Blurb:
From the critically acclaimed author of Sea of Rust and Queen of the Dark Things comes a hair-raising collection of short fiction that illuminates the strange, humorous, fantastical, and downright diabolical that tantalize and terrorize us: demons, monsters, zombie dinosaurs, and Death itself.
In the novella "The Soul Thief’s Son" C. Robert Cargill returns to the terrain of the Queen of the Dark Things to continue the story of Colby Stevens . . .
A Triceratops and an Ankylosaurus join forces to survive a zombie apocalypse that may spell extinction for their kind in "Hell Creek" . . .
In a grand old building atop a crack in the world, an Iraq War veteran must serve a one-year term as a punisher of the damned condemned to consume the sins of others in the hope that one day he may find peace in "In a Clean, White Room" (co-authored with Scott Derrickson) . . .
In "The Town That Wasn’t Anymore," the village of Pine Hill Bluff loses its inhabitants one at a time as the angry dead return when night falls to steal the souls of the living . . .
And in the title story, "We Are Where the Nightmares Go," a little girl crawls through a glowing door beneath her bed and finds herself trapped in a nightmarish wonderland—a crucible of the fragments of children’s bad dreams.
These tales and four more are assembled here as testament to Cargill’s mastery of the phantasmagoric, making We Are Where the Nightmares Go and Other Stories a collection of unnerving horror and fantasy will keep you up all night and haunt your waking dreams.
Review:
AThe only reason this collection of short stories found their way into my collection was due to me looking for some novels to read that weren't on my college reading list to balance the tedium out. That first led to "Sea of Rust", and a bit further, this one.
Strange as that selection method might be, I had a blast reading it, despite also being disturbed on many levels. Perfect Halloween read.
You may also notice that unlike my other short story review from two years ago (Abandoned by the Gods by Ronit J), I'm not delving deep into each story, mostly because the amount is much more than four and each novella (short story) has enough in them to make this even longer than it already is.
Also I know that the Amazon blurb describes some of the short stories but again, the ten that are in this book are so much more than what is described there.
To sum the whole thing up in a short manner (relatively speaking), the collection of short stories blends cosmic horror with existential dread with a minimal amount of humor, all the while there that is the whiplash of going from laughing at two people lightly joking about zombies to recoiling from horror at a world that Pinhead would dream of.
First off, the characters in here are as diverse as they can get, ranging from a Sheriff hating his job and the dead that make it even worse to a dinosaur surviving the apocolypse and finding a new family while the world is changing ever rapidly.
Even if they are as diverse as they are, there's one undercurrent of drive to each one. Be it the drive to wake up from a dream to the drive of survival or retiring, there's something of mettle to each character. Or they are just insane, as I was reading through the Amazon blurb and looking at the chapters in the preview, I was reminded of one of the characters deciding that his calling in life was sniping angels and then hiding under a bridge.
Another thing that is a standerd through these is that each character gets traumatised in some way. Each one goes through changes by the end of their tale, be it literally or figuratively.
Then, the plotlines of each short story. ALl of them have a similar path from start to finish, yet the perspectives of each are unique.
Almost all of them are in third person, some we get the names, some we don't, and there's always at least one traumatic event that directly, or indirectly, drives the plot forward. Some can be pieced together from context clues, others are stated outright.
And each time that I started to understand what was happening, I either felt chilled to the bone or shocked to the point of rereading the sentence again and again.
Lastly, Cargills worldbuilding within the short stories. Overall, each one of them was heavily placed within our world, mostly the US, existing in a twilight zone filled with madness.
Furthermore, with all of them being placed in a twilight realm of real and unreal, there was a vast assortment of spirits, monsters and other things that danced around the pages, with the text being compact or stretched to fit the descriptions in nicely without overdoing it.
However, if I had to critique one thing about all of stories within this novel, I'd have to say that there is a lack of a break between the times that you get hurtled from one end of the emotional spectrum to another. Probably due to me not wanting to take a break in between each short story, mostly my own reading style causing it, yet if you too like to read through something in one or two sittings, it gets difficult without taking a break.
Again, my opinion is probably born from the way I read, and I encourage whoever is reading this to first go through the short stories before agreeing or disagreeing with me.
Overall, if you like horror in bite sized pieces with a minimal amount of humor and a lot of back and forth in some of them, "We are where nightmares go and other short stories" is for you.
If you've made it this far, thank you for reading this review, and I hope I've at least added another novel to the pile of TBR books or mood reads for the various seasons of the year. Yet if I haven't, maybe another review by another person here on this site might be of interest to you, or not. It's linked here.
Wherever you are reading this, have a good morning, good afternoon, good evening and good night.
