Good for Her . . . and Then What?: ‘What a Nightmare’

Rebekah Faubion’s What a Nightmare delivers the revenge fantasy it promises, then spends the rest of the book asking what the payout costs.

Revenge horror often runs on a contract. Endure the leering boss, the church potluck, and the town that quietly protects both, and eventually the right woman gets to hurt the right monster. For decades, the genre has honored that contract so reliably that it rarely asks what the woman does on the morning after.

What a Nightmare, Rebekah Faubion’s adult horror debut, arrives October 13 from Berkley and pays that contract in full. In this story, the blood is not the polite metaphorical kind that stays offstage. Faubion has described it as a modern Carrie carrying big “good-for-her energy,” and that holds—for roughly the first third. Carrie White was sixteen and just learning about herself; Haven Smith is twenty-eight and has known for years.

Years of Practice at Disappearing

Haven was born Haven Powers, into money, evangelical certainty, and a Texas town called Friendship. She got out. She took a new surname, moved whenever anyone got close, kept every relationship shallow on purpose, and built a rotating set of plausible women to hand to strangers.

When an encounter with her boss cracks something open within her, the nightmare that follows does not stay in her head.

She goes home, searching for the source of it, and finds a family whose warmth arrives so fast it reads as a negotiating tactic, plus a wooden box she has been carrying most of her life. At first, the box looks like a standard cursed object. Faubion, though, gives it a far more complicated role.

How What a Nightmare Turns Repression Into Horror

For Haven, compartmentalization begins as a means of survival. She’s spent years putting whatever she could not afford to feel into a place she could not reach, and Faubion builds the novel’s supernatural system directly on top of that machinery. Haven’s nightmares draw power from what she refuses to examine. The more she avoids, the stronger her power becomes.

Connecting gendered power to family inheritance, the novel’s central idea comes down to one sentence: The women in What a Nightmare inherit the box because the men inherit permission.

Earl Powers gets to be furious in the open, and his fury gets called leadership. His sons receive some version of the same allowance, adjusted for how useful they are to him. The women in that house get a container and detailed instructions for keeping the lid down. Olympia learned the trick from the systems that shaped her and passed it to her daughter the way other mothers pass down a recipe, with the same conviction that she was handing over something protective.

Faubion’s most effective formal device appears once Haven starts moving through other people’s minds. Each mind has its own architecture that reflects its inhabitant. One psyche is a hidden room stacked with evidence. Another is a cage with a mirror. A third looks like a childhood bedroom where certain drawers will not open. Keller’s mind is padded in layers resembling bubble wrap, an initially comic image that suggests how thoroughly he has insulated himself from consequence. Buck’s involves hunting imagery and something locked.

Earl’s mind is an immaculate, carefully tended orchard. Unlike Haven, he has cultivated his history into a story where he comes out the hero, then watered it for decades.

Protection Is Not Punishment

Haven’s first kill is an accident, but she takes genuine satisfaction in the result.

Faubion initially invites readers to share that satisfaction, but then starts charging interest. She makes Haven’s growing willingness to use her power harder to excuse. Haven begins experimenting. She walks into people’s minds without asking, because nobody can stop her and because it works. At one point, she targets her brother Sterling for reasons that clear neither the bar of justice nor the bar of grievance. Sterling struggles with addiction and resentment and he’s certainly not innocent, but the novel doesn’t portray him as a monster awaiting punishment. She uses his worst places to destabilize the family, and she does it because she can.

Haven’s history makes her choice understandable, but the novel does not excuse the harm she causes.

Later she meets people who have genuinely done monstrous things, but the question sharpens instead of resolving. Deserving punishment and being subject to Haven’s punishment are separate propositions; the second requires an authority nobody in this novel can wield. The book repeatedly separates violence that stops immediate harm from violence that punishes, controls, or simply feels good, and it never pretends that a sympathetic protagonist is incapable of the latter.

Haven does not need to learn that her anger is wrong. She needs to learn what her anger permits her to do. Horror has spent decades asking what happens when a woman finally snaps. This one is more interested in what happens once the snapping starts to feel good, and in how quickly feeling justified turns into feeling permitted.

Friendship Has Rules, and Also Exemptions

Haven’s hometown reinforces her family’s moral system. Friendship presents itself as preserved Americana, complete with a civic history scrubbed of its racism, a church that functions as a credit rating, and public charity that photographs beautifully while the private damage stays indoors.

Faubion pays particular attention to who receives exemptions from those rules. The Powers family demands obedience from everyone around them, then abandons its standards whenever compliance turns inconvenient. Obedience is for other people’s daughters.

Earl is frightening because he is not troubled. His internal mythology converts every decision he ever made into an accomplishment, and he sleeps beautifully. Olympia is more complicated, and a better character for it. She reads at first like a mother enforcing the terms of her own cage, and the novel gradually reveals her as both a survivor of male control and one of its most effective instruments. Her own victimization hasn’t prevented her from harming her children, and Faubion presents both sides of the coin without treating either as absolution.

The four Powers siblings respond differently to their parents’ influences. Buck stays close to the throne and tries to inherit the machinery, while Sterling burns himself down, and Haven runs. Lucky, the youngest, can still ask whether the official family story is true. None of them stays planted in the lane first assigned to them.

Winter, Who Knew Her Before

Haven’s queerness surfaces over the course of the book, and Winter Reyes is the reason it lands as more than a subplot. Winter knew Haven Powers, the loud girl, before her exit and name change. She now meets Haven Smith, a woman whose identity is built largely from defensive fictions.

In Friendship, Haven expects either to resume the role prescribed by her family or stay hidden behind an invented identity. Winter offers the possibility of a third, more interesting role. Winter also left Friendship and built a life of her own, but she can return without surrendering herself to the town. Haven’s desire was on the family’s agenda long before she could name it, which is why reclaiming that desire belongs inside the horror rather than beside it.

Where Faubion Gets in Her Own Way

Faubion has a habit of not trusting her own metaphors.

Earl’s orchard tells you everything about his self-image. Keller’s bubble wrap does the same. After establishing those images, though,  the narration sometimes spends another paragraph explaining what you’ve just seen. The problem is not that the politics are loud. They can be as loud as they want. The problem is redundancy, and the frustrating part is that the imagery is strong enough to survive without the annotation that a weaker book might need.

The ending repeats the problem. Thematically it works, and the box metaphor closes with real force, because the novel understands that healing is not amnesia. Haven has to become someone who can remember the girl she was without sentencing that girl to hold the secret forever. That distinction is earned.

The external resolution is less convincing. The finale redistributes responsibility at the exact moment Haven is finally forced to confront her misuse of power. The choice makes emotional sense, and it also lets the novel resolve the family crisis more completely than it resolves Haven’s own violations. She gets to make the right choice at the climax without fully answering for the ones she made earlier. It does not wreck the book. It softens a moral difficulty the middle worked hard to build.

Where I Land

What begins as a bloody feminist revenge fantasy becomes a novel about inherited coping mechanisms, family mythology, the seduction of righteous violence, and the fact that being harmed does not make a person harmless. If you think you already know the shape of a female rage horror novel, this is the one that will argue with you. Read it, then find somebody else who has, because the argument over whether Haven has truly faced what she did is more complicated than the ending allows.

Related reading: Another revenge story that withholds easy satisfaction.

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Article by Luna Gray

Luna Gray is a horror critic, author of No House Is Empty, and senior staff writer at iHorror. She covers cult, indie, folk, queer, and streaming horror, with a particular interest in the strange stories that linger long after the credits roll. Her work can be found at her Substack.

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