Tag: Nathan Ballingrud

CATHEDRAL OF THE DROWNED – Nathan Ballingrud

grimdarkdadLeave a comment

There are two halves of Charlie Duchamp’s brain. One is in a jar stranded on Jupiter’s jungle moon, Io, who just wants to go home to the woman he loves. The other half is still locked in his body, hanging from a wall in Barrowfield Home on Earth’s own moon, host to the eggs of the Moon Spider and filled with a murderous rage. 

On Io, deep in the flooded remains of a crashed Cathedral ship, lives a giant centipede called the Bishop, who has taken control of the drowned astronaut-clergy inside. Both Charlies converge here, stalking each other in the haunted ruins, while more Moon Spiders prepare to be born.
Continue reading “CATHEDRAL OF THE DROWNED – Nathan Ballingrud” →

CRYPT OF THE MOON SPIDER – Nathan Ballingrud

grimdarkdadLeave a comment

Years ago, in a cave beneath the dense forests and streams on the surface of the moon, a gargantuan spider once lived. Its silk granted its first worshippers immense faculties of power and awe.

It’s now 1923 and Veronica Brinkley is touching down on the moon for her intake at the Barrowfield Home for Treatment of the Melancholy. A renowned facility, Dr. Barrington Cull’s invasive and highly successful treatments have been lauded by many. And they’re so simple! All it takes is a little spider silk in the amygdala, maybe a strand or two in the prefrontal cortex, and perhaps an inch in the hippocampus for near evisceration of those troublesome thoughts and ideas.

But patients aren’t the only ones with trouble on their minds, and although the spider’s been dead for years, its denizens are not. Someone or something is up to no good, and Veronica just might be the cause.
Continue reading “CRYPT OF THE MOON SPIDER – Nathan Ballingrud” →

THE STRANGE – Nathan Ballingrud

grimdarkdadLeave a comment
Since Anabelle’s mother left for Earth to care for her own ailing mother, her days in New Galveston have been spent at school and her nights at her laconic father’s diner with Watson, the family Kitchen Engine and dishwasher as her only companion. When the Silence came, and communication and shipments from Earth to its colonies on Mars stopped, life seemed stuck in foreboding stasis until the night Silas Mundt and his gang attacked.

At once evoking the dreams of an America explored in Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles and the harder realities of frontier life in Charles Portis True Grit, Ballingrud’s novel is haunting in its evocation of Anabelle’s quest for revenge amidst a spent and angry world accompanied by a domestic Engine, a drunken space pilot, and the toughest woman on Mars.
Continue reading “THE STRANGE – Nathan Ballingrud” →

Wounds: Six Stories From the Border of Hell – Nathan Ballingrud

grimdarkdad9 Comments

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. Continue reading “Wounds: Six Stories From the Border of Hell – Nathan Ballingrud” →