by Alex Carrigan
It’s hard to realize that as we settle into the Anthropocene era that we’re actually settling into a horror story. The world is changing faster than we can handle, and it’s entirely likely that the environmental changes caused by climate change and other environmental destruction will soon bring about terrors we can’t imagine. However, it’s fascinating to think about what those terrors could be, and exactly how the world may turn against us.
Field Notes from a Nightmare: An Anthology of Ecological Horror is a new anthology from Dread Stone Press, a publisher of horror and speculative fiction. The anthology features eighteen stories of natural and unnatural ways the environment turns on its human characters. These stories feature humans either suffering because of their direct actions or becoming victims of the environment due to the actions of others spiraling down towards them.
While many of the stories in Field Notes can read as variations of “what if X were to kill us?”, what makes the collection fascinating are some of the thematic similarities between the pieces. It’s one thing to read stories as trees killing humans following an act of destruction in their environment, such as in Nikki R. Leigh’s “A Snag By Any Other Name” or Eddie Generous’ “Root Structure,” what makes these stand out as more than moralizing tales of environmental awareness is how many of the stories choose to present these tales. Leigh’s story, for instance, follows someone who is merely caught up in the chaos solely due to her association with another person more directly tied to a forest’s destruction, while Generous’ story is more about the butterfly effect of how recklessness and insensitivity towards the environment can lead to disaster decades later.
In Field Notes’ eighteen stories, the stories present how characters are either active or passive contributors to environmental destruction, but can be punished equally. Many of the stories are told by narrators trying to justify their role in the ordeal, such as in “The MeatTM” by Tim Hoelscher, which goes through all the levels of a meat plant justifying selling meat that contains human flesh to its customers, and Gwen C. Katz’s “Los Angeles is Sinking,” where the LA residents respond to seismic devastation with all the annoyance of being caught in traffic on Cahuenga.
Other stories have characters attempting to connect with nature, only to realize that nature has turned in ways they couldn’t imagine. “The Bog People” by S.L. Harris takes a YA premise of kids going to a restricted area on Halloween and having them exposed to the horror of a natural phenomenon. Jonathan Louis Duckworth’s “Concerning a Pond in Massachusetts” takes this further by turning Henry David Thoreau’s Walden into a horror story, showing how the transcendentalist’s attempt to leave behind society and connect with nature only uncovered things beyond his comprehension. In many of these stories, characters are forced to confront their lack of knowledge about the natural world. They may read books or listen to authoritative figures, but until they confront the environment themselves, they’re unaware of just how deadly the world can be.
This also leads into some of the most effective and memorable pieces of the collection. Several authors explore the fact that, as humans, we are organisms in our environments, no better than small mammals or insects, and that we too are perceptible to the terrors of radical change. These stories discuss how the human body is also capable of turning or changing faster than we can handle or comprehend, and that as a result of our lack of understanding or unwillingness to understand, we are suscept to losing our bodies to these changes.
In Matthew Pritt’s “Urticate,” a simple camping trip turns into every parent’s worst nightmare when a young girl begins to undergo a metamorphosis due to some insect her father wasn’t able to protect her from and can’t help her handle due to the horrifying change she’s undergoing. “Bug Bite” by Alexis DuBon takes the act of bloodletting but turns it into nauseous, disgusting terror. Lastly, there’s “Dandelion Six” by Gordon B. White, in which the body morphing is intentional and a direct attempt to combat manmade environmental destruction through mad science.
Field Notes from a Nightmare is a warning, and one that hums low like tinnitus. It’s a collection of ideas for how the world can and may turn against us, and how everyone will suffer no matter how complicit we are in its destruction. The pieces range from fantastic to realistic, but each is made with a hope that we as a society can learn and change before it’s too late. Until then, it may be a good idea to become more aware of our own environments, lest the terror creep in without us realizing.
Alex Carrigan (he/him; @carriganak) is an editor, poet, and critic from Virginia. He is the author of “May All Our Pain Be Champagne: A Collection of Real Housewives Twitter Poetry” (Alien Buddha Press, 2022). He has had fiction, poetry, and literary reviews published in Quail Bell Magazine, Lambda Literary Review, Empty Mirror, Gertrude Press, Quarterly West, Roi Fainéant, ‘Stories About Penises’ (Guts Publishing, 2019), ‘Closet Cases: Queers on What We Wear’ (Et Alia Press, 2020), and more. He is also the co-editor of ‘Please Welcome to the Stage…: A Drag Literary Anthology’ with House of Lobsters Literary. For more, visit carriganak.wordpress.com.
