Nightmare “The Last of the Juggalos” by Alex Saint-Widow
“There Are No Monsters on Rancho Buenavista” by Isabel Cañas
“Dr. Wasp and Hornet Holmes” by Lavie Tidhar
Reviewed by Mike Bickerdike
Nightmare, the magazine of horror and dark fantasy, offers two short stories and one piece of flash fiction this month.
“The Last of the Juggalos” by Alex Saint-Widow is a tale of a dystopian future in which bands of rapping, carnival clowns rule the roost, speak in rhyme and set down the brutal Laws for the few survivors on Earth. There’s not very much that appeals here, unfortunately, as there’s little in the story that is convincingly believable, and the prose style the author adopts quickly palls. Many of the sentences are short and incomplete. For effect. With profanity. To add grit. But without actually engaging the reader in the story, or building sympathy for the protagonist, all the grim profanity falls flat and has no impact. The protagonist is thinly drawn, such that we only learn her gender a third of the way through. Throw-away lines also challenge our common-sense: seashells no longer wash up on the beaches, but knives do. How would knives (which surely sink to the bottom and stay there) wash up from the sea? And why is the sea full of knives anyway? Feel free to skip this one.
“There Are No Monsters on Rancho Buenavista” by Isabel Cañas is flash fiction. A young women attracts the attentions of the men of her village, and one seeks her out at night, only to discover she is not what he thought. Like most flash fiction, this tale struggles to generate reader engagement or develop the characters or plot. The horror imagery is okay, but not especially novel.
“Dr. Wasp and Hornet Holmes” by Lavie Tidhar is a short animal fantasy tale set in a wasp nest. It’s not really horror, though it’s quite well written for what it is. The link to Conan Doyle’s famous characters barely goes beyond the similarity of the main wasp characters’ names and is largely unnecessary to the short story. ‘Holmes’ believes there is something strange happening to the Queen and wasp larvae and explores his suspicions. Ultimately, the story rather lacks impact, though it’s probably the strongest entry in this issue of Nightmare.
Mike Bickerdike’s reviews and thoughts on science-fiction can be found at https://starfarersf.nicepage.io/