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The Nightmare Collection
The Nightmare Collection is a brand new poetry collection from the Bram Stoker Award winning poet of Pitchblende, and Shades Fantastic. The prolific SFPA Grandmaster brings us sixty poems collected from places like Asimov's SF Magazine, Dark Wisdom, Strange Horizons, Talebones, Weird Tales, and includes new works as well. Advance Praise for The Nightmare Collection "The Nightmare Collection is a stunning showcase of vivid prose. Alluring and provocative, emotive and often amusing, this is storytelling of the highest order. Boston once again demonstrates why he is the undisputed master of dark poetry." -- Michael McBride, author of the God's End trilogy and Bloodletting. "Bruce Boston is a sorcerer -- he can conjure the most powerful and visceral emotions out of a few words. The Nightmare Collection is horror poetry at its very finest...and creepiest. It's a midnight waltz of surreal images. Highly recommended!" -- Jonathan Maberry, Bram Stoker Award author, fiction and nonfiction, for Ghost Road Blues an The Crytopedia
96 pages, Perfect Paperback
First published January 1, 2008
57 people want to read
About the author
Bruce Boston
357 books117 followersI've published more than sixty books and chapbooks, including the novels Stained Glass Rain and the best-of fiction collection Masque of Dreams. My work ranges from broad humor to literary surrealism, with many stops along the way for science fiction, fantasy, and horror. My novel The Guardener's Tale (Sam's Dot, 2007) was a Bram Stoker Award Finailist and a Prometheus Award Nominee. My stories and poems have appeared in hundreds of publications, including Asimov's SF Magazine, Amazing Stories, Weird Tales, Strange Horizons, Realms of Fantasy, Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, and The Nebula Awards Showcase, and received a number of awards, most notably, a Pushcart Prize, the Bram Stoker Award, the Asimov's Readers' Award, the Rhysling Award, and the Grand Master Award of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. For more information, please visit my website at http://www.bruceboston.com/
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
October 4, 2012
I love everything that Bruce Boston has written. I've been collecting his books and chaps for more than ten years. This book is just one of them. I'm pretty much sold on anything that has his byline.
October 5, 2009
Bruce Boston has a singular habit of writing award winning material. He has nursed this habit for quite some time and in his latest book The Nightmare Collection I can find no signs of abating. Here we are treated to fifty-four new works of highly stylized dark poetry that will not only appeal to fans of horror and speculative poetry, but to anyone who appreciates poetry of the highest order.
In The Nightmare Collection, Boston weaves his heady brand of vivid darkness into a vast and fantastic array of delightfully brutish nightscapes, shadow-realms, and nether-worlds with uncontrived eloquence and poetic mastery. He employs a wide variety of styles that range from formal to free verse, from lyrical and metered verse to prose poetry, experimental, and beyond. Here you will find a lunatic buffet of wildly visual and emotive poems, often laced with dry wit and irony, which have the power to instigate fright and wonder simultaneously. Consider these verses from the poem “The Nightmare Collector”.
“From the endless slashes
In his voluminous greatcoat
You can feel the heat
Of captured bodies
Invade your rumpled bed
With delirium and fever,
You can smell a brassy
Sediment of tears.
“From the hollow blackness
Of his flapping sleeves
You can hear the pulse
And thump of unborn shadows,
A dense hysteric fugue
Winding up and down
The bones of your sleep.”
In addition to the plethora of creepy, unsettling, and down right frightening poems in this book, you will also discover cautionary works no less chilling, such as the grim, all-too-plausible near future scenario depicted in “Cold Letter to the Children” and the intense and visceral scorched earth mantra “I Build engines”. You will find a variety of darkly surreal works such as “A Geologist Braves the Torched Lands” and “Surreal Fill-Up”, which begins…
“The Hose turns into a snake in my hands,
Spewing forth the half-digested bodies
Of mice and birds rather than high octane”
There is even a delightfully sinister technophobic piece that could easily be classified as ‘cyberpunk’ titled “Your Bad Binary Brother”. Despite all this bold diversity, the poems in The Nightmare Collection course their way smoothly through the order of pages in a manner that makes perfect sense.
These are poems that will stick to your brains after you read them. Poems that have the power to stir the subconscious and offer a parallax view of the world beyond the walls of reason. Poems you will want to return to time and again because there is a certain magic locked within their words that you’ll want to imbibe and understand more intimately.
You will read poetry that plays on mankind’s littleness and challenges our common notions of reality, as evident in this excerpt from “Times Holy Wail”.
“Humanity has not slogged far or deep enough
through the stochastic millennia to grasp
how subjective time and its environs can be,
“how days can ebb elastic in their periodicity,
how weighted seconds can unroll like a carpet
or a snake slipping slyly into apprehension.”
In “Futurity Wears the Head”, a poem that shows the duel nature of fate, we find the same themes as above playing out from a different perspective. Consider the following verses:
“Futurity is infinite in its potential and terrifying in its command. It bedazzles you with promises and threatens you with dark possibility.
