Nightmare Man by Alan Ryker
My rating: 4/5 cats
EDIT – in this review, i give misinformation about the availability of ryker’s books. they are totally available on nook. i am too embarrassed to rewrite the review, and i think it is good to have a public record of one’s own dumbassery, so i thought i would just lead in with this PSA. my bad.
this one my least favorite of alan ryker’s book so far, but it’s still pretty spectacular. and my ranking of it was IN NO WAY clouded by my having learned just before starting it that he has written other books that are only available for stinky kindle and he was effectively freezing me out even though i have been his little cheerleader all this time. which he probably doesn’t even know, but now he does. thank you for passing along the message, netgalley!
this is the most emphatically supernatural of his books (that i have had the ability to read, hhmph) and i know that Burden Kansas was about a vampire, which is totes supernatural, but the treatment of vampires in it was starkly realistic: with the western-genre tone, it could have been any predator that stoic keith was protecting his livestock from. and The Hoard had…what it had, but honestly, the hoarding aspect of that story was the truly horrific element, so that one also skirts my supernatural-stamp. Among Prey was just excellent storytelling, and didn’t need any supernatural to make it burn.
this one is nightmare city.
not for me; you’ve all read me bitch and moan about how nothing scaaaares me and how that is the curse of my once-young life.
however, the one story that ever ever scared me was when i was nine years old and i was in the backseat of my aunt’s car as we were going somewhere pretty far from home. i finished the book i had brought with me to read and grew bored, so i started rooting around in this little mesh pocket thingie she had over the passenger seat, and i came across a copy of stephen king‘s night shift. “book!” i said to myself, and i started to read it.
and then i got to the story entitled the boogeyman.
and it destroyed me.
and that is the feeling i have never been able to recapture, but which i long for so fiercely,
i mention this because this story is similar in theme, with a nightmare creature affecting the waking life of its dreamer: jessie is a man who suffers from night terrors; very vivid nightmares of a hooded figure with whom he fights in an unconscious state and which feels so real. his disorder affects his home life; his vigorous thrashings and potential violence force his wife to sleep on the couch, and although he tries to hide the nocturnal situation from his two young children, he is exhausted and overwrought and things start to unravel, until he begins to question whether the nightmare man may not be a dream after all, and his family might be in great danger.
it’s a really solid story, and it has a more redemptive ending than king’s, but one which did not leave me wanting to go sleep in mommy and daddy’s bed for weeks afterward.
ryker does the “ooooor iiiiis iiiit??” thing really well, and that is probably my favorite part of any of his books; that creeping questioning feeling, the not-knowing where it is all headed.
another good, short little punch from ryker.
looking forward to more from him… on my nook.
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