TITLE: The Nectar of Nightmares
AUTHOR: Craig L. Gidney
166 pages, Underland Press, ISBN 9781630230630 (paperback, also available in e-book)
MY RATING: 4 out of 5 stars
SHORT REVIEW: The Nectar of Nightmares is an excellent introduction to the work of Craig L. Gidney. In stories that run from the erotic to the romantic, from the subtly horrific to the gorily terrifying, Gidney takes on the loneliness, yearning for connection, self-images issues, and homophobia that are almost endemic to queer lives and particularly queer Black lives. Along the way, he draws on classic fairy tales, historic settings, and a variety of horror sub-genres.
LONG REVIEW:
The Nectar of Nightmares is an excellent introduction to the work of Craig L. Gidney. In stories that run from the erotic to the romantic, from the subtly horrific to the gorily terrifying, Gidney takes on the loneliness, yearning for connection, self-images issues, and homophobia that are almost endemic to queer lives and particularly queer Black lives. Along the way, he draws on classic fairy tales, historic settings, and a variety of horror sub-genres.
The collection opens strong with “Beneath the Briar Patch,” a riff on traditional Bre’r Rabbit/Bre’r Fox oral tales. Where the traditional tales (at least as far as I’m familiar with them) are light-hearted and usually impart moral lessons, Gidney’s tale takes a more supernatural turn as the Tar Baby Brother Rabbit gets stuck to pulls him into the otherworldly briar patch. The omniscient narrator of the story has a very relaxed, colloquial, storyteller’s voice and I can easily see this being told around a campfire. I loved the way Gidney employed the classic “rule of three’s” storytelling trick throughout the story: three reasons Fox plays the tar baby trick on Rabbit, three rumors about the creature that rules in the briar patch, three encounters with supernatural beings in the briar patch, and other groups of three (juggling three balls/6 knives; 6 animals present at the briar patch bar) throughout the story.
I don’t have space to comment on every story individually in this post, but here are thoughts on some of the stories that stood out for me. Your mileage may vary, of course.
“Myth and Moor” gives us Emily Brontë as a child, encountered the ghost of a boy who has recently died and trying to find out what the ghost wants from her. Emily is clearly lonely, yearning for a connection with someone who will understand and accept her ability to see – although not talk to – ghosts. She does find such a person in this story, but the person is not what she expected.
In “Fur and Gold,” Gidney gives us a gay riff on the tale of Beauty and the Beast that is closer kin to the original tales than to the Disney version. Gidney delves into the beast’s loss of sense of identity and decline into a creature of instinct and primal needs in a story that feels elegiac even while delivering a strong message about the importance of consent.
From fantasy France, Gidney moves us to the Harlem Renaissance in “Black-Winged Roses,” a tale of transgender folks discovering and taking pride in who they are and what they can do while under assault by a hateful and self-hating preacher. This story is full of strong women who will take no shit and is one of my favorites in the collection. I suspect I’ll be re-reading this one often.
“Spyder Threads,” which I’d previously listened to as part of Nightfire’s audio-only short story collection Come Join Us By The Fire, Volume 2, is an intriguing mix of body horror and fantasy, a commentary both on how society treats people whose bodies don’t fit into the current social media paradigm and on how far people with low self-esteem because of that treatment will go to feel special. The shorter, punchier “Mirror Bias” attacks that same body image issue from a slightly different angle.
In “Sacred She-Devil,” Gidney gives us a near-perfect urban fantasy noir, in which main character Opal has the power to summon the ghosts of murdered women who were victims of sexual violence. It’s not an easy story to read, but it is a vital one. Especially as it plays with, and neatly subverts, the over-used trope of subjecting female characters to sexual violence to motivate male characters to “do great things.” I would love to see more stories with Opal.
I would be remiss if I did not mention “Desiccant,” a story which made it into the inaugural edition of The Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction (2021), which just days before I’m posting this won the World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology. “Desiccant” focuses on a trans woman forced to move into a very impoverished building, where she, like her neighbors, falls ill because of the environment they are forced to endure. The story touches on systemic lack of attention to how contaminated living environments disproportionately affect marginalized populations. The fact that there is a supernatural explanation for the ongoing health issue does not take away from the importance of the issue. Fair warning: there are also moments of transphobia in the story (as, sadly, there would be in real life).
The collection closes as strongly as it starts, with the title story “The Nectar of Nightmares,” in which three quite different individuals encounter a powerful dream being. I may have given too much away even saying that much – it’s a story about the way our nightmares feed off our anxiety, body dysmorphia, feelings of inadequacy, and more.