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).

Now, in Wounds, Ballingrud follows up with an even more confounding, strange, and utterly entrancing collection of six stories, including one new novella. 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.

Wounds: Six Stories From the Border of Hell is a new collection by Nathan Ballingrud, and includes the novella The Visible Filth, upon which the movie Wounds is based. Short story collections can be hit or miss, and for me, this one was mostly a hit. There are some wicked & twisted little gems in this book!

The first story is The Atlas of Hell, and it’s nightmarishly violent & weird, and if I’m being honest, it lost me pretty quickly and I didn’t love it. So I was definitely a bit concerned about how I’d find the rest of the stories, but each one of the remaining tales was like opening one strange & unique present after another. Some of these I absolutely loved!

There’s some similar themes across some of these stories, yet each one is wildly different. The Diabolist quickly pulled me in…it’s about a teenage girl dealing with the aftermath of her father’s death. Only her father was a renowned theomancer & diabolist. This one was dark & quirky, but with a really somber undercurrent of grief running through it. This was probably my favorite in the whole collection!

Skullpocket is the next story, and it has a surreal fairy tale quality to it, and played out in my mind almost like a Tim Burton movie on acid. Similar to The Diabolist, it plays with the theme of our world & the underworld mingling together, sometimes with grotesque results. This was probably the most bonkers & lightest of the stories, and I dug the hell out of it.

The Maw was one that I absolutely fell in love with, but wished it were just a bit longer. It features a young girl named Mix escorting an older man named Carlos through the apocalyptic hellscape that used to be their city, so he can try to find his dog. There’s some deeply unsettling imagery in this one!

The Visible Filth & The Butcher’s Table finish the collection in gruesome & demented fashion. The Visible Filth concerns a bartender named Will whose life becomes a living nightmare after he takes possession of a cell phone left in his bar. Some genuinely creepy moments in this one.

The Butcher’s Table turns the clock way the fuck back, and features pirates & Satanists & cannibals (oh my).

Nathan Ballingrud is a tremendously talented writer, and he keeps these way-out-there stories just grounded enough that you have something to hold on to. Each of these stories has such a unique atmosphere, although they are all quite dark & horrific. There’s a visceral quality to the writing, and all the nightmare-fuel imagery becomes all too easy to visualize.

This is definitely a collection worth checking out! These stories touch on love & death, loss & grief. It’s a really dark, weird, and powerful book of stories.

Big thanks to Saga Press for sending me a copy!! Wounds releases today, April 9th!