“Futurity never asks permission to be itself in mixed company
“Futurity is vivid as black light violet, cool as a retrospective on heroin jazz. It needs no makeup to sport a Mediterranean tan.
“Futurity takes your hat at the door and your shirt at the table. It leads you down a hall where your portrait becomes ancestral.”
A tad overplayed are the “’X’ people” poems that are scattered throughout the pages of this collection: nine in all. With titles such as “Bone People”, “Werewolf People”, “Gargoyle People”, “Ghost People”, etc, these crafty free-verse poems are thematic, mostly humorous, and generally lighter in tone then most others in the book. They are all smart, quirky poems that show cunning insight, there are just too many of them and this tends to slightly water down the concepts they put forth collectively and as individual works.
With this latest collection Bruce Boston clearly remains at the cutting edge of today’s dark poetry as the undisputed master of the craft. The Nightmare Collection is highly recommended; you will be richer of mind for reading it. The exquisitely creepy front cover was created by Marge Simon and it is more than a little spooky (the longer one stares at it the spookier it gets). Dispersed throughout the pages are eight striking black and white illustrations by Russell Morgan who does a superb job of complimenting Boston’s work.
Review by Anthony Bernstein
In The Nightmare Collection, Boston weaves his heady brand of vivid darkness into a vast and fantastic array of delightfully brutish nightscapes, shadow-realms, and nether-worlds with uncontrived eloquence and poetic mastery. He employs a wide variety of styles that range from formal to free verse, from lyrical and metered verse to prose poetry, experimental, and beyond. Here you will find a lunatic buffet of wildly visual and emotive poems, often laced with dry wit and irony, which have the power to instigate fright and wonder simultaneously. Consider these verses from the poem “The Nightmare Collector”.
“From the endless slashes
In his voluminous greatcoat
You can feel the heat
Of captured bodies
Invade your rumpled bed
With delirium and fever,
You can smell a brassy
Sediment of tears.
“From the hollow blackness
Of his flapping sleeves
You can hear the pulse
And thump of unborn shadows,
A dense hysteric fugue
Winding up and down
The bones of your sleep.”
In addition to the plethora of creepy, unsettling, and down right frightening poems in this book, you will also discover cautionary works no less chilling, such as the grim, all-too-plausible near future scenario depicted in “Cold Letter to the Children” and the intense and visceral scorched earth mantra “I Build engines”. You will find a variety of darkly surreal works such as “A Geologist Braves the Torched Lands” and “Surreal Fill-Up”, which begins…
“The Hose turns into a snake in my hands,
Spewing forth the half-digested bodies
Of mice and birds rather than high octane”
There is even a delightfully sinister technophobic piece that could easily be classified as ‘cyberpunk’ titled “Your Bad Binary Brother”. Despite all this bold diversity, the poems in The Nightmare Collection course their way smoothly through the order of pages in a manner that makes perfect sense.
These are poems that will stick to your brains after you read them. Poems that have the power to stir the subconscious and offer a parallax view of the world beyond the walls of reason. Poems you will want to return to time and again because there is a certain magic locked within their words that you’ll want to imbibe and understand more intimately.
You will read poetry that plays on mankind’s littleness and challenges our common notions of reality, as evident in this excerpt from “Times Holy Wail”.
“Humanity has not slogged far or deep enough
through the stochastic millennia to grasp
how subjective time and its environs can be,
“how days can ebb elastic in their periodicity,
how weighted seconds can unroll like a carpet
or a snake slipping slyly into apprehension.”
In “Futurity Wears the Head”, a poem that shows the duel nature of fate, we find the same themes as above playing out from a different perspective. Consider the following verses:
“Futurity is infinite in its potential and terrifying in its command. It bedazzles you with promises and threatens you with dark possibility.
“Futurity never asks permission to be itself in mixed company
“Futurity is vivid as black light violet, cool as a retrospective on heroin jazz. It needs no makeup to sport a Mediterranean tan.
“Futurity takes your hat at the door and your shirt at the table. It leads you down a hall where your portrait becomes ancestral.”
A tad overplayed are the “’X’ people” poems that are scattered throughout the pages of this collection: nine in all. With titles such as “Bone People”, “Werewolf People”, “Gargoyle People”, “Ghost People”, etc, these crafty free-verse poems are thematic, mostly humorous, and generally lighter in tone then most others in the book. They are all smart, quirky poems that show cunning insight, there are just too many of them and this tends to slightly water down the concepts they put forth collectively and as individual works.
With this latest collection Bruce Boston clearly remains at the cutting edge of today’s dark poetry as the undisputed master of the craft. The Nightmare Collection is highly recommended; you will be richer of mind for reading it. The exquisitely creepy front cover was created by Marge Simon and it is more than a little spooky (the longer one stares at it the spookier it gets). Dispersed throughout the pages are eight striking black and white illustrations by Russell Morgan who does a superb job of complimenting Boston’s work.
Review by Anthony Bernstein
February 13, 2009
Another excellent collection of speculative poetry from Bruce Boston. I've just finished it and will probably start it immediately again. I may have further commentary when I finish it the second time.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews