Douglas Clegg - The Nightmare Chronicles

[nightreader]

The Nightmare Chronicles by Douglas Clegg (Leisure Books 1999)

A collection of short stories bound together in a loose ‘framing’ story. The stories are not related nor do they have any bearing on the framing story, but they can be very dark, sometimes gruesome, sometimes shocking but I found them all to be well told. I really enjoyed this collection. I rarely read a collection from cover to cover, sometimes I’ll skip a story if it’s not ‘working’ for me, sometimes I’ll go back and finish it but often I don’t. With these I read them all.

Underworld
White Chapel
O, rare and Most Exquisite
Only Connect
The Fruit of Her Womb
The Rendering Man
The Night Before Alec Got Married
The Ripening Sweetness of Late Afternoon
Chosen
“The Little Mermaid”
Damned If You Do
The Hurting Season
I Am Infinite; I Contain Multitudes

The framing story concerns Alice and her sons, who have kidnapped a young boy from a wealthy family. The twelve year old boy is down in the basement in handcuffs with duct tape over his mouth. He’s been down there for two days. Alice’s sons believe there’s ‘something wrong’ with the kid. Alice goes to find out. Her sons prove to be right. Even though he’s bound and gagged he gets into Alice’s head and shows her his stories…

Underworld
A ghost story set in New York. Oliver’s wife Jenny and their unborn child are murdered in their apartment. Oliver finds the body. Later the grieving Oliver turns to neighbour Helen for friendship and comfort. While out one night they pass a Chinese restaurant where Oliver had taken his wife, he sees the business has closed and through a grimy window he sees dead Jenny’s face. He is sure he has seen Jenny and eventually breaks in to the old restaurant. He finds something hanging in an old walk–in freezer…

White Chapel
Journalist Jane Boone goes first to Calcutta, then to a remote place called White Chapel, down river in the heat and the mosquitoes. She is on the trail of a story. The story will be about a man called Nathan Merritt, deserter during the war then found to be a mass torturer and murderer, a man with a talent for killing and skinning the faces off his victims. Jane also learns about the legend on the Monkey God Y-Cha and the man Hadriman the Third who skinned monkeys to show his power over the Monkey God and people of White Chapel. The two stories collide when Jane finds Nathan Merritt and also discovers pain and blood…

O, Rare and Most Exquisite
A young man learns about love in a nursing home for the elderly. A dying old man shows the boy the rarest flower that ever existed and tells him the story of how he found love. A story about how far someone might go to show his love, even when it’s not returned...

Only Connect
Jim works for the rail company and gets terrible headaches. Or does he? Or is he really an old lady in a hospital, one of a group of people leading similar double lives? Perhaps it has something to do with the Arc Project. And then there is the problem of the Intruder...

The Fruit of her Womb
A couple retire to the country, buy a beautiful house called Tierraroja and life seems good. They find a Victorian urn sealed with wax. Inside is a smokers pipe inscribed with the initials J.R. They find the house (and pipe) once belonged to a Joe Redlander who chopped up his wife and children one night then headed off into the desert. The police caught him but he claimed his innocence. Then there is Ed the gardener who had been hopelessly in love with the eldest Redlander daughter...

...more to come...

[nightreader]

The Rendering Man
It’s 1934 in Moncure County and Thalia and her brother have found something dead on the farm. It’s a pig, which will mean a trip to the Rendering Man. Thalia discovers what rendering is – using every bit of the dead thing for something else, the skin, bones, grease. As the Rendering Man says, someone must do it. Years later in 1952 and Thalia is now a grown woman on a train in Germany and once again she meets the Rendering Man, who reminds her of something terrible she did that he paid the price for, and he tells her of something terrible that he has done also…

The Night Before Alec Got Married
A stag night party that goes horribly wrong. A best friend who thinks he’s giving the condemned man something amazing with a stunning looking prostitute. One night of dancing and whatever… Her pimp, seeing a bunch of rich guys, goes along to the party with his girl, warning the men: “head or hand, no tail”. There’s a very good reason for this, as Alec soon finds out…

The Ripening Sweetness of Late Afternoon
Roy Shadiak returns to his hometown of Sunland City to make his atonement. He finds his the town under a curfew, it’s citizens being picked off by angelic harpies, taken to the nearby beach and devoured. He believes he’s had a message from God to atone for a crime he committed when he was young…

Chosen
Bug horror. Rob Arlington’s landlord wants to get an exterminator in to kill the roaches, but Rob thinks it’s an excuse for the man to go snooping through his apartment. The slightly odd woman next door agrees with him, but then she likes bugs. Then Roy hears an odd noise from one of the disposal shafts while he’s doing his laundry in the basement, and finds a dead baby. Soon after his girlfriend tells him she’s been bitten by something during the night…

"The Little Mermaid"
When the lady sprains her ankle while walking on the beach the old man offers to help her. He said he’d once been a doctor. The painkillers he gives her are so strong, when she wakes up in agony she eventually realises something is missing…

...yet more to come...

[nightreader]

Damned If You Do
Calhoun is a killer. Nine children in twenty five years. It’s almost inevitable that somebody will find out and that somebody turns out to be his wife Patsy. He starts digging a hole in the garden…

The Hurting Season
In the middle of nowhere there are some strange customs. Theron isn’t sure if the the hurting season happens anywhere else, he just knows his Daddy hurts himself, does his penance from Winter Festival through to May Day. Chains and fish hooks and leather strops help him atone for a long forgotten sin. Into this private life stumbles Evan, with a broken down car, needing to use the phone…

I Am Infinite; I Contain Multitudes
Aurora is an asylum for the criminally insane. There are some very bad people in there. Joe has been in Aurora for four months and has already caught the attention of Hype, one of the ‘old-timers’, so nicknamed because he claims to have hyperawareness. Hype tells Joe there had once been another asylum on the site of Aurora, built underground with the inmates kept locked away from sight, forsaken. Hype also tells of the atomic testing that had gone on years ago, out in the desert, underground. He tells Joe there is a way out…

This was a really satisfying collection of stories. I’m definitely looking forward to reading more Douglas Clegg. He's got a very nice website at www.douglasclegg.com worth checking out.

[benedictjjones]

^some of those sound great, I'll definetly be on the look out for this.
cheers

[pbsplatter]

This is one of my favorites, really great stuff.