Instead, she’s tragic, believable, and monstrous. Like the Mad Magazine example, with only a few edits, Pam could have been a joke. Usually it’s a comic figure who doesn’t quite intrepret a situation correctly (Homer Simpson comes to mind). Again, this was a matter of family dynamics where a person in the narrator’s position would be statistically more likely to be male, but that would distract from the delusional nature of the narrator’s personality. Some readers might assume Tuttle, as a feminist icon, would male bash for effect. I’ve been in creative writing classes where individuals would have emphasized just how male the narrator was so the story would have “social and political value.” Many writers would have made the narrator male because, right or wrong, that’s the general perception of threatening manipulative control freaks. She didn’t have much of a life of her own, other than try to control Sylvia. I keep calling her “the narrator” because her name, “Pam,” was so infrequently used that for a long while I assumed the narrator was a brother, not a sister.

That farmer had a lot in common with the narrator of “The Nest.” He said the aliens’ ship looked like a 1964 Ford Fairlane Thunderbolt and he should know because the boyfriend that he forbid her to date had a 1964 Ford Fairlane Thunderbolt. Years ago, Mad Magazine had a comic about alien abduction with a farmer who claimed the aliens repeatedly snatched his daughter during the night and returned her naked on the porch the next morning. She’ll even help rebuild the nest if only Sylvia would come back. She believes her sister is sneaking up to the attic to see it and that they’ve built a huge love nest.Įventually, Sylvia escapes and the narrator sees the error of her ways. She interprets this as a supernatural creature that Sylvia is carrying on with. Sylvia begins to avoid her and during a walk she sees a large, dark form flap from a tree to their roof. The narrator thinks she is helping Sylvia by micromanaging her life and forcing her to break up with her boyfriend, not suspecting how much resentment this could cause. Workers could not repair it for months but covered it with a tarp. The roof is a mess with a huge hole in it. In “The Nest,” the first-person narrator, buys an old, isolated house with her sister, Sylvia. I think those are the two strongest stories in the collection and most disturbing but “The Nest” was the right choice for last story. Before I picked up the book, I knew Lisa Tuttle through two stories–“Bughouse” and “Flying to Byzantium”–both of which are included here.

“The Nest” is the final story in A Nest of Nightmares and in many ways defines the collection.

A nest of nightmares by lisa tuttle