Rantings From The Red Tower

I was reading this story again, one of my personal favorites. To be honest I must fight the urge to drop all other current projects and take pen and paper to scribble and sketch down a long list of possible "novelties" from the Red Tower.

One thing that comes to mind is a line of masks meant to be worn while sleeping which will provoke unique nightmares. Upon awakening, the wearer of the mask will vomit something from the nightmare. It will usually be small insect like abominations that can be kept as pets but which will grow and sometimes evolve into more dangerous things. There might be collectors of sorts who wear the masks to gather strange children from their nightly excursions into darker realms, perhaps staff in insane asylums who use the masks to extract particularly unusual specimens from the nightmares of madmen. Entire zoos might be kept in secret filled with all manner of grotesque animals grown from the fruits of the nightmare mask.

But what if someone were to adapt one of these masks to be worn by one of these grotesque animals? That is, assuming they have minds that can dream? What fantastical object or life form might they vomit upon awakening? Perhaps a perfect miniature clone of the human that dreamed them into existence? But what becomes of that person as a result? Could be that while the monster dreams their human creator vanishes in the night, reborn in the mind of the monster and out of its vomiting mouth, assuming that it even has a mouth to vomit with. Maybe this experiment could go horribly wrong where the beast that dreams doesn't have a portal through which to vomit their human parent, but rather they are grown inside of them, the human becoming like a parasite onto the beast body or both evolving into some new manner of organism.

So many strange results from such a seemingly innocent novelty item...

I had forgotten how good this story is. Unfortunately my copy of the Nightmare Factory is separated from me by an immense body of water, so there is no way for me to reread it at the moment.

I confess I do not remember that element of the story, though. All I remember is the strange, essay-like quality of the piece and thinking to myself all the time "how am I going to be able to write something this good?" while reading it.

Regarding the element of novelties, to refresh your memory on the story, the tower was a sort of factory creating a wild variety of novelty items from the unusual to the... extremely unusual.

Also, the tower holds a special place in my mind as I associate it with one of my earliest childhood nightmares. When I was very little and playing in the park there was a large red brick building with no windows or doors that I could see. It was actually used to house the lawnmowers and various tools used for the upkeep of the park, but as a child it was a fantastical structure that served no purpose that I could comprehend. My father, who was always telling me strange tales when I was a child, warned that the building housed a giant octopus that came out at night to feed. Probably some creative, if not frightening, means to keep me from wanting to stay in the park if my parents were ready to leave. The story worked a little too well as I became fearful of the building and never wanted to go near it should I awaken the sleeping monster within it. I had nightmares of the giant octopus, slithering through the park and destroying the slides and swings and other playground equipment, in search of children to eat before returning to that mysterious red bricked structure with no windows.

As horrificly grotesque and disgustingly gruesome the nightmarish novelty items churned out by the ruined factory, known as The Red Tower, are, they pale in comparison with the productions of that other factory of which The Red Tower is merely symbolic, filthy blemish on an otherwise perfectly desolate landscape that it is. As per TCATHR (p. 79-80):

"Nature (...) intruded on an inorganic wasteland and set up shop. What evolved was a global workhouse where nothing is ever at rest, where the generation and discarding of life incessantly goes on. (...)
We did not make ourselves, nor did we fashion a world that could not work without pain, and great pain at that, with a little pleasure, very little, to string us along - a world where all organisms are inexorably pushed by pain throughout their lives to do that which will improve their chances to survive and create more of themselves. Left unchecked, this process will last as long as a single cell remains palpitating in this cesspool of the solar system, this toilet of the galaxy. So why not lend a hand in nature's suicide? (...)
Once we settle ourselves off-world, we can blow up this planet from outer space. It's the only way to be sure its stench will not follow us."

Amen!

"We are all talking and thinking about the Red Tower in our own degenerate way."