I enjoyed C. Robert Cargill’s robot apocalypse novel Sea of Rust so much that I snatched up his latest book We Are Where The Nightmares Go And Other Stories right away, but then saved it to read for my spooky-book month. And I’m glad I did, because this collection goes really well with the nights getting longer and the days getting colder and the growing sense of mortality that comes with the fear of life being squandered. (Okay maybe that last one’s just me.)
Each one of these ten stories is a tasty little poison candy, something easy and entertaining to read in a half hour, but also so deep and many-layered that you find yourself still thinking about them days later. In just one collection you have, among other things, a children’s story that’s only safe for grownups, a dinosaur buddy-adventure zombie apocalypse (you heard me), and at least two cases of a break in the wall between our world and something very nasty. If there’s a theme that all ten stories share, it’s a question: What if things are actually worse than you thought?
…sometimes he daydreamed that the mountains were teeth and one night they might snap shut, the mouth of the world swallowing whole the town, the valley, and all the shit that came with it.
It’s fun sometimes to dive into a collection of really dark, bloody, violent and creepy tales about literal deals with the devil, world-ending disasters, and the horror trope that always works for me: trouble in the mine. The stories here take things a step further by being almost completely without hope. It’s not that things are as bad as they can get, it’s that they’re already more awful than anyone could have imagined, and they’re only going to get worse.
The opening story “The Town that Wasn’t Anymore” is set in Pine Hall Bluff, a dying town that lost so many in a horrific mine disaster, and now lives with a literal shadow looming over it. Cargill gradually draws you into the sad and outwardly kind of pointless lives of the remaining townspeople who are hanging on by routine, inertia, and alcohol. And then he reveals why some of the townspeople feel like they have to stay. And then he reveals why even if they left, there’s nowhere safe to run to.
Occasionally though there are moments of surprising humor in some of these stories, like the barflys in Pine Hall Bluff’s one bar discussing John-Paul Sartre, or the two good old boys in the ridiculously touching “Jake and Willy at the End of the World” facing certain death over a couple of beers and arguing about whether being a liberal means you go to purgatory or Hell, or what exactly the difference is between a metaphor and simile.
“Like, if I was to say this cheap-ass beer you bought is like your ex-wife Cheryl. It’ll do in a pinch, but it sure don’t go down easy and you spend most of your time thinkin’ that maybe if you’d spent a little more time lookin’, you’d have found something better.”
“The beer ain’t that bad.”
“It’s not good beer, Jake.”
“And that’s the title of my life story.”
Cargil’s characters have a quick, biting humor. The dialog jumps back and forth briskly among the eerie landscapes of West Virginia in the fog, or a hallway that twists around and shifts in new directions, or a squalid section of the Texas panhandle, or the otherworld that a little girl wanders into in the title story “We Are Where the Nightmares Go” (that one is similar to Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series, but taking the idea to a much darker place. There are unexpected dangers in learning to overcome your nightmares.)
Sometimes Cargill goes less for humor and more for rage. You see some of that in “A Clean White Room”, where a man accepts a job offer that’s supposed to keep evil from spreading to the rest of the world, in exchange for a peaceful life that he hasn’t been able to find since his tour of duty in Iraq. The problem is that he has to see that evil as he’s containing it, and the reader gets to experience the disconnect when the most brutal, nasty, and pointless crimes are committed by real human beings who are actually capable of being nice. Sometimes.
“The Last Job is Always the Hardest” also shows us some of this rage, this time at at just how much damage is caused by people who are so small-minded that they can’t grasp the scope of what they’re doing wrong. The idea of someone like that being saddled with a job like Marker or Collector is satisfying, but only if you ignore just how pointless it makes everything.
“Why would I like you? You’re a Jesus freak without the Jesus part. You hate more than you love. You believe that a bomb will teach people a lesson. And you’re stupid enough to listen to a group of church elders who told you that this was all going to work out okay, but didn’t bother to check on any of the details yourself. You’re a bad person.”
(I personally think this story also stands out as having the best ending in the book.)
“As They Continue To Fall” was the basis for a short film that went viral a few years ago. Check it out sometime; the original story shows a lot more of what the main character went through as the only child in the playground who sees fallen angels, but the film still has all the lovely images Cargill created, like the darkened city and the fallen angel smoking a cigarette on a rooftop.
(Also, did you know C. Robert Cargill co-wrote the screenplay for the Marvel movie Doctor Strange? I didn’t, and now I like this author even more.)
You might think that “Hell Creek” is played for laughs; a dinosaur zombie apocalypse, har har. But it absolutely isn’t, it’s brutal and rather terrifying, and Cargill humanizes his dinosaur characters the way he humanized the robots in Sea of Rust. You end up rooting for Triceratops and Ankylosaurus and the strange wordless friendship they make as they’re trying to deal with a world that’s literally gone insane. And if that isn’t enough of a draw, I’ll just say this: Zombie T-Rex. ‘Nuff said.
“Hell They Call Him, the Screamers” is a gruesome hack and slash, one that’s right up there with some of the bloodiest stuff Clive Barker comes up with when he’s glorying in purposeless violence. Right up until the moment that it isn’t. And speaking of Clive Barker, “I Am the Night You Never Speak Of” was first printed in an anthology set in Clive Barker’s Nightbreed universe from the novella Cabal. I have very little memory of reading Cabal, but it feels like there’s more going on in this story with the ultra-confident and very monstrous former resident of Midian than there is in a dozen other stories.
A sin ain’t found in the lines of a book. It’s found in the heart, the soul. A sin is found in shame. Or in that dark enjoyment of something made better because you think it’s wrong. That’s where I eat; that’s where I live. That’s where I come for you.
The collection ends with the novella “The Soul Thief’s Son,” featuring the same characters from Cargill’s novels Dreams and Shadows and Queen of the Dark Things. I haven’t read either of these books, but I’m curious to know more about this world of blood and aboriginal magic. I especially enjoyed the cause and effect of making deals with spirits who may give you exactly what you asked for, but not even close to what you wanted, and also the way Cargill writes very flashy, cinematic fight scenes between wizards who can step in and out of trees and throw monsters at each other.
The waterbeast rushed Colby, it’s liquid hands out to strangle him, the blood rushing to the fingers – red hands on a muddy brown body.
Colby unleashed a wild blast of energy, creating giant claws out of thin air. The claws grabbed the waterbeast from both sides, dug in, ripping through the chest, and tore the thing apart. The water hung suspended for a split second, then dropped all at once as if dumped from a bucket.
It’s a wild, super entertaining collection that I’ll be rereading a lot, but it it’s also relentlessly grim. And oddly enough, the only 
real positive note sometimes is the fact that the characters are suffering, that they recognize that the whole situation is wrong, and maybe even make the decision to stand against it. The fact that it could ultimately be a pointless and futile decision, one that just leads to them suffering more, is less depressing to me (or at least less wretchedly depressing) than the idea that people could see all that crime and violence and pain and blood, and shrug and say oh well, this is just the way things are.