The Nightmare Chronicles

When a young boy is kidnapped and held hostage in a tenement basement, his nightmares begin to unfold in the minds of his captors, subjecting them to unspeakable horrors

From Publishers Weekly

Clegg's (The Halloween Man, etc.) collection of 13 tales takes risks and is full of passions that sometimes burst forth violently. But his skill at elucidating the psychological lives of his characters in precise, revealing prose makes these emotions more disturbing than the violence itself. In the best selection, "The Rendering Man," a girl's lifelong obsession with the creepy local who turns dead animals into consumer goods discloses her own festering psychopathology. Subtle seeding of the tale with images of death and transfiguration gives its climax a haunting and visceral inevitability. The narrative device into which the stories are pluggedAeach is presented as a nightmare inflicted by a monstrous boy upon his kidnappersAis flimsy but succeeds in calling attention to several recurring themes: the predatory nature of human sexuality ("Chosen"; "The Night Before Alec Got Married") and "the secret rituals that all families have that would seem insane to outsiders" ("Damned If You Do"; "The Hurting Season"). Clegg's use of innovative metaphors catapults each story beyond a landscape crowded with the horror genre's usual monsters and madmen into a territory he alone can claim. (Sept.) FYI: Clegg is the author of Naomi, the much-touted e-novel in progress. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From the Publisher

These short stories from a master storyteller of horror "can chill the spine so effectively that the reader should keep paramedics on standby, " says author Dean Koontz. It all begins when a young boy is held captive in an old tenement, and from there 13 nightmares unfold.

From the Inside Flap

"Clegg Delivers!" -- John Saul It begins in an old tenement with a horrifying crime. It continues after midnight, when a young boy, held captive in a basement, is filled with unearthly visions of fantastic and frightening worlds. How could his kidnappers know that the ransom would be their own souls? For, as the hours pass, the boy's nightmares invade his captors like parasites -- and soon, they become real. "Douglas Clegg pulls out the stops of terror!" -- Publisher's Weekly Thirteen nightmares unfold: A young man searches for his dead wife among the crumbling buildings of Manhattan...a journalist seeks the ultimate evil in a plague-ridden outpost of India...ancient rituals begin anew with the mystery of a teenage girl's disappearance...and in a hospital for the criminally insane, there is only one doorway to salvation...But the night is not yet over, and the real nightmare has just begun. Thirteen chilling tales of terror from one of the master's of the horror story, The Nightmare Chronicles is the chronicle of darkness itself.

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