing for them, will do for them.” Even the apparent generosity of her hospitality becomes another means of possession, a way to know her guests thoroughly before consuming them. There is a dark absurdity in the contrast between the civility of her invitations and the brutality of what follows, and Ness lets a single, exhausted aside—that it is all extraordinarily hard work—carry most of the joke. The guests understand the terms, but understanding does not make their surrender any less disturbing. In fact, their willingness to surrender everything, read today, gives us plenty to chew on.
A compact, vicious examination of entitlement and the ways devotion can be turned against those who offer it.
Finally comes our third piece of fiction, and fans of Gothic horror will enjoy it. The title, “Shambling Groaning Brain-Dead Endocannibal on Exeter Street” by Ferdison Cayetano, tells you where the story ends; the pleasure is in watching how it gets there.
From its opening lines, damning Shackleton, Amundsen, and Hillary as men who got famous “just for tramping around in the snow,” we understand the motivations of our narrator. Glory is his goal, and his proclamations make him a ridiculous figure from the start. The English are to conquer, and that right is his by birth. He is an ethnographer at something called the Institute for Neuroethnology in an alternate-history London of computronic microbanks and punch-cards, and his work is harvesting the brains of indigenous dead. In the opening scene he is in a tent in Papua New Guinea, sawing open the skull of a Fore warrior named Auyano, wiring the brain to a device called the viewport, and living Auyano’s memories from the inside. The head stays on the ground beside him so he can look his subject in the eye. He pats the dead man’s cheek and says, “Good show.”
The story’s colonial critique is not subtle, and it is not meant to be. The narrator is explicit that the polar explorers conquered their last earthly frontiers and that the only frontier left is the mind. He believes he has surpassed them. Back in London he modifies the viewport to run guided tours of Auyano’s life for paying customers, selling the tribal war, the funeral rites, and the ritual eating of the dead as a safari for thrill-seekers. He toasts his colleagues at White’s Club knowing he has “traveled further and farther and more than any of them.” He will not, however, sell the same service to English widows who want to visit their departed husbands. That would not be civilized.
Then the deans call him in. The anatomists have found the Fore brain moth-eaten with a newly identified neurodegenerative disease, known to the Indigenous people as the trembling sickness or the laughing sickness. The narrator supplies the word before they can: kuru. He says it, he realizes, in an accent that is not his own. The viewport does not merely show a mind; it physically overlays one brain’s grooves onto another, and the Institute’s inoculations only work if you follow the exposure guidelines. He has not been following them. Neither have the hundreds of tourists he jacked in without a vaccine.
The second half is a long, slow descent, and this is the section that earns the story its place. Cayetano writes the decline from inside it, in the clipped, self-congratulating voice of a man who keeps assuring himself he can fix this. The symptoms arrive as clinical notes—ataxia, emotional lability, a laugh that will not stop—and the notes degrade along with the hand that takes them. The cure he settles on is a grand gesture worthy of Pasteur or Salk: overload the Institute’s radio tower and broadcast healing frequencies to all of Britain. Auyano, meanwhile, has begun to appear in the laboratory, first as a vision, then as a voice, speaking in a perfect Etonian accent, explaining that it is the Englishman’s life that now belongs to him.
What makes this more than a revenge story is the reversal in who gets to be the scientist. The narrator, who came to collect a culture he considers primitive for display, finds himself taking instruction in Fore medicine, requesting casuarina bark and pig fat on Institute letterhead, and concluding that “our science is not the only science.” He has crossed a frontier, exactly as he wanted. He has no idea what he has entered. Auyano offers a hand, the narrator takes it, and from that point the story’s logic belongs entirely to the man whose brain was stolen.
I will not describe what happens to his assistant James, except to say that the narrator insists on table manners throughout, and that the Shackleton paperweight he bought with his tour money gets its moment. The final pages dissolve into fragments as language leaves him, and the last coherent thought he manages is to find the switch on the tower. The curse Auyano lays on him, that the English who ate of the dead will now eat themselves, becomes the origin of an outbreak, and the story closes on an open window, waiting for the screams.
This is Scientific Gothic in the line of Wells and Machen: a man of science narrating his own undoing, with a thoroughly modern interest in who is allowed to observe whom. The narrator wants to be remembered alongside the great explorers. He will be. He has become the thing the title promises, and he begins to smile.
All three stories are recommended. On a first read, the third was my favorite: it is the most fun, the most lurid, and the most generous with its horrors. In the days since, though, the first has gradually taken its place. “Shambling Groaning Brain-Dead Endocannibal on Exeter Street” does what it does superbly, and its pleasures belong to a recognizable Gothic tradition; “An Unavoidable Consequence of . . .” is the more unusual story, and the one I have not been able to put down. “The Taker” earns its spot between them by writing its own rules, turning the finest hospitality into a sickening prelude to consumption. Taken together, they make for an excellent issue, and I would expect nothing less from Nightmare‘s October issue.
Markus Weimer is a Minnesota-based writer and critic.