So, how does it hold up after I finally read it? His second release thus rested pretty high on my TBR. In one short read, he became one of my favorite authors. Ballingrud combined the weird and the sincere with such grace and humanity that I couldn’t do anything else. Review: Quite a few years back, I read Nathan Ballingrud’s debut collection, North American Lake Monsters, and I fell in love. From the eerie dread descending upon a New Orleans dive bartender after a cell phone is left behind in a rollicking bar fight in “The Visible Filth” to the search for the map of hell in “The Butcher’s Table,” Ballingrud’s beautifully crafted stories are riveting in their quietly terrifying depictions of the murky line between the known and the unknown.Ĭontent Warnings: Cannibalism, Body Horror, Torture, Period-Typical Racism, Period-Typical Homophobia Now, in Wounds, Ballingrud follows up with an even more confounding, strange, and utterly entrancing collection of six stories, including one new novella. Summary: In his first collection, North American Lake Monsters, Nathan Ballingrud carved out a distinctly singular place in American fiction with his “piercing and merciless” ( Toronto Globe and Mail) portrayals of the monsters that haunt our lives-both real and imagined: “What Nathan Ballingrud does in North American Lake Monsters is to reinvigorate the horror tradition” ( Los Angeles Review of Books).
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