Preface
" NIGHTMARES: The United Mistakes of America" presents thirty interconnected tales of contemporary American horror, not the kind featuring monsters and ghosts, but the far more unsettling variety that emerge when democratic institutions strain under the weight of authoritarian impulses, when families are torn apart by political ideology, and when the American Dream becomes a nightmare for those caught in the crossfire of poorly conceived policies.
These stories follow Sarah Chen, a Harvard MBA and analyst navigating a second Trump presidency, as policy turns personal and fear seeps quietly into ordinary lives.
The horror in these pages is not supernatural; it is bureaucratic. It is the horror of watching efficiency become cruelty, of seeing policies promised as solutions instead of burdening ordinary people, creating absurdities where even the penguins of Heard Island find themselves subject to U.S. trade policy. It is the horror of families divided not by distance or tragedy, but by political loyalty, as Sarah’s Trump-supporting father, Luis Perez—a Venezuelan refugee who built his American Dream through hard work—finds his worldview challenged by the very policies he helped elect.
What makes this collection particularly chilling is its grounding in recognizable reality. These stories are not dystopian fantasies but extrapolations of real policies, rhetoric, and ambitions. Readers encounter presidential real-estate schemes for post-conflict Gaza, diplomatic failures spanning Vatican meetings and G7 summits, and the quiet calculations of tech billionaires seeking proximity to power to protect their own interests.
The framing of these events as nightmares reflects a simple truth: institutional failures produce genuine terror for real families. When Ming—an American citizen and Harvard MBA—is detained by immigration enforcement, the horror is not spectacle or shock. It is the slow realization that citizenship offers no protection from political scapegoating.
Across thirty interconnected stories, authoritarian tendencies ripple outward. Sarah’s path—from corporate consultant to DOGE employee to journalist and blogger—traces the struggle to maintain integrity as truth itself becomes politicized. Her sister-in-law, Alina, a Chinese student at Harvard, embodies an international community watching America’s retreat from its founding principles with growing alarm.
The horror is also psychological. These stories explore the mental toll of constant uncertainty, the quiet fracturing of families, and the exhaustion of maintaining hope as institutions fail. One chapter, "The Weight of History," captures this burden precisely: the experience of living through moments that future generations will judge harshly.
Yet the collection is not without moments of relief. Sarah and Ming’s escape to South Australia’s Barossa Valley—where healing comes through distance, wine country, and humour—suggests that survival often requires perspective. Laughter, even when born of bitterness, becomes a means of endurance.
Comedy and horror repeatedly emerge from the same source. Images of presidential absurdity, Wall Street acronyms born of frustration, and moments of dark humour reveal how satire becomes a coping mechanism when reality grows too implausible to process straight.
The true horror in these stories is not that they are unimaginable, but that they are entirely plausible. In an era when reality outpaces satire and governance blurs into performance, horror emerges as the most honest framework for examining how power operates in contemporary America.
These are not nightmares of the dark, but of daylight—of systems failing openly, institutions betraying their purpose, and the resilience required to remain human within inhumane structures. The most enduring horror does not ask whether we are afraid, but whether we recognize the world being described. In 2026, that recognition may be the most unsettling experience of all.