Nightmare“She Sheds Her Skin” by Raven Jakubowski
“Moon Rabbit Song” by Caroline Hung
“A Guide for Your Journey to the Green Hills” by R. K. Duncan
Reviewed by László Szegedi
“She Sheds Her Skin” by Raven Jakubowski
The storyteller introduces us to Cora, a mysterious woman who might not even be a real human at all, but who chooses to live with the narrator anyway. We don’t get to know every detail of her story and how exactly they met, we only see how lonely the narrator is with this person and how much he is struggling through everyday life with her.
I didn’t feel a right balance between telling everything and holding back some details as if this was a ballad. Furthermore, I couldn’t see why this relationship is fruitful for the main character, why he connects to this being so much. Thus, it felt like I was missing something, making the story incomplete.
“Moon Rabbit Song” by Caroline Hung
This is the longest and most detailed story in the Nov. issue of Nightmare. A hunting party, led by a princess, travels through a strange, otherworldly landscape in search of a valuable treasure, the Immortal Herb. They experience all kinds of adventures with dangerous creatures, and even some friction within the group. The author uses dreams as a device for an inside view of the princess, adding a cyclic structure to the text. Even though the whole story proves to be a powerful and tragic narrative that explores themes of love, suffering, immortality, and the cyclical nature of fate, with its classic twists, it feels like a dark fantasy story, unlike most of the stories the magazine usually publishes.
“A Guide for Your Journey to the Green Hills” by R. K. Duncan
This tale gives us a detailed description of a richly imagined world, full of strange customs, hidden secrets, and mystical locations, in the form of the guide mentioned in the title. The whole imaginary journey feels too linear, Lovecraftian, and we only get to know the goal, the purpose of the journey at the end, which doesn’t really amount to much, and came across as more or less just like a cliché.
László is very happy for the britpop band Oasis being back together.