This page is for Nightmare Fuel entries for the book series “Tennis Shoes Among The Nephites”.
- The Silver Sword’s whisperings. It oscillates between offering help and then explaining that you said yes too late and are going to die now.
- The rites of Jacobugath. Garth explains that while most human remains of the regime are buried or used as fertilizer, a certain amount of it is set aside for the priests to eat.
- Their chief priest Balam is terrifying, with piercings all over his face. When she first sees him, Melody describes it as a face full of holes.
- Partway through 4, the Gadiantons transporting Melody decide to raid a village for supplies. Melody is close enough to hear the screams of the villagers.
- ”Some of the voices were not men’s. Some of them were not adults."
- The torture inflicted on Melody. Her arms are covered in gunk and then stuffed in cool water to freeze it in place. The same is then done with her face, so she’s suddenly slowly suffocating to death and can’t claw free.
- Book 5 starts off in 70 AD Judea during the Jewish rebellion. This means there are plenty of war crimes happening.
- In order to intimidate the Zealots, the Romans have been crucifying hundreds of Jewish prisoners outside Jerusalem. Many of them are still alive, in agony, and slowly dying.
- The Jews have been throwing the bodies of the dead into the ditch surrounding Jerusalem. Near the end of Book 6, the heroes make their exit from the city and are disgusted by the mounds of dead."The Jews would never treat a dead body so disrespectfully."”I’ve seen the Jews do lots of things they said they’d never do."
- Simon Magus imprisons Meagan and Jesse in a catacomb with zero interior lighting. When Meagan wakes up, she’s worried she’s been blinded somehow. Then, the way they escape is worse; the only unexplored route is a pool of water the rats disappeared into, implying there might be a way out through it. But this involves swimming underwater through a pitch-black tunnel for an indeterminate distance in the hopes that you’ll find a person-sized opening at the end. Then, terrifyingly, Jesse doesn’t come back for a long time and Meagan goes after him. He turns out to have found another air pocket, but it's only big enough for your nose, so the two have to take turns, still in the pitch black.
- Simon Magus and his cult are legit willing to commit suicide in the belief that they’ll ascend to heaven and avoid the Roman offensive. You didn’t think they were THAT crazy.
- In Book 7, Harry is made a slave and put on a slave galley. When it's raided by pirates, they expect to be taken as prisoners, but the pirates instead leave them locked up and sink the ship. Harry manages to escape and free a lot of them, but then they're all desperately trying to swim out of a sinking ship that's also on fire.
- Before he gets the keys, the rest of the slaves are going crazy trying to free themselves. Genre Savvy Harry notes that unlike in Ben-Hur, the slaves can't free themselves if they get desperate enough, so they're just tearing their limbs to pieces failing to get out.
- The Scythians provide a lot of this in Book 7. When Harry is pursued by one at night, he can see their ghost god reflected in their eyes. They kill three Nephite lookouts, scalp them, and leave them for their allies to find. When Epigonus dies of a heart attack, they unhesitatingly carry out his order to kill everyone in his employ, which involves sealing the exits so no one can leave and working their way through the house. Throughout their fight, Harry and his companions are stepping over the corpses of the people they killed, male and female. During all of this, neither of them say a word. Almost three years later, Harry still has nightmares about them.
- Todd Finlay proves scary in a whole different way. Taking on the guise of a kindly old man, he befriends Mary, Becky, and Josh on a trip to Lagoon, feigning a limp to get their sympathy. At the end of the day, he sends Mary away for a second, asks the kids to grab his wheelchair out of the back of his truck, then locks them in and drops his disguise, threatening to kill them if they say a word. To those familiar, this is textbook operating procedure for Serial Killers, and is how Ted Bundy, another Utah resident, successfully lured many victims.
- Shika AKA Akish is Nightmare Fuel incarnate. Looking like a bald vampire, he appears benign for most of the book before revealing himself and using dark magic to freeze the heroes in place and killing Todd Finlay right in front of them. Todd himself is so surprised that he can barely protest before dying.
- At the start of Book 9, the losing soldiers in the war against Nimrod are stripped, given rags and branded with a large brand across the chest upon surrender. Steffanie can hear their screams and smell the burning flesh from across the field.
