The Nightmare Machine
An Action-Packed Horror-Thriller
The Nightmare Machine is a revealing psychological thriller replete with deep introspective asides.
The psychology of sacrifice, the power of self-preservation, and the uneven realms of dreams coalesce with action-packed results in Tim White’s epic horror novel The Nightmare Machine.
Sara and Dylan are teenagers, bonded for years through a mutual need for support in New England. Dylan’s unstable home environment informs his adolescence as his father engages in a yearslong pursuit of his missing wife, Dylan’s mother. Tom, an army veteran from the war in Afghanistan, runs a construction company and is plagued by guilt around the death of his best friend in combat twenty years earlier. Alex is a psychiatrist at the recovery center where Sara volunteers.
During a Christmas evening dinner party at Ethan’s, a symbiosis of heretofore scattered paths is given strict focus when Sara and Ethan commence with an induction involving a nightmarish journey through a mysterious dimension parallel to their own, the Twilight. Their task is both simple and daunting: to save humanity from a perilous ancient god, Ardu, by going to its lair and sustaining its slumber. If they do not, the world will be condemned.
The team’s quest to quell Ardu is rife with shared subliminal hallucinations that are detailed via revealing exposition. The quartet’s roles are first hinted at in the course of the book’s dense backstory, but they take shape as the four proceed further into the living nightmare they’ve been duped into dwelling within. It’s a place where the remnants of past expedition members’ fears writhe and snowball into otherworldly manifestations that seem invincible.
The prose evinces immense attention to detail and subtext. A host of horrifying specters seek to thwart the forward progress of Sara, Dylan, Alex, and Tom. Wading as it does into a suspenseful milieu, the book’s outward emphasis is on bloody fights with these unimaginable pseudomonsters, but this action is tempered by the blooming camaraderie between the team members. As their understanding of the ever-shifting environment they’ve been thrust into grows, they also develop better understandings of each other. Together, they also explore feelings of self-worth, guilt, and imposter syndrome. Their chemistry is vivid, in part because there is significance to their interconnectedness, broadening the scope of the story from mere monster epic to the realm of a psychological thriller, replete with deep introspective asides from each of the main characters.
Faithful descriptive scenes involving the minutiae of weapons mechanics, tactical strategies, and the choreography of battle propel the panorama of bloody moments into cinematic territory. Further, Tom’s masculine persona leads and informs the mission’s intense and terrifying battles. The thorough worldbuilding that’s obvious in the surreal elements of the Twilight is rivaled by the extraordinary rebuilding of the inner worlds of the main characters.
The Nightmare Machine is an electrifying novel in which journeys through hell occur both inside and outside the human mind.
Reviewed by
Ryan Prado
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
