

For example, 555 telephone numbers and mild swearing on television.)Īs taught in film studies, one convention-breaking element of French New Wave cinema is when characters were having a conversation in a restaurant, whenever the front door opened, noise from the street would overwhelm the audio, drowning out the characters. (I know different people use the same term to mean different things–I’m using “convention” to mean something that doesn’t happen in real life but we accept in a story. One broad similarity is a deliberate breaking of artificial literary conventions. Tuttle is a native Texan who moved to Europe and I recognized several reoccurring motifs that “Skin Deep” shared with other of her stories. It turns out that he wasn’t as lucky as he’d imagined.

He thinks he’s in luck when he meets two English women on holiday as well as an exotic woman from parts unknown. In “Skin Deep,” Danny, a young Texan, vacations in France after being unceremoniously dumped by his girlfriend back home. That’s part of the reason that I enjoyed Lisa Tuttle’s “Skin Deep.”Īfter finishing all of her stories in A Nest of Nightmares, I found another of Tuttle’s collections, Memories of the Body: Tales of Desire and Transformation. In some cases, they do things I never anticipated a monster of doing.

While classic monsters are great, I enjoy the unusual ones, monsters I’d never heard of before. It updates old, forgotten monsters from older editions of Dungeons and Dragons. This new edition features the original paperback cover art by Nick Bantock and a new introduction by Will Errickson.I recently found a YouTube channel called Monster of the Week. Never before published in the United States and highly sought-after by collectors, A Nest of Nightmares (1986) is a classic of modern horror. The thirteen tales in this collection are highly original and extremely chilling, and they reveal Tuttle to be a master of contemporary horror fiction. In ‘Flying to Byzantium’, a writer travelling to a science fiction convention finds herself caught in a strange and terrifying hell. The divorcing couple in ‘Community Property’ arrive at a macabre solution for how to divide ownership of a beloved pet. In ‘Bug House’, a woman who goes to visit her aunt is shocked to find she is dying – but even more shocking is what is killing her.

In Lisa Tuttle’s stories, the everyday domestic world of her female protagonists is invaded by the bizarre, the uncanny, the horrific.
