Nightmare “Ten Thousand Crawling Children” by R.A. Busby
“The Forgetter” by Andrew Snover
Reviewed by David Wesley Hill
I’ve reviewed Nightmare on and off over the years, enjoying some stories and disliking others, but I never found any of the fiction to be particularly nightmarish—until I read the opening novelette of the January issue— “Ten Thousand Crawling Children” by R.A. Busby. I’m no scaredy-cat, but I’m not looking forward to closing my eyes tonight. I won’t say much more about the story except to warn you not to read it if you’re even a little bothered by spiders. I’ll also say it made me really glad I was born a man and lack a uterus and ovaries. Seriously, the tale paints pregnancy—not to mention OB-GYNs—with such dark tar that it’s a miracle the human race continues to reproduce. You’d think all women, everywhere, would in unison say enough! and refuse any further intimate contact with the males of our species. After finishing “Ten Thousand Crawling Children,” I wouldn’t blame them… Highly recommended, but not for the squeamish!
Next up this month is “The Forgetter” by Andrew Snover, a Kafkaesque story whose nameless narrator lacks a past and any traits of character whatsoever. They work in a “tall brick room with peaked cathedral ceilings,” jotting down the exclamations of the bodies that occasionally fall from a chute in the ceiling into a pit in the floor. Sometimes, the bodies miss the opening and the protagonist has to scrape the dead flesh off the bricks into the hole with a shovel. That’s about all there is to the tale, which ends as pointlessly as it began, without illumination or epiphany in this inscrutable existential study that goes nowhere… Might appeal to philosophy majors.